OLLI0126 - Histories in Conflict: The Russia-Ukraine War in Historical Perspective

Course Description

Professional historians, custodians of the past, know just how contentious that past can be. The “truth” about it evolves with time, place, and generational perspective. Historians thus are left often unable to state categorically “this is how things were and why they happened as they did.” Instead, guided by an ever-expanding body of knowledge, we offer our best approximations of the past, knowing full well they will be challenged and debated by future generations trying to make sense of this, their own historical past. Nowhere today is this challenge and the raging debates it generates more evident than in Eastern Europe and the ongoing war there between Russia and Ukraine. This six-week lecture course will examine two histories of the region, one Russian and one Ukrainian, which provide each combatant side the intellectual arguments to justify the rightness of their cause. These histories reach deeply into the medieval past, and sweep across centuries of imperial power, war, Orthodox Christian culture, nationalism, communism, and the Cold War. We will reach our own approximations of how the past has shaped this tragic contemporary present—and perhaps as well what history might suggest about the future to come. This course will be recorded.