There are not many people in the world who have devoted much time to the study of the medieval East Slavic state of Kievan Rus. Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy is one. Vladimir Putin is another.
“I’ve been there before,” interjects Plochy, the world’s preeminent historian of Ukraine, as we meet on a wet London day for lunch at Ognisko, the restaurant of the Polish Hearth Club.
Established by exiled Poles in 1939 — its plaster reliefs and chandeliers a warm embrace of old-world grandeur — the club seems like a fitting place to meet a chronicler on the front lines of another seismic European war. Plochy, though now living in Vienna on sabbatical from Harvard, is right on that battlefield. “It’s not like I joined the war,” he says. “War occupies my part of the world and its history.”
In Ukraine, not only two armies but two historical narratives collided. In the narrative to which Plochy has devoted his career and more than a dozen deeply researched books, Ukraine has a long and significant history as a nation and an independent state.
The other, darkly manipulated version proposed by President Putin denies Ukraine its national identity. Ukraine, according to this narrative, has always been part of one great Russia, ever since ancient Kievan Rus. To quote Putin, it is “not even a country” and has no right to exist.
As we sit down at a table of rye bread and gherkins in Ognisko’s garden tent, I ask Plohi what it’s like to do his job when both his country and its history have been attacked. Plochy reminds me, smiling, that the fields of “medieval or early modern history were usually populated by people who simply wanted to go as far as possible. . . in the past.”
However, things have changed now. “Politicians and generals,” he says, seek to seize not only lands but also “pieces of history.” So there is nothing left but to fight against the “abuses and abuses of history”. “It’s really about defending your turf.”
On February 24, Plochy woke up early to an email from a colleague titled: “Oh my god.” Another comes from a former student at Dnipro University in southeastern Ukraine, where he taught. “He was asking if it was okay to send me electronic files of his work — for safekeeping, because he lived in Dnipro.”
Ognisko55 Exhibition Road, London SW7 2PG
Chlodnik (Beetroot Soup) £6.50 Sauerkraut Pies £8.50 Polenta with Goats Cheese £15.50 Pork Schnitzel £19.50 Sparkling Water £4.00 Still Water £4.00 Espresso £2.50 Total £68.06
Plochy knew immediately that Putin’s full-scale invasion—long feared, long threatened, still unforeseeable—had begun. He called his sister in the southeastern city of Zaporozhye, where he grew up. The first air raid had already hit the city. “That was my wake-up call.”
February 24 came as a wake-up call for Europe as well, he says. “I think deep down we really believed the story was over. Maybe not literally. . . but from the point of view of an unprovoked war.”It was assumed that the great problems of the continent would be settled once and for all through negotiations, elections, etc.
But the story wasn’t over, and for the first month it “seemed like a nightmare.” Ultimately, he found “a balance between emotion and work.” But much of the southeastern region where Plohi grew up is now occupied by Russian troops. “It’s surreal. Hard to accept. This makes you angry. All these things.”
We listened but didn’t hear what was going on. because it was so hard to imagine
Plochy’s writings focus on Ukraine and the post-Soviet space, but cover the entire period 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 US. I was born in Russia but grew up in Great Britain. We speak English, but when discussing food we slip into words in Russian.
Ognisko’s menu is rich in Eastern flavors – fennel, lard, pickles, cabbage – but also in Polish terms. Still, I have high hopes for my ability to read it without stumbling. I arrived at our lunch directly from Warsaw, where I had just spent six weeks, drawn to the city by its wartime role as a refuge for millions of Ukrainian refugees.
As we read, I try my hand at an au courant remark about potato dumplings—will pierogi ruskie still be called that after this war?
Yes, Plochy tells me, as my premise is wrong. Ruskie does not mean Russian, but instead refers to the fact that dumplings came to Poland from western Ukraine, perhaps during the time when it was part of Poland. Our region has folded so many times that it can make a thousand dumplings, I think, somewhat subdued, and choose them for an appetizer.
Plochy, who chooses a cold beetroot soup, says he was touched by Poland’s response, but not surprised. Both nations faced Russian aggression. Both have also seen their identities shaped by the experience of statelessness. Their anthems share the same opening line: “Ukraine is not dead yet,” “Poland is not dead yet,” he notes. They are statements of defiance expressing the idea that “the state may be gone, but the nation lives on.”
The message seems particularly poignant at a time when Russia has returned to its imperial drawing board, threatening Ukraine’s very presence on the map. It also permeates The Gates of Europe (2015), Plokhi’s odyssey through Ukraine’s history, where its cohesion as a nation remains the unifying thread even as one conqueror after another passes through its lands.
Ukraine is a frequent target thanks to its geography, a link between east and west, and the Dnieper River, which runs through the country, is often seen as the key dividing line. Plochy’s academic life began in the Dnieper, a city on its banks. There he researched the history of the Cossacks, a people with strong military traditions and originally from Ukraine.
In the Soviet Union of the 1970s and 1980s, his work was considered suspect. Moscow’s leaders—from czars to communists and beyond—have long viewed the idea of an independent Ukrainian history as a threat and sought to suppress it. Several of Plochy’s elders at the university were dismissed from their positions during a campaign against “Kazacophiles”, accused of “idealization” that could be “potentially nationalistic”.
It was formative. “Ever since I was a student, I’ve been aware that there are these problems with history and its interpretation,” he says as our starters arrive.
Don’t shoot the nuclear plant! At least get a map of the Chernobyl zone. Haven’t you seen the HBO series?!’
My pierogi are rich, filled with mushrooms and sprinkled with sautéed onions. Plohi dives into his beetroot soup. “I’m just trying to make the most of this lunch in terms of nostalgia,” he says. But the soup, he says, is more Polish than Ukrainian borscht.
Ukraine’s claim to borscht as its national dish has angered Russia in the past. The exchanges felt like fodder for tongue-in-cheek cooking competition articles. But their dark undercurrents were exposed after the invasion began, when Moscow’s foreign ministry spokeswoman said in a speech that the war was justified because Ukraine “cannot share borscht” and it was “Nazism”.
There is a long tradition of Moscow seeking to stifle the development of Ukrainian culture and attributes of national identity – banning publications in its language, for example in 1863. It is this 19th-century tradition that Putin harks back to when he claims that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people”.
“What’s so shocking,” Plochy says, “is that it really ignores the whole history of the 20th century,” when the Ukrainian national idea grew and led it to vote for independence from the Soviet Union in late 1991 .It was a vote, argued Plochy in his book The Last Empire (2014), that sounded the death knell for the bloc as a whole.
If we had paid more attention to Putin’s historical statements and Plochy’s dissections of them, could we have seen the invasion coming? I reported in Kyiv as tensions rose, but by the time the first bombs hit the city, I was convinced that this was not going to happen. The attack was a shock for Plohi as well. “We listened, but we didn’t hear what was there,” Plochy said. “Because it was so hard to imagine.”
People like to say that you can’t escape the past. In the post-Soviet region, you don’t even have time to put on your shoes. “I write a story and then it keeps popping up as breaking news,” Plochy says with a weary smile.
His latest book, Atoms and Ashes, is a global history of nuclear disasters. Its publication this spring coincided with Russia’s reckless military assault on the decommissioned Chernobyl power plant and on the operational Zaporozhye plant, Europe’s largest nuclear power plant.
“How can you do that?” Plohi says with exasperated horror. “Don’t fire on the nuclear plant! At least get a map of the Chernobyl zone. Don’t dig your trenches next to the Red Forest. Haven’t you seen the HBO series?!”
For Plochy, the subject of nuclear history is not a diversion; as with all the subjects he addresses, it is deeply intertwined with his own life. When he documented the Cuban missile crisis in Nuclear Folly (2021), it wasn’t a random choice—he told me that every warhead delivered to Cuba in 1962 was produced in factories in his native Zaporozhye region.
“Chernobyl”, published in 2018, also has its roots in his own experience of the nuclear disaster in 1986. Plohi was on the Dnieper, about 600 km…
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