“I was there before,” said Plokhy, Ukraine’s leading historian in the world, as we meet on a wet day in London for lunch at Ognisko, the Polish Hearth Club restaurant. Founded by Polish exiles in 1939 – stucco reliefs and chandeliers a warm embrace of old world grandeur – the club seems like a great place to meet a country chronicle on the front lines of another seismic European war. Plokhy, although now living in Vienna with permission from Harvard, is on this very battlefield. “It’s not that I went to war,” he says. “War has taken over my world and its history.” In Ukraine there are not just two armies, but two historical narratives that have clashed. In the narrative to which Plokhy has dedicated his career and over a dozen deeply researched books, Ukraine has a long and meaningful history as a nation and an independent state. The other, a darkly manipulated version proposed by President Putin, denies Ukraine its national identity. Ukraine, says this narrative, has always been part of a greater Russia, since ancient Kyivan Rus. To quote Putin, “it is not even a state” and has no right to exist. As we sit at a table set with rye bread and cucumbers in Ognisko’s garden, I ask Plokhy what it’s like to do his job when both his country and its history have been attacked. Plokhy reminds me, with a smile, that the fields of ‘medieval or early modern history were generally inhabited by people who simply wanted to go as far as possible. . . in the past.” But now things have changed. “Politicians and generals,” he says, “seek to occupy not only territories but also ‘parts of history.’ So there is nothing left to do but to fight against the “abuses and abuses of history”. “The task is really to defend your lawn.” On February 24, Plokhy woke up early with an email from a colleague saying, “Oh my God.” Another came from a former student at the University of Dnipro in southeastern Ukraine, where he taught. “He was asking if it would be okay for him to send me electronic records of his work – for safekeeping, because he lived in Dnipro.” Ognisko55 Exhibition Road, London SW7 2PG Chlodnik (beetroot soup) 6.50 £ pierogi sauerkraut 8.50 £ polenta goat cheese 15.50 £ pork schnitzel 19.50 £ Carbonated water 4.00 £ carbonated water 4.00 £ espresso 2.80 £ Total 6, 50 £ Ploy immediately realized that Putin’s complete invasion — very frightened, long-threatened, still unexplored — had begun. He called his sister in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia, where he grew up. A first air raid had already hit the city. “That was my awakening.” “February 24th came as a wake-up call for Europe as well,” he says. “I think deep down we thought the story was over. Maybe not literally. . . but in terms of unprovoked war. ” The big issues of the continent are supposed to be solved forever through negotiations, elections and so on. But the story did not end and for the first month “it looked like a nightmare”. Eventually, he found “a balance between emotion and work.” But much of the southeastern region where Plokhy grew up is now occupied by Russian troops. “It’s surreal. It is difficult to accept. It makes you angry. All these things.” We listened, but we did not hear what was there. Why was it so hard to imagine “ Plokhy’s writing has focused on Ukraine and the post-Soviet space, but has covered the whole range of its history, from the early modern to the Cold War to the present day. He first left Ukraine in the early 1990s to teach in Canada before moving to the United States. I was born in Russia, but grew up in the United Kingdom. We speak English, but when we talk about food we skip Russian. Ognisko’s menu is heavy with oriental flavors – dill, lard, pickles, cabbage – but also in Polish terms. However, I have high hopes for my ability to read it without stumbling. I came straight to our lunch from Warsaw, where I had spent just six weeks, fascinated by the city from its wartime role as a refuge for millions of Ukrainian refugees. As we read, I test my strength in an au courant remark about potato pasta – will it still be called pierogi ruskie after this war? Yes, Plokhy tells me, as my case is wrong. Ruskie does not mean Russian, but refers to the fact that the pasta came to Poland from western Ukraine, perhaps at the time it was part of Poland. Our area has been folded so many times that it could make a thousand pastas, I think to myself, somehow it goes out, and I choose them as an appetizer. Plokhy, who chooses a cold beetroot soup, says he was moved by Poland’s response, but was not surprised. Both nations have faced Russian aggression. Both have also seen their identities shaped by the experience of losing the state. Their anthems share the same starting line: “Ukraine is not lost yet,” “Poland is not lost yet,” he notes. They are statements of contempt, expressing the idea that “the state can leave, but the nation is alive.” The message is particularly painful at a time when Russia has returned to its imperial table, threatening Ukraine’s very presence on the map. It also permeates the Gates of Europe (2015), Plokhy’s odyssey in the history of Ukraine, where its cohesion as a nation remains the unifying thread even when, one after the other, the conquerors sweep its lands. Ukraine is a frequent target due to its geography, an articulation between east and west, and the Dnieper River that crosses the country is often considered the main dividing line. Plokhy’s academic life began in the Dnipro, a city on its shores. There, he researched the history of the Cossacks, a people with strong military traditions and of Ukrainian descent. In the Soviet Union of the 1970s and 1980s, his work was considered suspicious. Moscow’s leaders – from the tsars to the communists and beyond – have long viewed the idea of an independent Ukrainian history as a threat and have sought to suppress it. Several of Plokhy’s senior students at the university had been fired during a campaign against the “Cossacophiles”, accused of “idealization” that could be “potentially nationalistic”. He was formative. “He was very aware from my student years that there were these issues with its history and interpretation,” he says, as our originals arrive. Do not bomb the nuclear plant! At least get a map of the Chernobyl zone. Didn’t you see the HBO series ?! ‘ My pierogi are rich, stuffed with mushrooms and sprinkled with sauteed onions. Plokhy dives into beetroot soup. “I’m just trying to make the most of this meal in terms of nostalgia,” he says. But the soup, he says, is much more Polish than Ukrainian borscht. Ukraine’s claim to borscht as a national dish has sparked Russian anger in the past. Exchanges used to feel like food for playful articles about gastronomic competition. But their dark currents were revealed after the invasion began, when a spokeswoman for the Moscow Foreign Ministry said in a speech that the war was justified as Ukraine “could not share a borsch” and that it was “Nazism”. There is a long tradition in Moscow that seeks to stifle the development of Ukrainian culture and the traps of national identity – by banning publications in its language, for example, in 1863. It is this 19th-century tradition that Putin remembers when he claims that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people”. “What is so shocking,” says Plokhy, “is that it is truly a discount on the entire history of the 20th century,” when the Ukrainian national idea developed and led it to vote in favor of independence from the Soviet Union in late 1991. It’s A Vote, Plokhy argues in his book The Last Empire (2014), which sounded death to the bloc as a whole. If we had paid more attention to Putin’s historical attacks and their dissections by Ploy, could we have seen the invasion coming? I was reporting in Kyiv as the tension grew, but by the time the first bombs hit the city I was convinced it could not happen. The attack also shocked Plokhy. “We heard, but we did not hear what was there,” Plokhy said. “Because it was so hard to imagine.” People want to say that you can not overcome the past. In the post-Soviet region, you are not even given time to put on your shoes. “I write history and then it continues to appear as current news,” Plokhy says with a tired smile. His latest book, Atoms and Ashes, is a world history of nuclear disasters. Its release this spring coincided with a reckless military offensive by Russia at the retired Chernobyl power plant and operating plant in Zaporizhzhia, Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. “How can you do that?” Says Plokhy, with furious horror. “Do not bomb the nuclear power plant! At least get a map of the Chernobyl zone. Do not dig your trenches next to the Red Forest. Didn’t you see the HBO series ?! “ For Plokhy, the issue of nuclear history is no exception. as with all the subjects he focuses on, he is deeply intertwined with his own life. When he recorded the Cuban Missile Crisis at Nuclear Folly (2021), it was no accident – he tells me that every warhead delivered to Cuba in 1962 was produced in factories in his hometown of Zaporizhzhia. Chernobyl, released in 2018, also has its roots in its own experience since the 1986 nuclear disaster. Plokhy was in Dnipro, about 600 kilometers …
