Category Archives: migration

by | 25 July 2026 · 8:08 am

Explorers Return to Europe, 1775

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 207-208:

Before they had left England, it had been decided that the Resolution would return via Cape Town—which was why friends and families had sent letters there to wait for the crew on their arrival. The men devoured fresh food and letters and news. They read piles of old newspapers to catch up. ‘Sweden delivered from the yoke of aristocratical tyranny’, George was glad to learn. In the so-called Swedish Revolution, the young king Gustav III had been the mastermind in a coup d’état which had ended the stronghold that the nobility had exercised over the monarchy. He was not intending to take away freedom, the king had said, but wanted to stop aristocratic despotism and establish ‘a right kind of Liberty that only can make you, my dear subjects, happy’. Like other enlightened rulers at the time, he had then begun to reform the justice system and economy, as well as instituting limited religious freedom.

France had a new king: at the age of nineteen, Louis XVI had succeeded his grandfather in May 1774 during the second visit of the Resolution to Tahiti. Poland had lost vast swathes of land when Russia, Prussia and Austria had divided around a third of the country between them. Having added a huge territory to Prussia in the Polish partition, the Prussian king was, George noted, ‘resting from his triumphs’. George also read that Russia and the Ottoman Empire had signed a peace treaty in July 1774, ending the war that had begun in 1768. With Russia gaining land and the right to protect Christians in the Muslim realm, the treaty marked the beginning of the decline of the once powerful Ottoman Empire, which for long had controlled large parts of south-east Europe and the Middle East. George was optimistic. After the long years of war in Europe, peace seemed finally possible. Everything ‘promised general happiness to the human race’.

But trouble was brewing in the British colonies in North America. In December 1773 a group of colonists had dumped more than 300 chests of tea—the entire shipment of three East India Company vessels—into Boston harbour in protest against Britain’s new tax regulations on tea. A month later the rebels had tarred and feathered a British customs collector. On 5 September 1774, just as the Resolution had landed in New Caledonia, the colonists had convened the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia—a congress of elected colonial delegates—to discuss how best to respond to British rule in North America. Frustrated by the lack of parliamentary representation and economic restrictions, the delegates called for a boycott of British goods and recommended that each colony establish its own militia.

There was also news from the Adventure, which had stopped in Cape Town on her way to England exactly a year earlier, in March 1774. The men of the Resolution were horrified to learn that ten crew members had been killed and eaten by the Māori, but Cook refused to pass judgement until the news had been confirmed. He had always found the Māori to be brave and open-minded, ‘but they are a people that will never put up with an insult if they have an opportunity to resent it’. George agreed. John Rowe, one of the officers who had been cannibalized, had always shown a brutal disregard for indigenous people and ‘been exceeding desirous of firing upon them’. The Māori must have been provoked. ‘The whole tenour of their behaviour to Europeans, seems to acquit them of treachery and cruel malevolence,’ George wrote, ‘it is therefore greatly to be suspected that they took umbrage at some affront, perhaps unwittingly committed by the strangers, and revenged it.’

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by | 24 July 2026 · 5:57 am

Forster’s Impressions of Easter Island

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 163-165:

Perplexed by the huge stone statues they found here—human figures with extremely large heads and no legs, several metres high—George suspected that they were held in veneration. They asked the islanders ‘and from what we could understand, we concluded that they were monuments erected to the memory of some of their areekees, or kings’*—ariki was the Polynesian word for chief (or ari‘i in Tahitian). Usually able to adjust his viewpoint, these statues seemed just too baffling to George to appreciate. ‘The workmanship of this figure was rude,’ he wrote, ‘a European artist would have been ashamed of them.’ Where he had thought Tongan woodcarvers the equals of England’s best craftsmen, these statues showed ‘the arts in their infancy’.

George noted that the islanders here looked similar to the Tahitians except for their very elongated and pierced earlobes which almost reached their shoulders—‘in order to bring it to this size, they wore a leaf of a sugar cane, which is very elastic, rolled up in it like a scroll; by which means it was always on the stretch.’ They also had barkcloth, favoured red as a colour, had tattoos, and prepared their food not unlike those islanders the Resolution crew had met across the South Pacific islands. Their vocabulary revealed a common root with Māori and Tahitian words, he realized, and Hitihiti was delighted to be able to converse with them. Despite being thousands of miles away from New Zealand and Tahiti, George was certain that the islanders had ‘one common origin’.

Their faces were painted brown with streaks of white shell lime and some men wore large bushy caps made of brown gull feathers—almost ‘as large as the full bottomed wigs of European lawyers’. Some were dressed in tattered blue jackets and European hats, which they had traded with the Spanish explorers who had stopped here four years previously—‘indubitable testimonies of the visit which the Spaniards had made to this island’. Headdresses were regarded as sacred in Polynesia and the islanders snatched Hitihiti’s black cap as well as Hodges’ hat while he was sketching the statues. On another occasion, an islander grabbed Reinhold’s plant bag, and one of the marines shot and wounded him. Though Reinhold mentioned the incident briefly in his journal, George wrote about the moral implications—it was tragic ‘that Europeans too often assume the power of inflicting punishments on people who are utterly unacquainted with their laws’.

Trading proved difficult. Not only had the marine injured a man but the islanders had few provisions to spare. When the crew tried to bargain, the islanders tricked them by selling baskets of potatoes in which the bottom layers had been filled with stones. The islanders had no interest in beads or nails, but were keen on coconut shells and Tahitian barkcloth. Hitihiti once again advised the men to buy red feathers to barter with when they returned to Tahiti and purchased himself as many feather caps as he could find. The Resolution remained on Easter Island only three days because there was not enough food for them to stay any longer. Hitihiti added another stick to his journal bundle and ‘remembered Easter Island with this observation, tàta maïtaï, whennùa èeno, that the people were good, but the island very bad’.

* Today it is believed that the statues were carved between AD 1250 and 1500 as representations of ancestors and sacred spirits. Historians and archaeologists have speculated that the introduction of Polynesian rats and deforestation led to conflict, war, starvation and the societal collapse on Rapa Nui.

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by | 22 July 2026 · 8:06 am

Polynesian Explorers with Cook, 1773

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 133-135:

On 18 September 1773, after a month in the Society Islands, the Resolution and the Adventure sailed west. The crew were sad to leave. Fourteen-year-old Midshipman John Elliott, so dismissive of the Māori in New Zealand, had thought Tahiti a paradise—‘the Men being all fine’, he wrote in his journal, and ‘the Women beautiful, compaired with all those that we had seen, of the Middle Size, zingy, suple figures, fine teeth and Eyes, and the finest formed Hands, fingers, and Arms that I ever saw’. The stores were filled with fresh fruit, vegetables and water, and on Huahine they had bought plenty of livestock. The Resolution left with 209 pigs, thirty dogs, and fifty fowls on board, and so many bananas that the deck looked like a tropical orchard. The men felt rested and healthy—except those suffering from venereal diseases.

They also had two new crew members: Hitihiti, who had boarded the Resolution on Raiatea, and Mai on the Adventure. Mai was in his mid-twenties, a tall and slim man with long black hair and small hands ornamented with tattoos. Originally from Raiatea, Mai had fled to Tahiti as a boy after invaders from Bora Bora had overthrown the Raiateans. A few years later, in 1767, he had been wounded during the bloody battle between the Tahitians and the Dolphin crew—the jagged scar below his ribs a lifelong reminder of the encounter. He then returned to Raiatea, but he was captured and taken to Bora Bora, from where he escaped to the island of Huahine. By his own account, he had assisted one of the high priests and travelled between the islands, but mostly he was burning to avenge Raiatea against Bora Bora. During the Dolphin attack he had seen and painfully felt the violent power of European guns. So when the Resolution and the Adventure arrived at Huahine, Mai had asked if he could travel to England to procure firearms in order to fight against the Bora Borans.

Mai was affectionate and full of energy, quickly becoming popular with the Adventure crew who nicknamed him Jack. They were especially impressed by his fishing skills and couldn’t believe how much more he was able to catch compared to them. James Burney, the Second Lieutenant on the Adventure, believed that Mai’s curiosity and strength made him perfectly suited for an expedition. George also thought him intelligent, if sometimes too hot-tempered. He preferred the company of seventeen-year-old Hitihiti, who was also liked by the rest of the crew. Elliott was struck by his handsome looks, declaring him ‘in every respect a very superior sample of this Country than Omai’. Mai and Hitihiti were not particularly fond of each other—presumably because Hitihiti was originally from Bora Bora, which had invaded Mai’s Raiatea—and they engaged with each other as little as possible.

Both islanders had to adjust to their strange new lives. Cooped up below deck in the airless space where the sailors slept, his hammock swaying to the rhythm of the Resolution’s pitch, Hitihiti became seasick. How different it was to sail on this cavernous ship compared with a Polynesian outrigger canoe. He only felt better when he ate some pieces of raw dolphin, which he dipped into a bowl of seawater, and some of the fermented breadfruit balls which he had brought on board. On the Adventure, Mai was homesick and then terrified when he saw most of the crew assembling on deck the day after he had come on board. The captain’s solemn voice, the men lacing their fingers in prayer and tracing a cross from forehead to their shoulders, convinced him that this was some kind of ritual and that they were going to offer him as a human sacrifice. It took a while, Burney said, to understand why Mai was so scared and to convince him that this was just the ship’s normal Sunday service.

Despite the initial difficulties, over the next weeks the two islanders became part of the crew, respected and valued. On the Adventure, Burney, who had been at sea since the age of ten, looked after Mai. Burney enjoyed Mai’s tales from the Society Islands even if he was exaggerating—‘he is a Small matter addicted to romancing.’ On the Resolution, George and Hitihiti struck up a friendship. Roughly the same age, they talked and taught each other side by side at a table, George’s wavy dark-brown hair tied into a ponytail next to Hitihiti’s tight black curls. Hitihiti helped George to review his vocabulary from the Society Islands and George in turn taught Hitihiti English. They learned from each other.

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by | 21 July 2026 · 5:41 am

Forster’s First Impressions of New Zealand

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 93-96:

George was a gifted linguist, quick to learn Māori names and words as he pointed at plants, animals, clothing, weapons and jewellery, asking to be told what they were called and keen to understand the Māori way of life. He noted the striking tattoos—‘strongly carved with spirals in the face’—and their clothing and hairstyles. Some of the women wore caps made of brown feathers, while others had tattooed lips with several rows of blue punctures on their chin. There were young men with ‘amazing bushy hair, which hung wildly over their faces’, and others who tied it back and often decorated it with white feathers or carved bone combs. George described their canoes and clothing—‘an apron, made of their close-wrought cloth, covered with red feathers, faced with white dog-skin, and ornamented with pieces of the ear-shell’—and watched them dance ‘alternately extending their arms, and stamping with their feet in a violent and almost frantic manner’.

Equally fascinated by nature, George recorded black oystercatchers with bright red bills and feet strutting along the beach, and the long-necked shags, part of the cormorant species, roosting on rocky outcrops. Falcons with brown-and-cream-flecked plumage glided above him, and the noisy ka-hek-ka-hek-ka-hek call of the Fluttering Shearwater echoed across the water. He shot birds and caught fish which he painted, and collected plants to press. One evening, he and his father caught a small tawny-brown spotted owl with beautiful golden-yellow eyes as they scrambled through the dense forest, and a few days later the now extinct slate-grey South Island kōkako, a bird slightly smaller than a pigeon with prominent orange wattle flaps under its beak.

The forests were thick and lush, an entangled web of evergreen trees and ferns that seemed prehistoric. Ancient rimus soared high—with dangling spiky foliage which almost looked like Spanish moss from a distance. There were giant pukatea that stood firm with their huge buttress roots and cabbage trees with dense tufts of long sword-like leaves at the tip of their branches, which the Māori used for weaving, the roots an important food source. Tree ferns laced the sky—ponga with crowns of large fronds with a silvery underside that glowed in the moonlight and the even taller mamaku which grew up to 60 feet high.

A lively trade was soon established between the Europeans and the Māori. Glass bottles, nails, hatchets and European clothes were exchanged for carved fishing hooks, tools, jewellery, weapons, cloaks—and sex. The Māori were particularly keen on glass bottles and European shirts, George observed, admiring how ‘they were not inclined however to make disadvantageous bargains, and demanded the best price for every little trifle which they offered for sale’.

But when the Māori men presented their women to the sailors, George was appalled. The women were reluctant but, no matter how much they cried, the Māori men decided whether or not they had sex with the Europeans. Like Cook (who worried that his men would introduce vice and disease), George blamed the crew for having started this sex trade. He doubted whether the Māori ‘ever debased themselves so much as to make a trade of their women, before we created new wants by shewing them iron-tools’. Nothing could excuse the crew’s behaviour. Who was worse, George wondered, the Māori men who forced their women to have sex, or the Europeans who partook?

…

‘I fear that hitherto our intercourse has been wholly disadvantageous to the nations of the South Seas; and that those communities have been the least injured, who have always kept aloof from us,’ George now wrote. Less than two months after praising how the Resolution crew had shown the Māori at Dusky Sound the advantages of European improvements—tree felling, repairing, painting—George’s attitude had drastically changed. It was an extraordinary statement for the time. More typical was young John Elliott, who was convinced that the Māori were ‘ferocious Cannibals’ who ‘work themselves into a frenzey, foaming at the mouth’, and Anders Sparrman, who declared that they had a ‘desire to tear their enemies’ limbs apart with their teeth’.

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by | 20 July 2026 · 5:19 pm

Furneaux’s Adventure in New Zealand

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 91-92:

After losing sight of the Resolution among the Antarctic icebergs, Captain Furneaux had sailed the Adventure to Tasmania, a large island about 150 miles south of Australia which the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman had sighted and visited in 1642. The French had landed there in 1772, but the Adventure was the first British ship to anchor. For a few days they charted parts of the eastern coast, stopping briefly to fill up their water stores. They saw some abandoned huts and overgrown pathways but didn’t encounter any inhabitants. From there the Adventure sailed east to New Zealand’s Queen Charlotte Sound, where they arrived in early April 1773, two months after their separation from the Resolution.

Like a vast river estuary, the opening of Queen Charlotte Sound was eight miles wide but narrowed as it stretched inland. Sheltered by mountains, the waters within were calm. Steep ravines, rocky headlands and densely forested ridges serrated the coastline where some of the mountains dropped in perpendicular cliffs into the sound, and others sloped down towards long beaches. The water was dark with thin azure bands along the shallow edges. When the Adventure reached the rendezvous point at Ship Cove, a natural harbour with a wide sandy beach and a freshwater stream, they discovered trees carved with the names of the Endeavour’s crew but no sign of the Resolution. Over the next six weeks, Furneaux’s men repaired their ship, took on supplies, and also met a great number of Māori who lived in nearby settlements.

The Māori had carefully approached the Adventure in canoes. ‘Tobia Tobia,’ they called out, using their name for Tupaia—the high priest and navigator from Raiatea, an island near Tahiti—who had joined Cook on his previous voyage and travelled with the Endeavour to New Zealand in 1770. As Māori and Tahitian were related languages, Tupaia had not only assisted Cook with his navigation but also acted as the Endeavour’s translator. In Māori tradition, Raiatea was also their ancestral homeland so they felt a reverence for Tupaia. Having seen him work as interpreter, guide and navigator, most of the Māori had regarded Tupaia as the Europeans’ leader. In the intervening three years, stories about Tupaia, and the Endeavour’s thundering cannons and her pale-skinned crew, had been recounted by the Māori across New Zealand. And so they asked the Adventure crew—some of whom understood a few Māori words because they had been part of Cook’s first expedition—about Tupaia and were saddened to hear that he had died during the Endeavour voyage.

…

The next morning, at 5 a.m., the Resolution turned into Queen Charlotte Sound. Once past the entrance Cook fired a cannon and to their delight another answered. A few hours later, they saw the Adventure in Ship Cove. That evening the two ships anchored next to each other and the men celebrated their reunion.

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by | 18 July 2026 · 8:15 pm

George Forster’s Early Youth

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 27-28:

George Forster was ten when he went on his first expedition.

He was a slender boy, small for his age, but what he lacked in physical strength he made up for in tenacity during the five months that he and his father travelled through Russia. In charge of collecting and identifying plants, the ten-year-old would wander off alone, eyes wide open, searching for new discoveries—sometimes climbing trees, at others keeping his head near the ground to study the vegetation with a magnifying glass. When he returned to the tent with full bags, he would press the samples he had found between paper, carefully arranging blossoms and leaves so that he could classify them later. Soon his collection had risen to 700 specimens.

While other children sat on hard benches in orderly rows at school, learning by rod and rote, George found himself galloping on small Kalmyk horses across the Russian steppes and wading through marshes on the banks of the Volga river. He watched a violent wildfire race across the vast grasslands to the east, its ravenous flames consuming everything in its path. He remembered the terror he felt that day for the rest of his life. Instead of studying arithmetic or conjugating Latin verbs, he observed flocks of black herons, wild boars and wolves, and huge Bactrian camels used by the nomadic Kalmyks as pack animals, which evoked the stories of the Arabian Nights and Ali Baba. He met Muslim Tatar traders along the Volga, fierce Cossack warriors from the open steppes to the east who wore sheepskin hats, baggy trousers and colourful caftans, and German settlers so destitute that they lived in earth dugouts in the ground. Near today’s Russian border with Kazakhstan, he marvelled at Lake Elton, a huge shallow salt lake with a shoreline encrusted in a thick white layer like snow, against water which algae had turned blood red. And in the Ryn Desert just north of the Caspian Sea, he felt piercing winds whip across the dunes, as wild as the land itself.

Russia was on a different scale from the flat gentle countryside where George had been raised near Gdansk, in today’s Poland. Everything here was vaster and emptier. The skies, lakes and land were bigger, the distances immense, and the weather extreme. He feasted his eyes and tasted new foods. He ate wild asparagus, drank fermented mare’s milk—‘of a nauseous or disagreeable Taste’—and enjoyed the refreshing juice of bog cranberries mixed with water and honey after the long dusty days on horseback.

This was not like learning from the books he loved. He could see, smell and feel that he had entered another world. The food had a different flavour, the languages were unfamiliar, and the people looked nothing like those at home. In Russia, he absorbed a new and very foreign country for the first time. At the age of ten, he became a traveller.

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by | 13 July 2026 · 8:41 am

Russia Annexes Crimea, 2014

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 118-119:

On March 18, 2014, Vladimir Putin delivered one of the most consequential speeches of his career. Addressing a joint session of the lower and upper houses of the Russian parliament—the deputies of the State Duma and the members of the Federation Council, joined by regional leaders and representatives of Kremlin-controlled civic organizations—Putin asked the deputies to approve a law annexing the Ukrainian Crimea and the city of Sevastopol to the Russian Federation. Two days after the referendum, Putin was ending the Crimea’s short-lived independence by annexing the peninsula—the first annexation of a sovereign nation’s territory in Europe by a foreign state since World War II.

In his speech, Putin declared that the Crimean self-defense units had taken the initiative to bring about reunification, and the people of the Crimea had decided their fate, preventing Sevastopol from being turned into a NATO military base. He took advantage of the opportunity to remind NATO and the West of all the injustices allegedly committed against international law and Russia, from the bombing of Serbia to the recognition of Kosovo’s independence, as putative justification for Russia’s actions in the Crimea, and denounced the “color revolutions” as coups engineered by the West.

Putin made an unprecedented appeal to Russian nationalism. This was a marked departure from his earlier statements and pronouncements, in which his main addressee and point of reference was the multiethnic Russian political nation embodied by the citizens of the Russian Federation, referred to as rossiiane rather than ethnic russkie. Now he claimed that Russia and the Russians were the greatest divided nation in the world. After the fall of the USSR, said Putin, when “Crimea ended up as part of a different country . . . Russia realized that it was not simply robbed, it was plundered.” “All these years,” he declared, “citizens and many public figures have come back to this issue, saying that Crimea is historically Russian land and Sevastopol is a Russian city.”

There were also elements of the speech that appealed to Russo-Ukrainian unity, despite Putin’s attack on Ukraine and annexation of part of its territory. “Orthodoxy,” claimed Putin, “predetermined the overall basis of the culture, civilization, and human values that unite the peoples of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.” He even declared that Russia was taking the Crimea on behalf of both Russians and Ukrainians to prevent its loss to a third party. “Crimea is our common historical legacy and a very important factor in regional stability,” Putin went on. “And this strategic territory should be part of a strong and stable sovereignty, which today can only be Russian. Otherwise, dear friends (I am addressing both Ukraine and Russia), you and we—Russians and Ukrainians—could lose Crimea completely, and that could happen in the near historical perspective.”

Putin made a hybrid argument for the annexation: appealing to Russian history, territory, and identity, he invoked the legacy of empire to claim the Crimea under the banner of Russian ethnic nationalism, while also maintaining that Russians and Ukrainians were Slavic brethren. The latter was meant to exploit the sense of Russo-Ukrainian unity to which many citizens of Russia and Ukraine subscribed. Putin assured Ukrainians that Crimea was a unique case—a part of Ukraine historically, culturally, and ethnically belonging to Russia. The rest of Ukraine was safe. “Do not believe those who want you to fear Russia, shouting that other regions will follow Crimea,” declared Putin. “We do not want to divide Ukraine; we do not need that.” In fact, the division of Ukraine was exactly what Putin undertook in the weeks and months following his Crimean speech.

In conclusion, Putin asked the Russian parliamentarians to ratify the treaty and create two new constituent entities within the Russian Federation, one for the Crimea, another for the city of Sevastopol. The parliament complied, and on March 21 Putin signed the law integrating the Crimea and the city of Sevastopol into the Russian Federation. The annexation of the Crimea was now a fait accompli, carried out in accordance with the Russian constitution but in blatant violation of international law and treaties signed by Russia, including the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 and the Russo-Ukrainian Friendship Agreement of 1997.

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by | 12 July 2026 · 5:15 am

Reviving Russian Slavic Eurasianism

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 102-104:

Putin adopted many elements of traditional and revived Eurasianism as parts of his world view. In his official pronouncements he spoke repeatedly of Russia as a unique multiethnic civilization not only different from the West but opposed to it in history, culture, and values. But he also embraced with equal if not greater enthusiasm the ideas of a different group of Russian thinkers who juxtaposed Russia to the West predominantly as a Eurasian Slavic or Russian civilization. That trend of thought, represented by such figures as Aleksei Khomiakov, Ivan Kirievsky, and Konstantin Aksakov, predated Eurasianism, going back to the first decades of the nineteenth century, which produced one of the most consequential schisms in Russian intellectual history, that between Westernizers and Slavophiles. The former insisted that Russia’s destiny lay with the West, while the latter emphasized Russian uniqueness, rooted in history, language, culture, and nationality.

The nationality that the Slavophiles called Russian was in fact East Slavic. In imperial Russian terminology, it consisted of Great Russians, or Russians per se, Little Russians or Ukrainians, and White Russians or Belarusians. The model of a tripartite Russian nation, which the Russian historian Alexei Miller calls a “big Russian nation,” was adopted by the imperial elites in the second half of the nineteenth century and became part of the ideological credo and personal belief, as well as identity, of many of the country’s political, religious, and military leaders. The Russian Revolution put an end to the dominance of the tripartite nation in Russian political and ethnonational thought. In 1922, Lenin resisted Joseph Stalin’s attempts to incorporate non-Russian republics into the Russian Federation and insisted on the creation of a Union state in which those republics would be distinct polities with rights equal to those of Russia.

The idea of a big Russian nation went into the Russian emigration along with the White Guard generals defeated by the Bolshevik Red Army and the intellectuals who supported their vision of Russia, one and indivisible. Among the émigrés was General Anton Denikin, whose memoirs would make a strong impression on Vladimir Putin, and the philosopher Ivan Ilyin, an admirer of fascism, whose article, “What the Dismemberment of Russia Promises the World,” would become a frequently quoted source in the speeches and pronouncements of Putin and other Russian officials. Ilyin argued that one day Russia would gather its lands back under its tutelage.

The key figure who linked the imperial thinking of the past with a plan for dealing with post-Soviet Russian challenges and realities was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In his essay of 1990, Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals, Solzhenitsyn called for the separation of the eastern Slavs from the non-Slavic republics of the Soviet Union and the formation of a “Russian Union” consisting of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and northern Kazakhstan. If one followed Ernest Gellner’s definition of nationalism as the establishment of congruence between political and ethnonational borders, then Solzhenitsyn’s “reconstructed” Russia was to become quadripartite. But his plan never materialized, and several years later Solzhenitsyn went on to question the legitimacy of the Ukrainian borders. In his essay Russia in Collapse (1998), Solzhenitsyn argued for the annexation of eastern and southern Ukraine, denouncing its “inordinate expansion onto territory that was never Ukraine until Lenin: the two Donets provinces, and the whole southern belt of New Russia (Melitopol–Kherson–Odesa) and the Crimea.”

Putin was an admirer of all these writers and shared many of their ideas. In May 2009, less than a year after the invasion of Georgia, he made a public show of his admiration for imperial Russian thinkers. Despite rainy weather, he showed up in the company of numerous reporters at the cemetery of the Donskoi Monastery in Moscow to lay flowers on the graves of General Denikin and his wife, along with the grave of Ivan Ilyin and that of Ivan Shmelev, another Russian émigré writer whose remains had been returned to Russia. Putin also laid flowers on the grave of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who had died in Moscow the previous year.

Referring to General Denikin, whose grave he honored first, Putin encouraged one of the reporters accompanying him at the ceremony to read Denikin’s memoirs. “Denikin discusses Great and Little Russia, Ukraine,” said Putin. “He writes that no one may meddle in relations between us; that has always been the business of Russia itself.” Denikin was in fact following Aleksandr Pushkin, who had attacked the West for criticizing Russia’s assault on Poland after it rebelled against the empire in 1830. If Pushkin referred to Russo-Polish relations, Denikin referred to those between Russia and Ukraine. In Putin’s view, it was up to Russia to decide how to conduct its relations with a weaker neighbor. The Slavic roots of the two peoples became his excuse to condemn any Western support for Ukraine.

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by | 1 July 2026 · 12:33 am

Changing USSR Nationality Policy

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 18-21:

The USSR began its life with massive affirmative action for the non-Russian cultures outside the Russian Federation. But cultural Russification of the borderlands returned in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when Stalin emerged as Lenin’s sole successor and began preparing the country for war. One reason for the change was industrialization, which, given Russian control of the all-Union party, came with the advance of Russian as the language of administration, science, and technology. Another reason was accommodation of the Russians as the largest nationality in the now Soviet empire, along with concern to integrate the non-Russian nationalities culturally so that they would not switch sides in the coming war.

In Ukraine, the largest non-Russian republic of the USSR, the change of nationality policy was signaled by show trials against the Ukrainian intelligentsia. The first such trial, which took place in 1929, was followed by an attack on the Ukrainian party cadres and the peasantry, which reached its peak during the Holodomor, or the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932–33. A number of key Ukrainian communists committed suicide, while others were dismissed from their positions and jailed. As many as four million people were starved to death as part of a concerted campaign to crush the peasant resistance to the collectivization and maximize grain delivery for Soviet industrialization. In the month leading up to the start of the famine, Stalin warned his associates that such measures were needed to prevent loss of control over Ukraine. The Holodomor turned Ukraine, previously known as the breadbasket of Europe, into a land devastated by famine.

World War II led to another shift in Moscow’s policy toward the nationalities. Although Russocentrism was not abandoned, more manifestations of Ukrainian and other non-Russian patriotism were allowed. The Soviet takeover of Poland’s eastern provinces following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 was justified as liberation of fellow Ukrainians and Russians from Polish capitalist oppression. It was also celebrated in ethnic terms as the reunion of western Ukraine and western Belarus with the corresponding Soviet republics. The old imperial reunification paradigm was back, dressed this time in Ukrainian and Belarusian clothing. After Hitler attacked the USSR in June 1941, non-Russian nationalism was mobilized once again, especially in Ukraine, to encourage patriotic resistance to the German invasion. Once German forces occupied all of Ukraine with the assistance of their Romanian and Hungarian allies, Moscow did not mind promoting the Ukrainian language, culture, and history to mobilize resistance and inspire the loyalty of more than six million Ukrainians drafted into the Red Army. The Ukrainian card was also played at home and abroad to justify the military takeover and annexation of western Ukrainian lands ruled by Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania during the interwar period.

In 1914 the Russian army had captured the city of Lviv, then under Austrian rule, justifying it as liberation of fellow Russians—that was the tsarist authorities’ official term for the local population. As World War II drew to an end, the Soviets played not the Russian but the Ukrainian national card when they integrated Lviv into the Ukrainian SSR, although the city was largely Polish in ethnic composition, with Jews (largely exterminated during the Holocaust) as the second-largest ethnic group.

While the authorities were eager to exploit Ukrainian ethnicity to justify Soviet westward expansion, they did not welcome or tolerate every expression of Ukrainian patriotism and nationalism. The radical Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), formed in the western Ukrainian lands during the interwar period, was considered particularly dangerous. Its members were known to the Soviets as Banderites: their leader, Stepan Bandera, and some of his followers were imprisoned in German concentration camps after a failed attempt to declare an independent Ukrainian state in alliance with Germany and against the USSR in the summer of 1941. The Nazi occupiers, who regarded Slavs as subhuman, deported more than two million Ukrainians to Germany as slave laborers and persecuted Ukrainian patriots of every description.

The two branches of the OUN, one led by Bandera, the other by his less-known rival Andrii Melnyk, turned against the Germans by the end of 1941. In 1943 the Bandera faction assumed leadership of the 100,000-strong Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a guerrilla force that fought against the Polish Home Army and the Nazis and, later, against the Red Army for control of western Ukraine. The Ukrainian nationalist insurgency was not completely crushed until the early 1950s, the last years of Stalin’s rule, earning the designation of the strongest and longest-lasting movement of resistance to the Soviets anywhere in east-central Europe.

The Soviets did their best to discredit the Ukrainian nationalists by condemning their early collaboration with the Germans and exposing the participation of some OUN members in the Holocaust and the ethnic cleansing of Poles during the German occupation of Ukraine. They also made major concessions to the Ukrainian language, which became dominant in western Ukrainian government institutions, replacing Polish. But the Sovietization of western Ukraine was carried out mainly by repression. Not only the captured fighters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army but also civilians suspected of helping the insurgents were resettled or deported en masse to gulag camps in the Russian SFSR, making Ukrainians the largest ethnic group of political prisoners in the Soviet Union—a phenomenon documented by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his Gulag Archipelago.

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by | 29 June 2026 · 12:05 am

Polish & Ukrainian Anthems

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 213-214:

THE UKRAINIAN NATIONAL anthem begins with the words “Ukraine has not yet perished,” hardly an optimistic beginning for any kind of song. But this is not the only anthem whose words do not inspire optimism. The Polish national anthem starts with the familiar line “Poland has not yet perished.” The words of the Polish anthem were written in 1797 and those of the Ukrainian one were penned in 1862, so it is quite clear who influenced whom. But why such pessimism? In both cases, Polish and Ukrainian, the idea of the death of the nation stemmed from the experience of the late eighteenth century—the partitions of Poland and the liquidation of the Hetmanate.

Like many other anthems, the Polish one was originally a marching song written for the Polish legions fighting under the command of the future emperor of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, in his Italian campaigns. The song was originally known as the “Dąbrowski mazurka,” named for a commander of the Polish troops, Jan Henryk Dąbrowski. Many of the Polish legionnaires, including the commander himself, had taken part in the Kościuszko Uprising, and the lyrics were meant to lift their spirits after the destruction of their state by the partitioning powers. The song’s second line asserts that Poland will not perish “as long as we are alive.” By associating the nation not with the state but with those who considered themselves its members, the Polish anthem gave hope not just to the Poles but also to representatives of other stateless nations. A new generation of patriots in Poland and Ukraine refused to accept the disasters of the previous century as the final verdict on their nations. Both Polish and Ukrainian activists promoted a new understanding of a nation as a democratic polity made up of citizen patriots rather than a territorial state.

IN THE FIRST decade of the nineteenth century, Napoleon and his soldiers brought the ideas of nation and popular sovereignty to the rest of Europe in their songs and at the points of their bayonets. In 1807, the dream of the Polish legionnaires came a step closer to realization when, after defeating Prussia, the French emperor created the Duchy of Warsaw out of territories annexed by that country during the partitions of Poland. To the Poles, this offered the exciting prospect of the restoration of their homeland. In 1812, after Napoleon’s invasion of the Russian Empire, Poles under Russian rule rose in support of the French invader, whom they considered a liberator. Adam Mickiewicz, the foremost Polish poet of the era, reflected the Polish nobility’s excitement at the advance of the French army into today’s Belarus in his epic poem Sir Thaddeus, which is still required reading in today’s Polish (but not Belarusian) schools. “Glory is ours already,” says one of the poem’s Polish characters, “and so we shall soon have our Republic again.”

In 1815, when entering the University of Vilnius, the sixteen-year-old Mickiewicz gave his name as Adam Napoleon Mickiewicz. By that time, Polish hopes of having “our Republic again” had been crushed. Napoleon, Dąbrowski, and their French and Polish troops had retreated from the Russian Empire in defeat.

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