In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev decreed that Crimea, conquered by Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century and heroically defended against the Nazis, would be governed by the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic from Kiev, not from Moscow. Ukraine’s modern shape took form, but it seemed ephemeral, subject to the larger forces of geopolitics, as most borderlands have been throughout history. At the same time, the soviet reconvenes, ready to fight for a communist government in this new Russia. on Wednesday, September 7, at the Penn State School of International Affairs and Penn State Law. It was the historical root of Russia itself: Kievan Rus, the medieval fief whose leader, Vladimir the Great, adopted Christianity in 988, and the frontier of the tsarist empires that followed-its name translated literally as the Ukraine, or “the border.” Its borders had shifted over time: Parts of its western territory had belonged to Poland or the Austro-Hungarian Empire Stalin seized some of it with his secret pact with Hitler in 1939 and the rest after the end of the Great Patriotic War. Join New York Timescorrespondent Steven Lee Myers, author of The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin, as he discusses Putin, Russia, and implications for the U.S. “Ukraine, in contrast, had deep ethnic, cultural, and economic ties to Russia-and to Putin.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |