The last empire is still falling: Serhii Plokhy on Ukraine, Russia, and 1991

Lex Fridman opens with a historian’s question: what actually explains the collapse of the Soviet Union? Serhii Plokhy, director of Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute and author of *The Last Empire* and *The Russo-Ukrainian War*, refuses a single cause. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he says, three processes ran at once: the collapse of communism as an ideology, the end of the Cold War, and the end of the Soviet state. They were connected, but treating ideology as the master key is where he disagrees. The faith died across the whole Union, from Moscow to Vladivostok. The Cold War was lost everywhere. The breakup of the state is a different story: why Vladivostok and St. Petersburg ended up in one country, while Kyiv, Minsk, and Dushanbe did not.

Plokhy’s own frame is mobilization from below, collapse of the center, economic bankruptcy, and ideological implosion. The Soviet collapse was unique, he adds, but not more unique than the fall of any other empire. The Union, and Russia after it, held roughly one sixth of the Earth’s surface. “You don’t get in possession of one sixth of the earth by being a nation state.” What the world saw in 1991, and what it still sees in Russia’s war against Ukraine, is the continuing disintegration of one of the largest empires. The Russian Empire began to come apart in 1917; the Bolsheviks arrested that process with an internationalist ideology; in the late 1980s the stitching came undone. Russian nationalism, he argues, proved as destructive of a multiethnic state as Ukrainian, Georgian, or Estonian nationalism.

Could Mikhail Gorbachev have saved it? History is full of what-ifs, Plokhy says, and different management of reform — or no reform at all — might have bought time. He does not think it would have bought a permanent Union. The twentieth century redrew the map: Austria-Hungary, the Ottomans, and the British Raj went; Yugoslavia fractured; Czechoslovakia managed a rare “civilized divorce.” The Soviet Union was the last of the great European empires still standing. Even today’s Russian Federation, he notes, is already a post-imperial formation: no national republics with more rights than Russian regions, a higher level of unification, different nationality policy. The lesson Moscow drew from 1991 was not to rebuild 1914, but to make sure 1991 could not be repeated inside Russia itself.

Fridman asks whether American Cold War pressure caused the collapse. Pressure was part of the Cold War story, Plokhy says, but it does not explain the end of the Union. The United States did not want the Soviet Union to disintegrate — not in 1948, when the strategic documents now available show American concern about a messy breakup, and not in 1991. The White House liked working with Gorbachev. A reforming Soviet Union was emerging as a junior partner. Collapse destroyed that arrangement and raised the nightmare of unaccounted nuclear weapons.

In August 1991, the month of the Moscow coup, George H.W. Bush flew from Moscow to Kyiv and delivered the speech later mocked as “Chicken Kyiv,” warning Ukrainians against independence. Until late November, Plokhy says, the administration did everything it could to keep the Union in one piece. Only when the cause was lost did Washington say goodbye to Gorbachev. A year later Bush was running for a second term and hunting for achievements. Destroying the Soviet Union was not one of them. He had been on the other side of that divide. Campaigns, Plokhy notes, produce mythology, and Americans still live with the myth that Washington brought the Union down.

Chronology, Plokhy insists, is the start of historical explanation. On December 1, 1991, Ukrainians voted in a referendum; turnout was high and more than 90 percent backed independence. A week later the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus dissolved the Union in the Belavezha Forest. Ukrainians had not been asked whether they wanted the Soviet Union abolished. They had been asked whether they supported their parliament’s decision to go independent. Why, then, was the Union gone seven days later?

Boris Yeltsin explained it to Bush. If Ukraine left, Russia was not interested in the Soviet project, because Russia would be outnumbered and outvoted by the Muslim republics. Culture mattered: Ukrainians were close linguistically and otherwise, “their own people.” Economics mattered more. Ukraine was the second-largest republic in population and economic potential. Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin’s chief economic adviser, was telling him there was no money left to subsidize other republics; oil and gas revenue had to stay inside the Russian Federation. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries empire had been a moneymaking machine. By the late twentieth it cost money, and the state was bankrupt. Ukraine’s decision spelled the end. If anyone today wants to restore not the Soviet Union but some form of Russian control over the post-Soviet space, Plokhy says, Ukraine is as important now as it was in December 1991.

Fridman turns to Putin’s line that the Soviet collapse was among the great tragedies of history. The actual formulation, Plokhy notes after checking the text and the date, was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century,” delivered a few weeks before the May 9 Victory Day parade — the core myth of the current Russian state. Why talk about 1991, not about the war the Soviet Union won? World War II exacted an enormous price, but the Union emerged a victor and took half of Europe. In 1991 the loss of life was very low. What mattered to Putin was the loss of the state, great-power status, and the “unity” of those he considered the Russian nation, understood very broadly to include Ukrainians and Belarusians. That reading, Plokhy says, sits on the page and between the lines.

Plokhy’s book *The Origins of the Slavic Nations* starts before nationalism. DNA and linguistics, he says, are pushing the story into prehistory. On present evidence the Slavs emerged around the Pripyat marshes — northwestern Ukraine, southwestern Belarus, eastern Poland — and spread to the Adriatic and the Pacific. His own work is not laboratory science. He wants to know how Eastern Slavs — Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians — imagined themselves, and how three nations and three states arrived. *Origins* stops in the eighteenth century; *Lost Kingdom* carries the argument to the present.

The medieval state of Kyivan Rus left a common historical mythology, a legal code, Christianity received from Byzantium, and a written literature that began in Kyiv. Those inheritances are contested. For a long time the debates were academic. “What we see now tragically have been being continued on the battlefield.” Kyiv itself began as a Viking outpost on the trade route from the forest zone toward Constantinople, then the richest market in the world. The cargo was often slaves. Kyiv sat on the edge of the steppe; the river offered protection from nomad raids on the way to the Black Sea. As in other parts of Europe, Vikings practicing that business model became, by default, founders of a polity — a major medieval kingdom stretching from the Baltics to central Ukraine.

They called themselves Rus, not Russia. Rus was a self-name for many groups on that territory. Moscow did not exist when Kyiv rose; the first reference is twelfth-century, a town founded by a Kyivan prince. Moscow’s rise is the story of Mongol rule. Much of what is now Ukraine and Belarus was pulled out of Mongol control by the Lithuanian state; much of Russia stayed under the Horde until the late fifteenth century. After Mongol power faded, Moscow embarked on what nineteenth-century Russian historians called “the gathering of the Russian lands,” applying “Russian” to Rus and reaching for both former Kyivan and former Mongol territories. Russians reached the Pacific before they reached Kyiv. Only in 1945, when Moscow bullied Czechoslovakia into handing over Transcarpathia, was that nineteenth-century destiny fulfilled. Language, Plokhy adds, already tells you Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians are different peoples — as Americans and Australians are, despite English.

After the Napoleonic Wars a mysterious text, *History of the Rus*, began to circulate, attributed to a long-dead Orthodox archbishop. It claimed that the Cossacks of Ukraine were the original Rus people and deserved a central place in the Russian Empire. It was romantic history: heroes, villains, drama. Kondraty Ryleyev, later executed for the 1825 Decembrist uprising, wrote poetry from it. Pushkin paid attention. Taras Shevchenko, the central figure of Ukraine’s nineteenth-century national revival, read it too — each of them differently. By the mid-twentieth century some Russian nationalist writers were calling it the Quran of Ukrainian nationalism.

Plokhy’s claim in *The Cossack Myth* is that the authors were first making an estate argument: the Cossack officer class should have the same rights as the Russian nobility. At the start of the nineteenth century they recast the claim in the new language of nation. That was a huge claim. The Russian Empire, in a strong line of historiography, had grown by integrating elites — Muslim, Roman Catholic, whoever would take the deal — on the basis of state loyalty. Once nation, language, and culture entered, that model began to fall apart. Poles challenged it with two nineteenth-century uprisings; Ukrainians followed. No empire survived the turn from elite integration to loyalty based on nation, language, culture, and history. The Russian Empire was not an exception.

The manuscript built a bridge from the Cossack state of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into a new age of professors, students, folklore, and eventually mass politics. That spirit, Plokhy says, never fully died. Ukraine declared independence five times in the twentieth century and succeeded only in 1991. Identity took two forms: national communism inside Bolshevik-controlled Ukraine, and radical nationalism in the parts ruled by Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and later Hungary. In 1991 most members of the Ukrainian parliament who voted for independence were still Communists. National communism had come back in the 1960s and 1970s. The radical current is the one that haunts today’s war talk.

There are two Stepan Banderas, Plokhy says: a real person and a mythology that travels under his name. The person was a young nationalist student in late-1920s Polish-ruled Ukraine, of a generation that regretted missing World War I and the revolutions. They thought their fathers had lost independence and that radical nationalism and new tactics were required. Bandera became leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in Ukraine, organized assassinations of Polish officials and of Ukrainians the young militants called collaborators, and used his trial as a platform. The speech made him a hero among Ukrainian youth. He was sentenced to death, then to life. When Poland collapsed under Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, he walked free.

He split the OUN and led its most radical, “revolutionary” wing. They worked with Nazi Germany in the hope it would deliver an independent Ukraine. In the first days of the German attack on the Soviet Union, OUN-based units marched into Lviv and declared independence. Berlin had not sanctioned it. Bandera was arrested; two brothers died in Auschwitz; he spent most of the war in Sachsenhausen, refusing to revoke the declaration. After the war he lived in exile in Munich and never returned to Ukraine. Between 1930 and his assassination in 1959 he spent perhaps two years on Ukrainian soil. Soviet authorities still called the Ukrainian Insurgent Army “Banderites” into the early 1950s, attaching a distant name to a whole movement. The Nazi-collaborator label, Plokhy notes, is Soviet and then Russian propaganda that works if you freeze the years of collaboration — the same years Stalin collaborated with Hitler. Bandera never became an emperor, so he never received an emperor’s immunity. On antisemitism, Plokhy says there are texts for people in Bandera’s circle, not for Bandera himself. Italian fascism influenced the organization; they still called themselves nationalists and refused, even when it would have helped in 1939–41, to declare themselves Ukrainian fascists.

Does Ukraine have a neo-Nazi problem? There are Nazis and white supremacists, Plokhy says, and they are extremely marginal — more so than in parts of Central Europe, perhaps more than in the United States. In 2019 the most popular far-right party won 2.15 percent; no nationalist party crossed the threshold into parliament. Germany and France cannot say the same. 2019 was already a year of war: Crimea annexed, a front in Donbas, far-right groups fighting there. Ukraine is also, outside Israel, the only country with a Jewish president, whose post-election popularity Plokhy calls historic. The interesting research question, he says, is not whether Ukraine has a far right, but why even in war it remains so weak. Putin’s “denazification” lands in Russia because World War II is the strongest myth the Soviet Union passed on. Use the words fascism, Nazi, denazification, and “people not just start listening, they just stop analyzing.” If that were the real goal, the war would have started against France.

Fridman raises the September 2023 scandal in the Canadian parliament, when Yaroslav Hunka received two standing ovations and was then identified as a veteran of an SS formation. Once Germany ran short of manpower, Plokhy explains, it created foreign-legion units. Because the men were not considered Aryan they were placed under Heinrich Himmler as Waffen-SS. The Galicia Division was raised with difficulty — Nazis did not generally think Slavs worthy even of that — and some young men joined looking at World War I, when Ukrainian units in the Austrian army later mattered in the fight for independence. The division was smashed by the Red Army within days. Plokhy will not justify the phenomenon or celebrate it: it is “one of the very tragic and unfortunate pages in Ukrainian history.” The unit numbered perhaps 10,000 to 20,000; two to three million Ukrainians fought in the Red Army. Propaganda defines Bandera by the collaboration years and Ukraine by 20,000 men. The way to answer, he says, is not to fight on propaganda’s chosen question but to restore context: talk about the far right in the United States, Russia, and France. Propaganda need not be an outright lie. It can be one factor taken out of context and blown out of proportion.

Plokhy wrote *The Man with the Poison Gun* about Bohdan Stashinsky. After May 1945, with the red banner over the Reichstag, the Red Army was still fighting inside the Soviet Union. The OUN and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army kept that war going into the early 1950s, almost until Stalin’s death. The secret police recruited locals to spy on the underground. Stashinsky’s family fed the resistance; his sister was engaged to a local commander. They offered him a choice: prison for the family, or help capturing the fiancé. He said yes. After that betrayal he could not go home to the village or back to his studies in Lviv. “The secret police becomes his family.”

Trained in Kyiv for two years and posted to East Berlin, he was sent across the border to Munich, headquarters of anti-Soviet émigré groups. He killed two OUN leaders, including a newspaper editor, and then Bandera, with a spray pistol that later appeared, reshaped, in Ian Fleming’s *The Man with the Golden Gun*. Under the influence of his German wife he decided to defect. They found the apartment bugged. Their son died in Berlin; the KGB blocked the trip until her nervous breakdown forced a visit. The day before the burial they crossed to West Berlin, two hours before the Wall went up. American intelligence did not believe him: documents in five names, a spray pistol, a story that Bandera had been poisoned by someone close. They handed him to German police. At trial, retracting his confession would have freed him — and made him a target for former colleagues. His job in court was to prove he was guilty. He then vanished. A former chief of the South African police later confirmed to Plokhy that West German intelligence had sent him there under another name.

What does this have to do with Putin, a KGB foreign-intelligence officer for sixteen years? The KGB’s power varied: Khrushchev spent the 1950s putting it under party control after Beria; by the 1970s, with Yuri Andropov in the inner circle, it was making decisions such as Afghanistan. Unlike the CIA, it combined domestic secret-police work, foreign intelligence, and even border troops. It had a clearer picture of the country than other institutions, first pick of recruits, and prestige. It also resented a party leadership it saw as ineffective and corrupt, and that after the Stashinsky scandal blocked James Bond methods abroad. Alexander Shelepin, KGB chairman at the time of Bandera’s killing, had the foreign scandal used against him. Plokhy’s judgment is that Putin and his circle brought that resentment into the Kremlin. The methods are available; no party stops them. Foreign policy is planned as operations. Soviet KGB culture, he says, is now part of the culture of the Russian establishment.

The road to 2022, in *The Russo-Ukrainian War*, runs through the Orange Revolution of 2004 and the Revolution of Dignity in 2013–14. Both, Plokhy says, were revolts against government behavior a large part of the population found unacceptable. 2004 was a protest against falsified presidential elections and against a candidate openly backed by Russia — Plokhy remembers a Yanukovych billboard in central Moscow, aimed at Ukrainians who could vote there. It produced a pro-Western presidency that put NATO membership on the agenda. In 2013 Viktor Yanukovych, by then president, spent a year promising an association agreement with the European Union, then reversed overnight. Protest became a revolution when police beat students in downtown Kyiv who were already close to going home. Roughly half the city came out. Around that period Leonid Kuchma published *Ukraine Is Not Russia*, a phrase Plokhy traces to a conversation in which Putin pressed him to use force on the square. Kuchma allegedly said, “You don’t understand. Ukraine is not Russia, you can’t do things like that. You get pushback.”

War began in February 2014 with the Russian takeover of Crimea by “little green men.” The trigger, in Plokhy’s geopolitical reading, was the association agreement. Signing with Brussels would have made a parallel deal with a Moscow-led Eurasian union impossible. Consolidating the post-Soviet space was an agenda item of Putin’s third term. Without Ukraine — the second-largest republic, whose vote had ended the USSR — that space would exist under Moscow’s control with a hole in it. The response was an attempt to topple Kyiv’s government, the seizure of Crimea, and a domestic popularity boost that worked. Donbas was different. Russia, Plokhy argues, did not really want to possess it; it wanted a lever to stop Ukraine’s drift west.

Donbas had a Ukrainian majority by the early twentieth century, but it was a key site of imperial industrialization. Mines and metallurgy pulled in peasants from elsewhere in the empire; cities became more Russian. In Mariupol, later largely destroyed, ethnic Russians were over 40 percent. The region is also a classical rust belt: mines that no longer pay, unemployed workers, politicians chasing subsidies instead of unpopular reform. That mix made destabilization easier. Igor Girkin has said he fired the first shot and became defense minister of the “people’s republic”; the prime minister was another man with a Moscow residency permit. Key posts at the start were filled by Russians from Russia, close to government and intelligence, not by local Ukrainian Russians. The claim of a defensive war to protect persecuted Russian-speakers, Plokhy says, requires never setting foot in Ukraine. Russian was not persecuted; in Crimea and Donbas a Ukrainian school could be hard to find. Ukraine, in his experience, was the only truly bilingual country he had visited: you could speak either language anywhere and be answered in the other. The war, and especially 2022, is pushing the young toward Ukrainian as a marker of identity. Linguistic habits are conservative, but his bet is on Ukrainian rising.

In July 2021 Putin published “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” The thesis is in the first sentences: Russians and Ukrainians are one people. He had been saying it since 2013, on a visit to Kyiv with Patriarch Kirill. The idea is the nineteenth-century imperial formula of Great, Little, and White Russians as one nation with some dialect and folklore. The 1917 revolution, Plokhy stresses, was national as well as social; the Bolsheviks had to recognize Ukrainians and Belarusians as nations with territories and institutions in order to reassemble the empire. One institution was not reformed: the Russian Orthodox Church, frozen in its pre-1917 imperial theology. After 1991, when Russians reached back before the Bolsheviks they found empire; when Ukrainians did, they found liberal or radical nationalism. Stalin, a Georgian, promoted Russian nationalism to keep the largest group on board, but he had already accepted that Ukrainians and Belarusians existed. Putin goes back to pre-Stalin times. Similar language and shared entertainment, including Zelenskyy’s own career, can hide the political DNA Plokhy cares about: Russian identity formed around an imperial state; the Ukrainian project formed in revolt against the state. Police violence ended protest in Moscow; in Ukraine it was the beginning.

Since 1991, Plokhy sees a new fact in Ukrainian history. Ukrainians were historically successful rebels — he cites the large peasant army in southern Ukraine during the civil war — and historically bad at keeping the freedom they won or identifying with the state. In the last two years they have begun to treat the state as their own: the armed forces had the highest trust even before the full-scale invasion; city governments function under missile attack. They are trying to move from successful rebels to successful managers and state builders. That is the domestic backdrop to the argument about NATO.

Fridman had recently spoken with John Mearsheimer; many people think NATO caused 2022. NATO was a large part of Russia’s justification, Plokhy agrees, especially in the months before the invasion. Putin himself went on record that Western leaders told him Ukraine would not join anytime soon. Russia had already blocked Ukraine and Georgia at the 2008 Bucharest summit, when Putin persuaded France and Germany to stop George W. Bush’s push for membership. In early 2022 Moscow issued an ultimatum demanding NATO roll back toward 1997 borders — terms designed, Plokhy thinks, to stop talks, not start them. Finland then joined, doubling the NATO-Russia border; if NATO were the real fear, he would have expected a large share of the army in Ukraine to move to that new frontier. Tucker Carlson, Plokhy notes, was surprised that the first twenty-five minutes of his Putin interview were about Russia and Ukraine, not NATO — the same focus as the 2021 essay. The broader context is the fall of empire, not the story of NATO. The immediate goal in 2014 and 2022 was to keep Ukraine in Russia’s sphere. When Ukrainian resistance and the Ramstein coalition made that fail, plan B was annexation of Ukrainian regions into the Russian constitution.

In *The Russo-Ukrainian War*’s “Gates of Kyiv” chapter, the first hours and days are the hardest psychologically. The rest of the world did not expect Kyiv to last more than a few days or Ukraine more than a few weeks. Putin called it a “special military operation,” a phrase that advertised limited time and a semi-police job. Every reasonable Western leader, Plokhy says, tried to convince Zelenskyy to leave and set up a government in exile in Poland or London. Yanukovych had fled; the Afghan president had fled months before. Zelenskyy was “very, very unreasonable.” Plokhy, who has never met him, thinks he believes that if you are president you play the role to the end, and that he has a performer’s gift for feeling an audience and amplifying it. The audience was Ukrainians. East-west division was already less of an issue after Crimea and part of Donbas were gone. Zelenskyy won 73 percent; his predecessor Petro Poroshenko had carried 90 percent of precincts. The country had unified after 2014 to a degree hard to imagine before. Zelenskyy felt that.

Peace talks failed, Plokhy says, because the terms Russia offered were unacceptable: “denazification,” de facto loss of territory, and a future outside NATO or any Western support. That might buy weeks; Russia would come back and take the rest. Once Ukrainians saw they could win on the battlefield — once Russian forces withdrew from Kyiv — an exit from talks that led toward destruction became possible. The massacres of civilians in Bucha then made negotiation morally and emotionally still harder. Claims that Boris Johnson or “the West” wrecked a deal do not persuade him. He asked people who accompanied Johnson; they said no. He cannot imagine Zelenskyy taking orders from Johnson or Joe Biden against what he thinks is Ukraine’s interest. Johnson represented Britain, not the United States; the promise of massive Western support came only in late April at Ramstein, after the West saw Ukraine could fight. The principle was the terms, with or without Johnson.

In the long run, if this is a war of Soviet succession and imperial disintegration, Plokhy says we know the ending: empires fall, new states appear as new colors on the map, a story that starts with the American Revolution. Tomorrow is harder. The war can end in victory for one side, victory for the other, or stalemate and territorial compromise. It is the largest war in Europe since World War II and the largest in the world since Korea; Korean armistice talks ran more than two years while both sides fought for position, and they moved only after Stalin’s death and Eisenhower’s arrival. Return to the February 2022 borders, he argues, is impossible without political change in Moscow. In autumn 2022 Putin wrote five Ukrainian regions, including ones he did not fully control, into the Russian constitution, tying his own hands and his successors’. Days later Zelenskyy decreed no negotiations with Russia — in plain language, no stable deal that accepts those five regions. An armistice along the current front is imaginable. Russian withdrawal to 2022 lines would require a defeat like the one near Kyiv. Possible, Plokhy says; likely, given faltering Western military support, probably not. He looks at 2024 as a year when at least the Russian side will try to take what it can by force. The previous year’s front barely moved; Ukraine’s real success was in the Black Sea, pushing the navy west and restoring grain exports from Odesa to about 75 percent of the prewar level, at enormous cost in lives.

Zelenskyy’s firing of General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, popular with the army and the public, is “a very, very dangerous moment.” The American analogy is Truman firing MacArthur, with stakes for Ukraine higher than they were for the United States. The issue is whether political and military leadership stay on the same page, and whether Zelenskyy is changing only personnel or also his approach to the war — more presidential control of operations, a shift of tactics after a failed counteroffensive. Plokhy does not know, and is not sure Zelenskyy knows, what comes next. He does not think Zelenskyy’s days are numbered. Ukrainians united around president and army; Zaluzhnyi’s own behavior does not suggest a putsch. After wars, democracies often vote out wartime leaders — Churchill, de Gaulle, Piłsudski — and sometimes vote them back. What interests Plokhy as a possible question for Zelenskyy is how he thinks about legitimacy past a five-year term, with elections postponed because most Ukrainians do not want a campaign in the middle of the war: a coalition government, or unity first. Emergency power, he agrees, can become a habit; Tucker Carlson’s remark that Putin seemed out of practice at explaining himself is, for Plokhy, what long unaccountable power does.

If he could ask Putin anything, it would be a historian’s questions: when the decision to attack was made, what went into it, when Crimea was decided. He does not expect an honest answer on regret. As for empire, Putin will deny the word; Plokhy thinks the aim is some form of Russian control — otherwise there would be no busts of Catherine and Peter. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, half Ukrainian, formulated a “Russian question” as a Russian nationalist: communism was bad for Russia, and the tragedy was the division of Russians, including Ukrainians and Belarusians, among states. In 1990 he wanted to drop the Baltics, Central Asia, and the Caucasus and keep Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and northern Kazakhstan as one nation-state. After 1991 he offered plan B: take Donbas, Crimea, and southern Ukraine — the areas now in the Russian constitution. The Ukrainian question, Plokhy says, is no longer acquiring a nation-state but keeping a sovereign one. A long war could push a future Ukrainian leader toward authoritarianism and the far right; he thinks that would go against thirty years of pluralist practice and against a society in which radical nationalism was still a “minority faith” in 2019. Possible, he says; unlikely.

Fridman’s grandmother lived through the Holodomor. The famine of 1932–34, Plokhy says, was the result of forced collectivization and of Stalin’s drive to roll Ukraine into the Soviet Union with no potential opposition from national communists. In December 1932, Stalin and Molotov signed a single decree that requisitioned grain — the policy that produced mass starvation — and banned Ukrainian-language publication and education in other Soviet republics while limiting Ukrainization inside Ukraine. Most scholars now work with a figure of about four million dead; larger numbers also circulate. Famine was not unique to Ukraine, but most Soviet Ukrainians who died, died in Ukraine, and only there did grain seizures coincide with a purge of political leadership and an attack on Ukrainian culture.

What he learns is less a timeless lesson about “human nature” than a lesson about twentieth-century ideologies. China’s famine was, in numbers, more devastating; the Holocaust belongs in the same century. What unites them is ideologies that did not merely devalue human life but treated the destruction of large groups — ethnic, religious, social — as the way forward. For centuries before, people were needed to work land and make wealth; states looked for settlers. Then came mass destruction in the name of race or of a future humanity. Plokhy is “absolutely convinced that we didn’t learn the lesson.” After fascism and communism, “we somehow decided that we’re free of that,” that history in those terms had ended. He feels a historian’s responsibility to say that humans have a dark side and must be careful.

Chernobyl, in his account, is not only a physics failure. Secrecy mattered: the reactor was dual-purpose, able to boil water and produce enriched uranium, and problems were kept even from operators. Managerial culture mattered: people had no right to decide in their own jobs. At Three Mile Island, operators and managers owned the decisions; Jimmy Carter came and did not call the shots. At Chernobyl, when a senior official arrived everyone fell in line, and evacuating Pripyat needed Moscow’s approval. Cutting corners to meet a test deadline or a production quota is not uniquely socialist — swap quota for profit and the story rhymes. The most Soviet piece was the combination of total mobilization to fight the accident and a radiation-cloud secret that would have been impossible in the United States or Britain. A few years later the Union collapsed, helped by mobilization over Chernobyl that scholars call eco-nationalism. In Ukraine the first mass slogans were not language or autonomy. They were “Tell us the truth about Chernobyl.” A party card did not protect you from radiation.

Fridman praises the HBO miniseries. Plokhy was impressed, and also not. It is truthful on the macro level — the cost of lies, the Soviet Union lying to its people — and unusually good on micro detail: curtains, how houses looked inside and out. Between those truths sits a gray zone of Hollywood: KGB officers dragging someone from a meeting, a boss threatening to throw a man from a helicopter. In the fourth episode, he says, they “completely decided just, to hell with the reality,” putting Valery Legasov and Boris Shcherbina in a courtroom Shcherbina did not attend. Plokhy asked the screenwriter, on air, how a film that declares the importance of truth squares with going beyond it. The big truth, he still thinks, is why the production works.

On deaths per unit of energy, nuclear looks far safer than coal or oil. In *Atoms and Ashes* Plokhy still writes that the political, economic, social, and cultural factors behind past accidents are with us, that the industry can repeat old mistakes in new ways, and that any new accident will trigger new anti-nuclear mobilization — which makes nuclear impossible to count on as a long-term climate solution. Authoritarian centralization, corner-cutting, and secrecy have not vanished. The industry’s new frontier is in the Middle East, in states without deep democratic experience and with first-generation nuclear engineers. The present war added a scenario few had lived: Russian National Guard took Chernobyl on day one; at Zaporizhzhia, Europe’s largest plant, fighting took place on the site, with missiles and fires. Fukushima happened because a tsunami cut power to shutdown reactors that still needed cooling; war around Zaporizhzhia produced the same effect more than once. About 440 reactors exist; none was designed for a direct missile strike or for operators who do not know whether the next round hits the control room or whether their families are alive. After every accident, smart people close that trap; the next one exposes a new vulnerability. Chernobyl, then tsunami, then war.

People are not afraid of coal and are afraid of radiation, which is invisible. “Chernobyl anywhere is Chernobyl everywhere.” After Three Mile Island, the next U.S. reactor go-ahead took on the order of a decade. After Fukushima, Germany went nuclear-free at the expense of burning coal. Each major accident means a global freeze of about ten years. That, not only engineering, is why Plokhy calls the industry politically unreliable. We can be trained, he says, but we fear what we cannot see.

As a historian he has déjà vu: the Cold War is coming back in many of its features. Russia’s vision since the 1990s was not a return to bipolarity it could not afford, but a multipolar world in which Moscow would be a pole alongside China, the EU, and the United States. The 2014 war sits in that context. After 2022 almost no one still believes Russia is the superpower it was imagined to be. It has found ways around sanctions and has not imploded, but its military, economic, and political power is diminished; it is hard to see it as a pole. The war awakened the old West — the U.S.–West European transatlantic alliance — and East European states that are often stronger proponents of aid to Ukraine than Germany or America. It also shows elements of a rebuilt Beijing–Moscow alignment, so important to the 1950s and the Korean War. The bipolar world that is emerging is centered on Washington and Beijing, with countries in between joining blocs that are not fully formed. That, Plokhy says, is a reason for historians to reread the Cold War.

A hopeful twenty-first century would mean being as wise, and as lucky, as Cold War predecessors. The dominant question has been how horrible the Cold War was and what we did wrong. Today that is the wrong question. The right one is what we did so right that for more than seventy years there has been no world war — when World War II followed World War I by twenty years — and how to keep a cold war cold. Luck was a factor in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Commanders at the top thought they held the cards; they did not fully control people on the ground. A Soviet missile shot down an American plane and killed the pilot, an act of war, without Moscow’s approval. Kennedy, Plokhy notes, remembered from World War II that there would always be someone who did not get the order. Khrushchev and Kennedy were different men of the same “generation of the beginning,” the hydrogen-bomb generation, scared of weapons that could destroy the world. The crisis occurred because of nuclear weapons, and it was resolved because leaders feared them. Perception, not the devices alone, mattered. A new generation of voters and politicians does not belong to that beginning. The fear can fade. “We can” make the same mistakes again, Plokhy says. Fridman closes with Hemingway: never think that war, no matter how necessary or justified, is not a crime.