Awakening to Nationhood

At the heart of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is the Russian president’s apparently sincere believe that Ukraine does not—or at least should not—exist, that it isn’t a real  country, that its existence is a kind of historical error that enshrines in geo-political reality a present that corresponds neither to the past nor, if he can have anything to do with it, the future. As I wrote a few weeks ago, Putin’s gaze seems to focused on the distant past, on Kievan Rus, the enormous confederation of Northern and Eastern European peoples that existed from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries and which managed to expand eventually include territory that today constitutes all or part of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Finland, and Romania. It was an enormous state, significantly larger than the Holy Roman Empire or the Byzantine Empire, the only two nations even remotely as large as Kievan Rus at its largest or as powerful.

People interested in getting inside Putin’s head need, I think, to focus on the history of Kievan Rus, the nation-state that existed long before Russia or Ukraine on the territory that both now occupy. Part of the problem, in fact, in interpreting the events of the last few weeks has to do with the remarkable lack of knowledge most Americans have of early Russian history. Sviatoslav I (943–972), Vladimir the Great (980–1015), and Yaroslav the Wise (1019–1054)—these names are unknown to most, but they are the ghosts hovering over Putin’s bed at night while he sleeps and dreams his dreams of a world without Ukraine. Lenin, not so much!

I made reference a few weeks ago to an essay by Vladimir Putin available for all to read on the  website of the President of Russia. (Click here to take a look if you haven’t yet. The country he references as Ancient Rus is what historians call Kievan Rus.) The man couldn’t be clearer. Waving away his prose as grandiose posturing is no wiser than it was in the 1930’s to wave away Mein Kampf as the ravings of a madman. And his prose is actually clear as a bell. Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians are, he writes totally unambiguously, all “the descendants of Ancient Rus, the largest state in Europe.” In Putin’s historical recollection, the ancestors of today’s Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians, and I quote, “were bound together by one language (which we now refer to as Old Russian), economic ties, the rule of the princes of the Rurik dynasty, and—after the baptism of Rus—the Orthodox faith.” It’s a remarkable essay and I recommend it to all who wish to understand what is really going on in Vladimir  Putin’s head.

As noted, it is a fascinating essay. But it is predicated on the assumption that, for it to be legitimate, the future must mirror the past. But is that really true? Are new developments in the world by definition inauthentic if their point is not to restore a glorious past and retrace a nation’s steps to locate the precise point at which it went off-track, then to fix the errors that led the nation astray and restore—or rather, create—the future that was meant all along to have been that nation’s destiny? Can’t new developments be authentic without leading to a replication of the past?

Where do nations come from? To argue that the existence of the United States, for example, is illegitimate because its independence was the first of a long line of tragic events that reduced the British Empire, an imperialist invention that once claimed as its territory a full quarter of the earth’s landmass, to the actual British Isles (minus the Republic of Ireland) and a handful of bits and pieces of almost no geopolitical importance spread out over the world—that would be absurd. And yet the world is full to overflowing with ethnic groups that would like to exist as independent nations but whose right to chart that specific path forward for themselves has been denied to them for reasons that are hard to explain with any sort of convincing rationale. The Chechens, the Basques, the Uighurs, the Rohingya, the Lapps, the Catalonians, the Inuit—all of these are groups that will probably never attain statehood. But to explain why Bhutan or Iceland should awarded by all the status of independent nations, but none of the above should, is hard to say. There are, after all, more than two times as many Chechens in the world as there are Bhutanese…and more than four times as many Chechens as there are Icelanders!

Amir Gilboa (1917–1983), one of Israel’s greatest poets, wrote in one of his best-known poems, later a familiar Israeli song, that it occurs from time to time that “a person wakes up in the morning / and feels himself to be a nation and starts to walk / and to all whom he meets on his way, he calls out “Shalom.” The idea here is both simple and complex. Nationhood, the poet is saying, is a feature of self-awareness, of self-conception, of willing self-determination. The past exists, obviously. But nations do not come into being because of history, but because the arc of national purpose and will bends towards autonomy and independence. Our nation came into being not because declaring independence from Britain wasn’t a seditious act of open treason against king and country, but because, by the end of the eighteenth century, the colonials living in British North America woke up one morning possessed of the sense that they were a nation unto themselves and could no longer be content to exist as a mere appendage to somebody else’s empire. Gilboa was thinking about Israel, I’m sure. (He fought in the War of Independence, which experience influenced his poetry for the rest of his life.) The tragedy of the Palestinians can be charted along these lines as well, by the way: when the opportunity was handed to them on a silver platter in 1948 to declare independence and get on with the work of building a nation, they simply didn’t possess the national will to be a nation. (In my opinion, the solution to the Palestinian problem cannot be based on endless disappointment that in 1948 they hadn’t woken up to nationhood yet. A topic for another letter!)

And that brings me to Ukraine. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, the Ukrainian Parliament, formerly a toothless organization that existed merely to rubberstamp directives from Moscow, adopted what it called a Declaration of State Sovereignty. A year later, that same parliament adopted a formal document called the Act of Independence. A referendum was conducted; 92% of the population supported the concept of Ukraine as a fully independent nation. In 2004, the so-called Orange Revolution took place as the nation, almost as one, rose up to protest against the results of a corrupt election and to insist on a new referendum to choose a national leader: clearly, the people had become used to thinking of themselves as a nation and, although surely ever mindful of the nightmare of the USSR years, were not prepared to be slaves again. And as the nation has charted its course forward, coming closer and closer to the West and doing its best to distance itself from Putin’s Russia and its imperialist fantasies about restoring the good old days of Kievan Rus, the Russians did what they could to thwart the Ukrainians’ plans for their own nation. The invaded and seized Crimea, which had been part of Ukraine since the 1950s, then continued to rebel forces in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions eager to turn back the tide of history and re-integrate Ukraine into a restored Grand Russia.

When Putin attempts to justify his invasion of Ukraine, he falls back on the legacy of Kievan Rus. But the Ukrainian people have long since moved forward. Just as Amir Gilboa wrote would have to be the case, the populace woke up and realized they were a nation. And, just as was the case with the colonials in the thirteen colonies, there could be no turning back. Our Founders all knew that. And the Ukrainians know it as well. Only poor Vladimir Vladimirovich seems unaware that the yearning for freedom cannot be extinguished even when the freedom fighters are outnumbered and out-armed. As noted, the arc of national self-awareness bends towards autonomy and independence. And that is why, no matter what the outcome of the current war, the idea of an independent Ukraine—rooted, as it is, in the self-conception of the Ukrainians themselves—cannot be eradicated by violence or bloodshed. It is far too late for that! And where should our nation stand in all of this turmoil? As a people who precisely did wake up one morning and realize it had matured into nationhood, we have no choice but to support the Ukrainians as they struggle not to become a historical footnote to a different nation’s imperialist fantasies.

Our Ukrainian Purim

What an interesting experience it’s been having Purim in the foreground—even if just for a day or two—while the Ukrainian War rages in the background. The two stories are disparate and unrelated, of course. But there actually is  a common threat that binds them together and I thought I’d write about that this week. (I promise soon to write about something other than the Ukraine situation, but not quite yet: it’s still in the forefront of my thinking about the world and our place in it. As it is, I’m sure, in all my readers’ as well.)

The last three chapters of the Megillah are in many ways the most interesting ones as the various story lines come to their natural conclusion. Esther reveals her identity and gets king Achashveirosh to order Haman’s execution. Haman himself is gone almost instantly, his lifeless body pathetically impaled on the very giant stake he had previously had prepared for Mordechai’s execution. And Mordecai has already been given the ring that the king took from Haman’s finger, thus moving up in the Persian hierarchy to a position of influence and importance. Furthermore, Esther has been made the executrix of Haman’s estate, an important job given the immense wealth the man appears to have accrued in his lifetime. (This was, after all, a man who declared himself able to part with ten thousand talents of silver to encourage the king to do his bidding.) So all loose ends have been tied up except for one: the pogrom that the late Haman scheduled for the following year has yet to be cancelled.

It feels like this is a mere detail: the king granted Haman the right to annihilate the entire Jewish population and can, we suppose, just as easily withdraw that order. That would  certainly do the trick, but then we find out that it’s not going to be that simple because, it turns out, an edict promulgated over the king’s name and sealed with his signet ring cannot just be withdrawn. In fact, we learn, it cannot be withdrawn at all. And so that leaves Esther and Mordechai with only one reasonable route forward: they need to get the king to issue a new edict not annulling his previous one but instead formally permitting the Jews of the Empire to strike back. And that is precisely what happens as the king authorizes “the Jews in every city to gather themselves together, and to stand up for themselves, to destroy, to slay, and to annihilate, any armed force of any people or province that might attack them, infants and women, and to plunder their goods.” Readers are now fully relieved of their anxiety as all seems well: Haman is dead, Mordechai has been elevated to a position of power, Esther is firmly in the king’s good graces, and, although the pogrom has not been cancelled, the Jews have at least been granted formal permission to defend themselves. Does the text mean to imply that the Jews would otherwise not have had the right to defend themselves? It says that almost clearly, leaving readers to wonder how and when the Jews were deprived of the natural right to defend themselves and their families.

And then thing start to happen, but not quite what readers have been primed to expect. (When reading any book, but especially a book of the Bible, readers must force themselves not to know what comes next no matter how many times they’ve been through the narrative in the past: like any book, the Megillah needs to be read from beginning to end without the reader somehow knowing in advance what plot twist is just around the bend.)  The notion that the Jews will not go like sheep to the slaughter but are actually going to defend themselves comes as a huge shock to Persia, one so ominous and worrisome that the Megillah notes in passing that people began to disguise themselves as Jews so as to be safe when the fighting begins. (There are different possibly ways to interpret that reference, but the one proposed here seems to me the most likely.)

And so we reach the end of the story, but without any of the most obvious questions being raised or resolved. Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel’s book, The Dynamics of Ancient Empires suggests that the population of the Persian Empire in the time period during which the Megillah is set could easily have been as high as thirty-five million people. The Jews were a tiny minority. The death squads of anti-Semitic hooligans mobilized by Haman must certainly have outnumbered the entire Jewish population—let alone Jews of fighting age—and many times over. So if the king lacked the ability to rescind his own decree, then why didn’t Haman’s people just move forward with the pogrom and defeat the overwhelmingly outnumbered Jews who just recently were busy pre-sitting shiva for themselves in the streets and broad places of the empire? They could certainly have won!

But then, when the big day finally comes, the impression we get from the Megillah is that the sonim are so demoralized that they fail to take up arms at all. The Megillah actually says that in almost so many words. But we would have known it anyway: how else could the death toll as given in the Megillah be 78,500 losses for the Persians and exactly zero losses for the Jews? If that reminds you of the deliverance of Israel at the Sea of Reeds back in the days of Pharoah and Moses (where the millions of Israelites crossed the sea to safety without any losses at all while all of Pharoah’s soldiers, including Pharaoh himself, drowned in the sea when the walls of water collapsed), it’s suppose to!

And so there is lurking behind the familiar story, a less familiar one. The familiar one is about how days that could have spelled doom and disaster were turned into “days of gladness and feasting.”  But behind that story is a slightly different one. Haman’s willing executioners outnumbered the Jews in every conceivable way: in numbers, in arms, in ammunition, in chariots and horses, in back-up, and in training. Yes, the Jews have been granted permission to fight back. But the endless phalanxes of Jew-hating ruffians could surely have prevailed nonetheless! They had the numbers and they surely had the ammo. But something amazing seems to have happened: when the Jews, encouraged by the king’s countermanding decree, finally found the courage to shuck off their timidity and their apparently natural sense of themselves as victims and losers, the enemy responded not by doubling down and making sure they had plans in place to guarantee their victory, but by panicking, losing confidence in themselves, and wondering (maybe) if they were not on the wrong side of history. When the big day came, in fact, the Megillah suggests they were so paralyzed by the specter of Jews defending themselves vigorously that they forgot to fight at all! And so, in the end, numbers proved not really to matter much at all. What mattered was courage born of conviction…and a willingness to call the bullies out and see if they could stand being stood up to.

And that brings us back to Ukraine. The Russians certainly should win. They have the numbers. They have a huge storehouse of nuclear weapons. They have a giant navy and their GPD—because, in the end, everything, even war, is about money— is more than nine times the GPD of Ukraine ($1.658 trillion vs. $181 billion). And they have a limitless number of potential recruits: there are about three times as many Russians in Russia as there are Ukrainians in Ukraine (146,000,000 vs. 43,000,000). So it couldn’t be clearer that the Russians should win. Maybe even they will win. But they also expected the war to last hours, not days and certainly not weeks or months. They expected Ukraine to crumble when the first Russian tank crossed the border and for the invasion to result in a quick, almost effortless victory.

But they failed to take into account the Ukrainians’ lack of interest in going quietly into the night. Once the Ukrainians found the courage to stand up for themselves, the Russians’ superiority in every measuredly military way came to mean significantly less than it would have appeared—to them and to everybody—just a few days before. In other words, the Megillah’s point that what counts when facing the enemy is courage and self-reliance—that turns out to be a truly relevant lesson for all concerned. The Jews of Persia should have lost but didn’t. And on this strangest of Shushan Purims, all decent people across the globe can hope will be the case is that Ukraine, which certainly should not be able to succeed, will turn the tide of battle and end up victorious over enemies who only have numbers, guns, and wealth.

Babyn Yar

The Russian missile that hit Babyn Yar in Kyiv last week brought the war home to me personally in a way that I hadn’t anticipated. Was it an accident? It’s hard to imagine what the Russians could possibly have hoped to accomplish by bombing the most sacred of all Shoah sites in Ukraine and one of the most important ones in all Europe. Was it somehow related to Vladimir Putin’s regular—and supremely grotesque—willingness to reference the Ukrainian leadership, very much including its Jewish president, as a gang of neo-Nazi thugs? But even if it was, what exactly was the message here? Was it that the Russian Army liberated Ukraine from the Nazis once and is planning to justify its occupation and (I’m assuming) eventually annexation of Ukraine by selling it to the world as a justifiable, even laudable, effort to accomplish the twenty-first century version of that same thing? It’s hard to imagine that that could be it—not because Vladimir Putin is not cynical and malevolent enough to self-justify along such lines, but because it’s hard to imagine him imagining anyone hearing that without laughing—and yet what part of the events of the last few weeks wouldn’t have reasonably been labelled “hard to imagine” just a month or two ago? So maybe this too!

We grow up incrementally, step by step, stage by stage. No one goes to sleep as a child and wakes up as an adult. I’ve written in this space about my own coming-of-age experience reading Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg’s The Black Book of Russian Jewry page by page when the ten- and eleven-year-old me found himself alone in our synagogue library for a few minutes. But that book was only the gateway to other books, some of which became so much a part of my growth to adulthood that I can remember them after all these years as though I just read them recently. André Schwarz Bart’s The Last of the Just was the foundation upon which rested my sense of my place in the world for years and years. So, of course, was Elie Wiesel’s Night. But Anatoly Kuznetsov’s  Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel was perhaps the most profound of all in terms of its effect on my sense of what it means to be a Jew…and also what it means to be a human being. (See below.) The slightly fictionalized true story of the murder of almost 34,000 Jews in Kyiv in the course of just two days in the fall of 1941, the book was beyond terrifying and disorienting to me. I grew up in a neighborhood of survivors and had friends whose parents had lived through the camps. But, of course, there simply was no one—or no one I ever met—who lived through Babi Yar. The unimaginable massacres in that place, but also in Ponary Forest (where about 70,000 Jews from Vilna were murdered in the summer of 1941) or Rumbula Forest (where 25,000 Jews from Riga were murdered in November and December 1941)—these dark European forests  were the terrible landscape of my nightmares as a boy, a dreamscape I still wander from time to time even now and which will always be part of me. As all readers know, the camps are central to my sense of self, even today. But I never dream about them.

But it was in the fall of 1973 that Babi Yar came to represent something else to me entirely. It was in the fall semester of my senior year in college. I was busy trying to gain admittance to JTS, but I was also taking my Russian seriously (just in case!) and it was in that context that I met Yevgeny Yevtushenko, at the time the best-known Russian poet in the West. How that came about is easy to explain: I met him easily because one of my teachers at Queens College, Albert C. Todd, was his American translator and invited him to visit our school and, semi-amazingly, he agreed to come. (It was a good gamble on his part too—years later, Yevtushenko himself became a CUNY distinguished professor at Queens.) Places were limited, but I was one of the first to sign up and got a ticket. I admired his writing, and particularly the poems I had read under Professor Todd’s tutelage. I eager to see what the man was like. But I had no idea how profound an encounter it was going to be.

The man began by reading one or two poems in Russian—translations had been handed out in advance at the door so you could read along while he spoke—and taking questions. (He spoke English well, it turned out.) But then he said he wished to read to us the poem that he described as his own literary Rubicon, a poem that could either have led to his ruin or to his ever-lasting fame but back from which he knew in advance there would be no turning. And the poem was, of course, “Babi Yar.”

In those days, the massacre at Babi Yar was famously commemorated yearly by the Soviet government without any reference to the fact that the victims were Jews. (Many thousands of others were murdered at Babi Yar as well, which provided the Russians with a kind of fig leaf covering their anti-Semitism. But it was the massacre of Kievan Jewry that was why Babi Yar was famous, or rather infamous, and that much was known to all.) He began by setting the scene. It was back in 1961, he explained, that the editors of the Lituraturnaya Gazyeta (then as now one of the leading Russian literary magazines) hinted to him that they would be prepared to publish his poem about the Nazi massacre, a piece of work that had to that point only circulated privately. They were clearly well aware that the poem was also about the Soviet government’s anti-Semitic persecution of its Jewish citizens and its revisionist refusal to acknowledge the site as a Jewish memorial. But they were ready to print the poem if he was willing. It was a huge gamble. This was the bad old days in the USSR, a time when people disappeared into the Gulag for far less. Yevtushenko said he considered his options. He knew the offer could not have come out of the blue and must have been pre-approved, possibly even by Brezhnev himself. Or was it a trap? Or a test? There was no way to know. Terrible things could have ensued. But there was also the possibility of advancing the USSR in a positive, liberal direction through his assent to publish. And so he agreed that they could print his poem in their next issue.

It was a huge success. No less a personality than Dmitri Shostakovich—probably the greatest Russian composer of his day—set the poem to music, then used that setting as the first movement of his Thirteenth Symphony. And the opening line of the poem, which reads “No monument stands over Babi Yar / a drop sheer as a crude gravestone” so galvanized public opinion in the Soviet Union that, finally, a memorial was established in that place that formally and unambiguously acknowledged Babi Yar as a site of Jewish martyrdom of almost unimaginable proportions.

 I was beyond enthralled. Here was a man with no Jewish blood in him at all, who understood that anti-Semitism was as much, possibly even more, about the anti-Semite as about the Jew. And when he explained that the Shoah had become the benchmark for Western morality, I was enthralled. I felt as though he were speaking to me personally when he said, almost as though this were a commonplace thought, that identifying with the dead at Babi Yar is in our day the prerequisite for thinking of yourself as a human being, as a fully human being. The end of the poem, he read slowly in Russian while I followed along in translation. “I am each old man here shot dead,” the man read out. “I am every child. Nothing in me shall ever forget! The Internationale, let it thunder when the last anti-Semite on earth is buried forever. / In me, there is no Jewish blood. / But in their callous hatred, all anti-Semites must now hate me as a Jew. / For that reason, I am a true Russian.”

Maybe you had to be there. People applauded. I myself was stunned: this was the first time I truly understood that, even more than it defined my Jewishness, the Shoah defined (and still defines) my humanity, my human-ness. It was a threshold experience for me, the kind of experience you step through and feel changed. The notion that my whole adolescent obsession with the Shoah was as much about being a part of humanity as it was about being a member of the Jewish people—that was transformational for me.

Yevtushenko died in 2017 in, of all places, Tulsa, Oklahoma. He won a million prizes. He was awarded several honorary doctorates and was made an honorary citizen of many different cities. He had an asteroid named after him! (How cool is that?) But for me he was the guide who ushered me out of the prison I had constructed for myself and helped me understand that my emotional and intellectual involvement in the history of the Shoah was as tied to my human-ness as it was to my Jewishness. And he did that not by psychoanalyzing me or dissecting my psyche, but merely by reading a poem aloud in an overheated lecture hall and managing to speak directly to me as he did so.

The story of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is still unfolding, its final dénouement still unknown. But the defiling the sacred space of Babi Yar moves the Russians’ aggression against Ukraine, at least for me, from the global to the personal. The Red Army was key in defeating the Nazis and rescuing the remnant of European Jewry still alive in 1945. Attacking Babi Yar, even if just symbolically, suggests to me that the Russians have turned their backs on their own history and have chosen to emulate not their own forebears but those forebears’ most vicious enemies.

 

Ghosts

Like all of you, I’m sure, I have been watching the events unfolding in Ukraine all week with the greatest attention. And, also like all of you, I’ve been surprised over and over in the course of these last days. Who would have thought countries like Sweden, Finland, and especially (time a million) Switzerland would abandon their former inability to join the West in anything that could even slightly irritate Russia to take serious, meaningful steps to help the beleaguered Ukrainians? Who would have expected our own government to shake off its doldrums and spearhead what so far feels like a remarkably successful effort to inflict maximal economic and commercial damage on the Russians and thereby, at least theoretically, eventually to dissuade them from pushing forward with the conquest of Ukraine? Watching China and even Israel—both of whom are so traditionally eager not to step on Russian toes—speaking out, respectively, vaguely and less vaguely on the side of Ukraine—that also came as a huge surprise to me. So it’s been a week of surprises that I’ve watched parade past me when I’ve been ensconced in Joan’s shiva room at her father’s assisted-living facility for long enough to peruse the news on my phone. (For non-Shelter Rockers, my wonderful mother-in-law died last Shabbat and we’ve been here in Toronto since Sunday for her funeral and shiva week. May her memory be a blessing for us all.)

As always, I try to respond to current events by setting them in their historical context. Is Putin a latter-day Hitler trying to swallow up as many of the neighbors as he can without caring if anyone does or doesn’t believe whatever fig-leaf justification he offers up to justify his actions and only having begun with Ukraine, just as Hitler only began with the Sudetenland? Or does he see himself more as a latter-day Lincoln, looking south and attempting to bring back into the union a seditiously self-proclaimed rogue state led by the political heirs of the rebels who wrongly and illegally chose to jump ship when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991? I admit that comparing Putin to Lincoln seems beyond exaggerated. But is that only because I—we—consider the nation that declared its independence in the summer of 1776 to have been a true union, a “real” nation, that the South was treacherously betraying by attempting to go its own way—and thus nothing like the USSR, which was—at best—an archipelago of serf-states held in place by the brute force brought to bear by the only “real” country in the union, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (or, as it was earlier and later called, “just” Russia)?

It’s a more complicated question than it sounds like at first. Putin himself is clearly a complex mixture of things: part schoolyard bully, part oligarch, part Caesar, part self-labelled patriot, and part gangster. I’m sure people with far more extensive grounding than myself in Russian history will find all sorts of themes from Russian history echoing through his rhetoric and his actions (and particularly his actions of this last week). But to me there are three central ghosts hovering over Putin as he pursues this policy of naked aggression towards Ukraine and each, a bit like the angels in Angels in America (and especially the one played by Emma Thompson in the HBO miniseries), guides the action forward without actually playing a role personally in the way the drama unfolds.

The first ghost is that of Ivan the Terrible. (The word “terrible” is not at all right, by the way. The Russian word grozniy means “formidable” or “fearsome,” not terrible in the way the word is used in modern English.) Ivan was the first of the czars, the grand prince of Moscow who, in 1547 proclaimed himself “Czar of All Russia.” It was a carefully chosen title: the Russian word tsar (usually written “czar” in English, or “tsar”) is merely the Russian equivalent of the Latin word Caesar, just in the same way that Kaiser is the German version of that word. And it was a latter-day Caesar that Ivan set out to accomplish the twin foreign-policy initiatives of his years in power: the effort to make Russia safe from the so-called Golden Horde (as the huge Mongol empire to the east was called) and the parallel effort to gain access for Russia to the Baltic Sea regardless of what countries lay in the way. He accomplished the first of these two initiatives, extending Russian control as far east as the Urals and as far south as the Caspian Sea (and thus creating a huge buffer zone between Russia and the Mongol Empire). But he was unsuccessful in his attempt to colonize and annex Lithuania, in those days the sole gateway to the Baltic for Russia. Still, by rejecting the Russian words for “king” or “emperor” and choosing instead to be known as czar, he was signaling—and not especially subtly—that he viewed Russia’s place in his world as something akin to Rome’s place in its, which is to say as the central state of a giant empire and as anything but a nation among nations.

The second ghost hovering over Putin’s head is Peter the Great, czar from 1685 to his death in 1725 whose self-appointed mission was once and for all to make Russia into a great nation worthy of the role in world leadership he envisaged for it. He invented the Russian navy, completely overhauled the Russian army, created a secular school system devoted to teaching children to think of themselves as citizens of a great world power, and he exerted enough influence on the Orthodox Church to keep it from getting in his way. And, indeed, he made himself into one of the most powerful of world leaders. And he managed to expand Russia decisively, taking over (because he could) large swaths of Finland, Estonia, and Latvia, thus gaining access to the Baltic. And he went to war with Turkey, as a result of which he gained access to the Black Sea. And he founded St. Peterburg (named after himself), Russia’s so-called “window to Europe,” which made him truly a towering figure in Russian history. (He was, by the way, also a towering figure in the literal sense of being six-foot-six.)

And the third ghost is the specter of Catherine II, called Catherine the Great, who became empress of all Russia upon the death of her peculiar husband, Peter III, and who remained on the throne until her own death in 1796. Catharine saw herself as the “real” successor to Peter the Great. And Russia dramatically expanded under her reign—conquering Poland and then giving away parts of it to Austria and Prussia. She went to war with Turkey and won, securing the entire northern shore of the Black Sea for Russia. (This is basically where Ukraine is today.) And she also seized the Crimea in 1783, making it part of Russia. To learn more, I recommend Robert K. Massie’s book, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman, which I enjoyed immensely, as did I also his biography of Peter the Great, called Peter the Great: His Life and World. Both volumes are still in print and available as e-books. The best biography of Ivan the Terrible is probably the one by Isabel de Madariaga, published by Yale University Press in 2006.

In lifetimes of none of the above did Ukraine exist as an independent state. In other words, Putin’s ghosts did not conquer Ukraine because there was no such place: once the Russian Empire existed with its czars and czarinas at the helm, it simply went without saying that the territory that is today independent Ukraine was part of the empire. And that, I think, is the world the ghosts hovering over Putin’s head are urging him to recreate, one in which Russia, the largest nation in Europe (and by far—although Ukraine is second-largest), takes its rightful place as leader of the lesser and smaller nations of Europe, which position of natural power and influence it is being prevented from assuming by the efforts of NATO and the European Union, and by the efforts of our own nation as well, to draw Ukraine away from Russia and to make of it an independent nation in the Western style with ties to the other nations of the world, and Russia among them, that are suggestive not of Ukrainian subservience or servility but of Ukrainian sovereignty, autonomy, and independence.

Where all this will end, who knows? The Russians, it has already become clear, can only lose by winning: having to occupy a gigantic vassal state that will remain openly hostile is not what the Russians can want, but neither—and even more horrifying—would be the specter of actually losing the war they’ve begun and having to retreat. The Ukrainians have played their hand well so far, doing precisely what it took to win the support and admiration of the world. President Zelenskyy has shown himself to be brave, clever, and—crucially—photogenic and appealing. (The man is a trained performer, after all!) The Russian government will not collapse under the weight of criticism levelled against it by the entire rest of the world. But becoming a pariah state can’t have been Putin’s plan either. Perhaps the man needs to look up one last time and see the specters hiding just behind Ivan, Peter, and Catherine—the specters of the emperors of Rome (the real Caesars, after all) who chose to conquer and rule the world only for their empire to collapse in on itself when the weight of the world’s loathing simply became too heavy for it to bear.