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

Serhii Plokhy frames the 1991 Soviet collapse and today's war as stages in the long disintegration of the Russian Empire rather than a simple ideological failure or a U.S. victory. He traces East Slavic identity from Kyivan Rus through the rise of Moscow, the Cossack 'History of the Rus' text, and the divergence of Ukrainian and Russian political traditions. The conversation examines contested figures and narratives, Stepan Bandera, the OUN, the SS Galicia division, the 'denazification' pretext, and Putin's essay on Slavic unity, alongside the KGB and the assassin Bogdan Stashinsky. Plokhy walks through the path to 2022 via the Orange Revolution, the Revolution of Dignity, Crimea, and Donbas, and assesses Zelensky, the failed peace talks, and possible endings. He closes on Chernobyl as a catalyst of Soviet collapse, the political fragility of nuclear energy, and lessons from the Cold War and Cuban Missile Crisis.

• Plokhy argues the U.S. did not want the Soviet Union to collapse; Bush gave the 'Chicken Kyiv' speech in August 1991 warning Ukrainians against independence, and Washington tried to keep the USSR intact until late November 1991.
  00:05:14
• Yeltsin told Bush that without Ukraine, Russia lost interest in the Soviet project because it would be outnumbered and outvoted by the Muslim republics; Ukraine's December 1 referendum effectively ended the USSR a week later.
  00:13:10
• OUN units marched into Lviv at the start of the German invasion and declared Ukrainian independence without German sanction, leading the Nazis to arrest Bandera, who spent most of the war in Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
  00:41:19
• KGB assassin Bogdan Stashinsky killed Stepan Bandera in Munich using a spray pistol that later inspired the weapon in the James Bond novel 'The Man with the Golden Gun.'
  01:10:10
• A return to the 2022 borders is legally impossible without political change in Moscow because in fall 2022 Putin wrote five Ukrainian regions, some not fully controlled, into the Russian Constitution.
  02:17:46
• National mobilization in Ukraine before independence began not over language or autonomy but over demands to 'tell us the truth about Chernobyl,' making the disaster a key catalyst of the Soviet collapse.
  02:51:19
• Plokhy says the right Cold War question is not what went wrong but what we did right to avoid global war for 70+ years; the Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved because leaders of the hydrogen-bomb generation were genuinely afraid of nuclear weapons.
  03:14:30

• Plokhy separates three often-conflated late-1980s processes: the collapse of communism as an ideology, the end of the Cold War, and the end of the Soviet Union itself.
  00:01:32
• He notes the 20th century was the century of imperial disintegration: Austria-Hungary, the Ottomans, the British in India, and finally the Soviet Union, with Czechoslovakia's split a rare 'civilized divorce.'
  00:09:28
• Moscow is first referenced in the 12th century and rose to prominence only under Mongol rule, with the 19th-century Russian 'gathering of the Russian lands' completed in 1945 when the USSR took Transcarpathian Ukraine from Czechoslovakia.
  00:24:57
• Ukraine's most popular far-right party won only 2.15% of the vote in 2019, and no nationalist party has crossed the threshold to enter parliament, unlike in Germany or France.
  00:51:18
• The Yaroslav Hunka incident in Canada's Parliament (September 2023) honored a World War II veteran later revealed to have served in an SS Waffen unit, fueling Russian 'Nazi' narratives.
  00:58:37
• The SS Galicia division numbered roughly 10,000 to 20,000 men, while 2 to 3 million Ukrainians fought in the Red Army.
  00:59:43
• Harvard's MAPA Digital Atlas of Ukraine documented spikes in self-reported Ukrainian-language use in 2014-2015 that later receded, suggesting linguistic shifts can be temporary.
  01:43:27
• At the 2008 Bucharest Summit, Putin convinced France and Germany to block NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia; Plokhy argues NATO was a pretext, not the war's primary cause.
  01:58:50
• Zelensky won the 2019 election with 73% of the vote, and his refusal to flee Kyiv contrasted with predecessor Yanukovych and Afghanistan's president, both of whom fled.
  02:08:17
• Plokhy says Putin's territorial vision echoes Solzhenitsyn's 1990 essay 'How We Should Restructure Russia,' which proposed a state of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, shedding the Baltics, Central Asia, and the Caucasus.
  02:35:27