Plokhy, Serhii

historian at Harvard University, director of the Ukrainian Research Institute, author of The Last Empire, The Gates of Europe, Chernobyl, and The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History

Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War

Lex Fridman Podcast · Mar 4, 2024

• Serhii Plokhy
• Soviet Union collapse
• Ukraine and Russia history
• Stepan Bandera
• KGB
• Russo-Ukrainian War
• Zelensky
• Holodomor
• Chernobyl
• nuclear power safety
• Cold War

Core ideas

Plokhy frames the Soviet Union's 1991 collapse not primarily as an ideological or Cold War story but as the final chapter of the disintegration of the Russian Empire — a process suspended by Bolshevik internationalism after 1917 and reignited by both local nationalisms (Ukrainian, Georgian, Estonian) and Russian nationalism itself. He rejects the idea that US pressure caused the collapse, noting Bush's own 1991 "Chicken Kiev" speech warned Ukrainians against independence, and argues the decisive fact was chronological: Ukraine's December 1, 1991 independence referendum preceded the USSR's formal dissolution by one week, because (per Yeltsin's own explanation to Bush) Russia had no interest in continuing a union that, without its second-largest and culturally closest republic, would leave Russia outnumbered by Muslim-majority republics — a dynamic he argues still makes Ukraine central to any future Russian project of regional control. He reads Putin's description of the collapse as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe" not as grief over lost lives (the toll was comparatively low) but over lost great-power status and the "unity" of a broadly-imagined Russian nation.

Tracing deeper history, Plokhy explains that Kyiv predates Moscow by centuries as the seat of Kievan Rus (a Viking-founded trade-and-slaving state whose name, "Rus," is not synonymous with "Russia"), while Moscow only rose to prominence later under Mongol rule, with the "gathering of Russian lands" project — imagining Ukraine and Belarus as inherently Russian territory — only being completed as late as 1945 with the Soviet annexation of Transcarpathia. He describes the emergence of Ukrainian and Russian nationalism as parallel, mutually destabilizing forces against imperial rule, tracing Ukrainian national mythology partly to a mysterious early-19th-century manuscript ("The History of the Rus") that reframed the Cossack elite as a distinct nation rather than merely a loyal imperial estate — a shift from elite-loyalty-based to nation/language-based political legitimacy that no multiethnic empire, including Russia's, ultimately survived.

On Stepan Bandera, Plokhy separates the historical figure (a young 1930s Ukrainian nationalist student who spent most of his adult life in Polish prison, a Nazi concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, or German exile, and was assassinated by the KGB in Munich in 1959) from the propaganda myth exploited by both Soviet and later Russian narratives. He argues the "Nazi collaborator" label is asymmetrically applied (Stalin, too, collaborated with Hitler in 1939-41) and that Bandera's organization, despite real fascist influences and antisemitic figures within its ranks, deliberately refused to declare itself fascist and continued demanding Ukrainian independence even after Germany imprisoned its leadership. He details the KGB assassin Bohdan Stashynsky's story (a blackmailed village informant turned professional assassin who killed Bandera with a cyanide spray gun, later defected, and whose confession cemented Bandera's martyr status) as a lens into the KGB's institutional culture — an organization sidelined under Khrushchev after the Beria purge but which regained major political power under Andropov in the 1970s, and whose "us versus the corrupt party leadership" mindset, Plokhy argues, directly shaped Putin's own governing instincts. On the modern "denazification" narrative and incidents like the 2023 Yaroslav Hunka standing ovation in Canada's Parliament, he argues Ukraine's actual far-right electoral support (around 1-2%, no far-right party has ever entered Ukraine's parliament) is markedly lower than in France or Germany, and that Ukraine is unique in being the only country besides Israel with a popular Jewish head of state — a fact he finds worth investigating rather than dismissing.

On the drivers of the current war, Plokhy identifies 2004's Orange Revolution and 2013's Revolution of Dignity as pivotal moments cementing Ukraine's pro-Western, democratic trajectory against Russia's deepening authoritarianism, and traces the 2014 annexation of Crimea and Donbas intervention to Putin's objection to Ukraine's EU Association Agreement, which would have blocked Ukraine's participation in his competing Eurasian Union project. He describes Donbas's mixed ethnic Russian/Ukrainian composition as a legacy of 19th-century industrial migration compounded by post-Soviet "rust belt" economic collapse, providing fertile ground for externally-driven (not organically Ukrainian) destabilization — pointing to figures like Igor Girkin, who has himself claimed to have "fired the first shot." He dismantles the claim that Russian-speakers face persecution in Ukraine (Russian remains widely spoken and unrestricted, a fact he says is obvious to "anyone who ever set foot in Ukraine") and traces the 2021 Putin essay "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians" to pre-1917 imperial "great/little/white Russian" ideology preserved institutionally through the Russian Orthodox Church, contrasting it with Ukraine's political identity, which he argues formed historically through rebellion against, rather than identification with, centralized state power — a pattern only now shifting as Ukrainians, for the first time, associate their state with security and legitimacy rather than as a foreign imposition. He pushes back on NATO-expansion-centered explanations of the war (citing Finland's NATO accession without corresponding Russian military redeployment there as evidence NATO was a pretext, not the cause), and lays out three broad possible endings to the war — decisive victory for either side, or a negotiated stalemate — while noting Putin's 2022 constitutional annexation of four Ukrainian oblasts makes any return to 2022 borders legally and politically near-impossible absent regime change in Moscow.

On Zelensky, Plokhy describes his refusal to flee Kyiv in February 2022 (against the expectations of Western advisors and echoing Afghanistan's fallen government) as reflecting both principle and a performer's instinct for reading and channeling his audience's resolve, and frames the February 2024 dismissal of popular General Zaluzhny as one of the most dangerous moments of the war given historical precedents (Truman-MacArthur) for civil-military rifts — while expressing confidence Ukraine's democratic institutions and Zaluzhny's own restraint make a Prigozhin-style power struggle unlikely. Reflecting on Holodomor (Stalin's 1932-33 engineered famine, killing an estimated 4+ million, deliberately paired with a crackdown on Ukrainian-language culture) and the Holocaust, he argues the 20th century's distinguishing horror was the emergence of ideologies that didn't merely fail to value human life but actively required mass destruction of defined populations as a path to a supposedly better future — a lesson he worries has been forgotten, comparing this concern to the mishandling of Chernobyl, which he frames as fundamentally a story of Soviet secrecy and rigid centralized authority (contrasted with the more decentralized, locally-empowered response to America's Three Mile Island) whose cover-up-driven backlash ("eco-nationalism," demands for truth about contamination) became one of the first mass mobilizations that helped bring down the USSR. He extends this into a broader argument that nuclear power, while statistically far safer than fossil fuels, remains politically unreliable as a climate solution because each new disaster (Fukushima, and now the war-zone risks demonstrated at Zaporizhzhia, the first nuclear plant ever to become an active battlefield) triggers roughly a decade-long global freeze in new reactor construction, driven by humans' disproportionate, largely irrational fear of invisible radiation versus visible risks like coal pollution.

Zooming out, Plokhy sees the war as reviving Cold War-like bipolar dynamics — not Washington-Moscow this time but Washington-Beijing, with a weakened, diminished Russia unlikely to become an independent multipolar pole as it once envisioned — and argues the essential lesson of Cold War history isn't "how did we end up in a nuclear standoff" but "how did we keep the Cold War cold for 70+ years without a third world war," crediting both luck (citing a nearly catastrophic unauthorized Soviet shootdown of a US plane during the Cuban Missile Crisis) and the fact that Kennedy and Khrushchev's generation had direct, formative fear of nuclear weapons (the "Bikini Atoll generation") — a fear he worries has faded from today's political leadership and voting publics, raising the risk of repeating the same mistakes.

Excerpts