Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War | Lex Fridman Podcast #415

What happened during World War II was that once the Germans started to run out of, uh, of manpower, they created foreign legion groups. But because those people were not Aryans, they couldn't be trusted, so they were put under the command of Heinrich Himmler, uh, under command of SS, and became known as SS Waffen units. And, uh, one of such units was created in Ukraine.

The following is a conversation with Serhii Plokhy, a historian at Harvard University, and the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute, also at Harvard. As a historian, he specializes in the history of Eastern Europe, with an emphasis on Ukraine. He wrote a lot of great books on Ukraine and Russia, the Soviet Union, on Slavic peoples in general across centuries, on Chernobyl and nuclear disasters, and on the current war in Ukraine. A book titled the Ruso-Ukrainian War: The Return of History. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Serhii Plokhy. What are the major explanations for the collapse of the Soviet Union? Maybe ones you agree with and ones you disagree with.

Very often, people confuse three different processes that were taking place in the late '80s early '90s, and the one was the collapse of communism as ideology, another was the end of the Cold War, and the third one was the end of the Soviet Union. Uh, all of these processes were inter-related, interconnected, but when people provide ideology as the explanation for all of these processes, that's where I disagree, because ideological collapse, uh, happened on the territory of the Soviet Union in general. The Soviet Union lost the Cold War, whether we are talking about Moscow, Leningrad, or Saint Petersburg now, or Vladivostok. But the fall of the Soviet Union is about a story in which Vladivostok and Saint Petersburg ended up in one country, and Kiev, Minsk, and Əməkdaşı ended in different countries. So, the theories and explanations about how did that happen, for me, these are really very helpful theories for understanding the Soviet collapse. So, the mobilization from below, the collapse of the center, against the background of economic collapse, against the background of ideological, uh, ideological implosion, that's, that's how I look at the, at the fall of the Soviet Union, and that's how I look at the theories that explain that collapse.

So, it's a story of geography, ideology, economics. Which are the most important to understand of what made the collapse of the Soviet Union happen?

The Soviet collapse was unique, but not more unique than collapse of any other empire. So, what we really witnessed, uh, or the, the, the world witnessed back in 1991, and we continue to witness today with the Russian aggression against Ukraine, is a collapse of one of the largest world empires. We talk about, or talked about the Soviet Union, and now talk about Russia as possessing plus/minus one-sixth of the surface of the Earth. You don't get in possession of one-sixth of the Earth by being a nation-state. You get that sort of size as an empire. And, uh, the Soviet collapse is continuation of the disintegration of the Russian Empire that, uh, started back in 1917, that was arrested for some period of time by the Bolsheviks, by the communist ideology, which w- which was internationalist ideology, and then came back in full force in the late '80s and early '90s. So, the most important story for me, this is the story of the continuing collapse of the Russian Empire and the rise of, uh, not just local nationalism, but also rise of Russian nationalism that turned out to be as destructive force for the imperial or multi, multiethnic, multinational state as was, mm, Ukrainian nationalism, or Georgian, or, or, mm, Estonian for that matter.