Fifteen Questions: Serhii Plokhii on Atlantis, Chernobyl, and the Dangers of Writing History

Historian and Ukrainian Research Institute director Serhii Plokhii studies Eastern Europe’s intellectual, cultural, and international history — particularly the early modern period and current-day Ukraine. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

FM: You were born in the Soviet Union and spent your childhood in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine. Growing up, how did you conceptualize your national identity? Did you think of yourself as first and foremost Soviet or Ukrainian, and how did those identities interact?

SP: I grew up in an area where languages and ethnicities were intermixed.

I had a friend at school and he was ethnic Russian. I was ethnic Ukrainian. There were two languages around, and I had heated discussions with him about the right term for a piece of ice. He said one name, and I gave another. And I remember we found an adult and said, “Who was right, who was wrong?” And the answer was most disappointing to me: “You’re both right. One word is Russian, another is Ukrainian.”

There was an idea that we can be of different backgrounds, but it came quite later, maybe when I was a teenager. It was a process of gradual recognition.

FM: When did you first become interested in studying history?

I grew up in a place called Zaporizhzhia, which was a product of industrialization in the 1930s. At that time, we didn’t know that the glorious Soviet story of industrialization was very much also an American story, because the engineers who constructed a hydroelectric power dam in the city had equipment that came from the United States. It was the Cold War, so no one was talking about the United States. That was part of history I was interested in.

That place also has a long history in terms of the Ukrainian Cossacks. It was one of the places they first came to in the 15th and 16th centuries. A deep history was around me. So I was very much interested in that.

The third layer was not so much history, but interest in the United States because it was the Cold War. I got interested in American history, but mostly the history of the Native Americans. I was reading histories that even regular Americans didn’t read in the 1970s.

FM: What about history excites you?

SP: It’s about mystery. The first time I decided it would be cool to be a historian was when I was reading about Atlantis. My dream was to find that ancient island.

It was about archeology; it was about something that went under the water, and nobody can find it. And I will. I will come, and I will find it.

FM: As a historian, if you could live in any era that wasn’t the present — anytime in the past — where would you choose to live?

SP: I really don’t want to live in any other era. But I would love an opportunity to be a tourist, to visit a place. I started as an early modernist. I would love to go to the 17th century to talk to some of the characters and find out whether I got them right or wrong, and then maybe come and rewrite my books.

FM: How do you feel your Ukrainian identity informs your scholarship?

SP: Through history, I looked at the stories of my family, at the place where I grew up, at the language and linguistic situation that I described before where we really didn’t know what word belonged to what language. So I, to a degree, discovered this identity through history.

I was formed in many ways under the Soviet Union. In the late ’70s, I realized many topics I study were really not welcomed by the establishment. I met with people — mentors — who were fired from their positions. Some of them spent time in the gulag in the 1950s. So in that sense, my Ukrainian identity was mostly confined to my history. I couldn’t publicly declare any manifestation of identity that didn’t fit the Soviet paradigm.

FM: Putin often seeks to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with twisted and incorrect accounts of history. I know you’ve spent time studying, teaching and living in Ukraine, the Soviet Union, the U.S., and Russia. What are the biggest differences between how Ukrainian history is viewed within Russia versus outside of Russia?

SP: There was already Russo-centrism in Soviet history. Not allowing particular manifestations of Ukrainian or Armenian history — to say nothing about Jewish history. What you see with the current Russian approach is that what was, in the Soviet times, just a Russo-centrism became part of the Russian Imperial interpretation of the history of everything.

This war started with Vladimir Putin declaring that Russians and Ukrainians were one and the same. Which really meant Ukrainians don’t exist. That’s quite new in the last 100 years, but it’s not particularly new if you look at the longer perspective. Because this is the vision of history of the 19th-century Russian Empire, and Russian Imperial historians who considered Ukrainians and Belarusians to just be parts of the big Russian nation.

FM: You’ve spoken before about being a Chernobyl survivor, and you’ve since written a book about the nuclear disaster — and have another forthcoming book on the subject. [Chernobyl Roulette, Plokhii’s most recent book, was published the day after this conversation.] What was it like living in Ukraine during Chernobyl? Did the disaster and the government’s response to it change how you saw the Soviet Union?

I would be a Chernobyl survivor only in the eyes of people who lived in Western Europe or the United States, really far from the reactor. Because when the Chernobyl disaster happened, I lived roughly 300-400 kilometers away from there. So in the eyes of anybody in Ukraine, I’m not a Chernobyl survivor.

But of course, Chernobyl affected me in a very direct way. There was irradiation and pollution around. I had two small children at that time. We kept them indoors the entire summer. My friends and my colleagues were drafted into the army, and my students as well, and sent to Chernobyl to deal with the cleanup work. Some of them became so-called “bio-robots.” I still remember the names and faces of my students being sent to the most dangerous places.

The feeling was that the government was, on the one hand, doing whatever they could under the circumstances. But they were also hiding from us what the reality was. We didn’t know how high the levels of radiation were. Didn’t know how to protect ourselves.

The modern politics of Ukraine started with mobilization around Chernobyl. And the basic slogan was, “Tell us the truth about Chernobyl.” As a historian, I was very much interested in what was hidden from us. Once I started to realize that there were archival materials open, that became a natural choice for me. That’s become one of the big themes in my book on Chernobyl.

FM: You started your career as an academic writing about the early modern period, but a lot of your recent work has been about events that you lived through and events that are ongoing. What was it like making that shift?

SP: Once you get your tenure, you can take risks that otherwise you would not take. First thing once I got tenure — and that was at the University of Alberta, before coming here to Harvard — I started researching a topic linked to my childhood memories. Every summer we would go to the Crimea for vacation, and there was Yalta. My father would tell me that President Roosevelt had visited this place. And that was absolutely surreal, in the middle of the Cold War, that an American president could visit Yalta.

I decided, “Okay, if this research is a complete bust, I will apologize, and we’ll go back to the 16th and 17th centuries.” But it wasn’t a bust. The book was received quite well, and I decided I could also write on topics that are not necessarily early modern history.

The first book that really dealt with my time and my experiences was also an attempt to understand what happened in my life, in my country. In the fall of ’91, when the Soviet Union fell apart, I was on sabbatical. I was teaching in Canada. So my book on the fall of the Soviet Union is really a book about trying to understand what happened during my Canadian sabbatical.

FM: You’ve spoken about how it was difficult to begin writing about the Russo-Ukrainian war, in large part because writing about the war while it’s still ongoing and as someone who’s been personally affected by it went against your instincts as a historian. How has writing about that war changed your conceptions of what history is and how it should be studied?

SP: For a historian it’s agony, writing a history of something that is unraveling in front of your eyes.

I became much more appreciative of this generation of chronicle writers and diary keepers. Journalists, who are the first there on the ground to capture the events of history as it unveils. Because we historians are the second, third, fourth. We have much more time.

Another thing I discovered, that I didn’t encounter before, is the kind of sources social media can provide. It captures people’s thoughts, people’s reactions, people’s emotions, almost at the time when things are happening. We never had that. Archives created by institutions and governments don’t have that information.

FM: How do you see your role and the role of your scholarship within the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war?

SP: I’m writing history, and I know from experience that those who write things first don’t normally get good treatment. They don’t have all the sources. They don’t have all the time. They provide the conceptualizations that generations of scholars after them come and try to trash.

The Russo-Ukrainian war is the largest war in Europe since ’45, and one of the largest in the world since 1945. People will be turning to that history again and again. Basically, I’m sacrificing myself, right? There will be a lot of people trying to prove me wrong, and very often for good reasons.

But I am also doing that because I felt I had something important to contribute to the understanding of the war. You mentioned Putin. This war is probably more wrapped in bad history than any other war I’ve studied. The guy is absolutely obsessed with Imperial Russian history.

I don’t recommend too much of Tucker Carlson — but if anyone wants to watch him, watch his interview with Vladimir Putin. Carlson is treated to a 35-minute lecture on the medieval and early modern history of Russia and Ukraine, where he is completely lost. That’s one indication of how important the misreading and misrepresentation of history has been for this.

As a historian, I felt that I have not just the possibility, but also the duty to talk about history in a different way.

FM: What can scholars at Harvard and other universities in Western countries do to support Ukraine through their academic work?

SP: Unlike journalists, we historians are quite slow, right? But our other colleagues are much more proactive. There is a turn toward studying either the war or Ukraine on the part of political scientists and at the Harvard Kennedy School. There is involvement on the part of people studying health care. I’m the director of the Ukrainian Institute, and a lot of people at Harvard who start projects related to Ukraine turn to us to be partners.

Certainly, there are more courses on Ukraine. And I see growing interest not just in Ukraine, but also in something that for a long period of time was considered to be less important by many students: elements of international history, work history, and political history.

FM: Do you view your own work as supporting Ukraine during the war?

SP: I certainly do, but I also look at it as a way of supporting the existing international order — the fight for democracy and ideas of sovereignty. What’s at stake is not just Ukraine.

It really mattered who won and who lost in World War Two. It will really matter for the next couple generations how this war ends, just because of its scope and impact. The impact is already global. When it comes to my research, it’s certainly supporting Ukraine. But in a way that supports all these other values, and on a certain level, the key foundations of today’s world.

FM: Amid the war and martial law, Ukraine has not held presidential elections and has had to shift away from other priorities. What are your hopes for a post-war Ukraine?

SP: One of the things that Ukraine defends in this war is certainly democracy. Ukraine is multi-ethnic, multi-lingual. Democratic values unite the nation. The war, on the other hand, brings certain limitations to how democracy is functioning.

What I hope to happen after the war is for Ukraine to stay democratic, rebuild democracy, and remove limitations on democracy. One test will be the outcomes of the presidential elections after the war. Major leaders who led their countries in war, like Churchill, like de Gaulle, like many others, somehow don’t stay after the war. People want to move on. So the chances are, if Ukraine really maintains a democratic tradition, there will also be a change of government.

— Associate Magazine Editor Adelaide E. Parker can be reached at adelaide.parker@thecrimson.com.