Serhii Plokhy: disagreement

Transcript context

…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 Russo-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 and 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. All of this processes were interrelated, interconnected, but when people provide ideology as the explanation for all of these processes, that’s where I disagree, because ideological collapse happened on the territory of the Soviet Union in general. The Soviet Union lost the Cold War, whether we’re talking about Moscow, Leningrad, or St. Petersburg now, or Vladivostok. But the fall of the Soviet Union is about a story in which Vladivostok and St. Petersburg ended up in one country, and Kyiv, Minsk and Dushanbe ended in different countries. The theories and explanations about how did that happen, for me, this 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 implosion, that’s how I look 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?…

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