Viewing The Ukraine With A Historical Lens with Professor Jesse Kauffman

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Richard Helppie

Hello, and welcome to The Common Bridge. I'm your host Rich Helppie. Today we have a guest with us from Eastern Michigan University, Professor Jesse Kauffman. And we're going to talk about Russia, the Ukraine, Europe, what the past was like, where we sit today, and perhaps a little bit about the future. Welcome to The Common Bridge, Professor. So happy you're taking some time with me today.

Professor Kauffman

Thank you for having me.

Richard Helppie

The Common Bridge, of course, [is on] substack.com, TheCommonBridge.com, on most podcast outlets, YouTube TV, and on Mission Control Radio on your Radio Garden app. Please join us, and particularly at Substack, we sure would like to hear from you. We're looking for subscribers and guest columnists and guests. Professor Kauffman, [we are] really happy that you're with us today. Our audience likes to know a little bit about our guests. So if you don't mind, just maybe fill us in. Start with where'd you grow up and what's been your career arc? And what are you up to today?

Professor Kauffman

Sure. So I grew up in Los Angeles, but I was kind of a bad kid so I ended up joining the military when I was 19 to sort of get myself straightened around. I joined the Navy and spent four years in the military and then got out and went to college and decided I never wanted to leave. So that's basically what I've done for the past 20 years. I went to community college first in Los Angeles and then I got my undergraduate degree in European history at UCLA and then went on to Stanford and got my PhD in modern European history; main focus in German history, but on Germany and Eastern Europe. I also studied the Polish language and Central Europe - all of Central Europe during the 20th century. My first book was on the German military's occupation of Poland in the First World War. And I'm just now finishing a book on basically all of Central Europe, from just before the First World War to just after.

Richard Helppie

Those are, first of all, fantastic credentials - prestigious institutions like UCLA and Stanford University. You've been at Eastern Michigan University on [the] faculty for, I believe, 10 or 11 years now?

Professor Kauffman

Eleven very happy and fulfilling years.

Richard Helppie

Great. Did you have to learn to spell Ypsilanti before you took the post?

Professor Kauffman

[Laughter] I did, I did!

Richard Helppie

Well, we sure welcome you to Southeast Michigan. You're doing research and teaching today; give us a little bit about some of the things that occupy your time, if there's such a thing as a typical year or a typical month?

Professor Kauffman

Sure. So I'm teaching four classes this semester: Western Civilization, 20th Century Germany, a graduate class, and a class called A Global History of Warfare. So that's my teaching load this semester. And like I said, struggling to finish this book, it's almost done, so I try and spend a few hours every morning finishing up. I'm on the last chapter, but I have to get to Europe to finish it, to get some of the documents there. That's just been a challenge. So it's been a good and rewarding semester, but also a bit stressful and challenging.

Richard Helppie

Well, look, be real safe when you go there. I know that you know the lay of the land so you will be, and you can converse in Polish and English and maybe some other languages as well. There's been so much discussion about the Ukraine. It's dominating our new cycles, it's wiping basically everything else off the front pages. We're recording this on March 19. So the war in the Ukraine seems to be up for grabs at this point, or the outcome's uncertain, but how the heck did we get here in the first place? Take us as far back as you wish, I don't know what a good starting point might be. Is it 1900? Or is it before that and the age of the Russian Empire? What did it look like? And what's happened? What's brought us to this point?

Professor Kauffman

Great question. So you do have to go back to the Russian Empire. But if I had to pick a date when this started, it would be 1917. So for several centuries, the territory of what is now the country of Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire, it wasn't until the Empire collapsed in 1917, when there were two revolutions: first, a kind of liberal reforming revolution and later that year, of course, the communist Bolshevik revolution. But with that first collapse in February 1917, many of the national movements in the western Russian Empire began to mobilize and to find some new place for themselves; at first within the empire, maybe in some kind of federation, that would give them their own national, political and cultural life. One of the first and best organized and best supported - that is among grassroots support - was in Ukraine. They formed a government called the Rada, which means "council", and essentially told the central Russian authorities, look, we'll stay in Russia in some kind of federation but we want to basically run our own affairs, and we want to have this place called Ukraine. We'll have our own language and our own education system and our own military and so on. And both of the Russian governments said, no, there's no such thing as Ukraine, you're just a region of Russia. And the way I see this is it's a continuation of that, it's been going on since 1917.

Richard Helppie

So that was one of the questions that I had; are Ukrainians a distinct ethnicity or are they distinct culture? I know they have their own language. Would it be parallel to several United States setting up or would it be more like Puerto Rico? Is there a parallel? How do they declare themselves Ukrainians versus Russians, if there is such a thing?

Professor Kauffman

That's an excellent question as well. I can't think of a good comparison because it's a uniquely Central European issue in some ways. So there were, for a long time, people in that area that we call Ukraine now, who consider themselves different from the Russians. But the word "Ukranian" to designate these people didn't really start to be used until the late 1800s, mid 1800s, when that became a kind of distinct ethnic and national identity. So it's complicated, because there were people who were Ukrainians who saw themselves as a kind of regional identity. They were essentially Russians, and most Russians continued to see them as simply Russians. The name of the region - the Russian Empire, they had called it Little Russia, the little Russians. In the 1800s, as Ukrainian poets and historians began to say, no, no, we're a distinct ethnicity, there were still Ukrainian elites who said, no, no, we're a branch of the Russians. Now I certainly would say that they are a distinct nation based on shared historical experiences, based on culture. But nonetheless, the line is still kind of, I wouldn't say indistinct, but as you probably know, Zelenskyy's mother tongue is Russian.