Phthursday Musings: Know Your Maps

There are a few videos like this out there but this is a particularly good one:

The video begins at the year 1000 and shows the changing map of Europe over the next millennium. The whole thing takes 10+ minutes but you really gain an appreciation for how much in flux Europe has been for so long.

At the outset, there’s a big red blob in the east called “Kievan Rus”. Remember that.

I’ve told bits and pieces and variations of all this before, but given global events… I’ve been thinking about all this again. Here goes:

When I was young, 4 or 5, we had a couple of house guests for a while, Polish students, who were members of Solidarność. This was 1980, 1981, coinciding with the declaration of martial law in Poland. I’m told that I listened intently and I closely read the paper for news about what was happening in Poland. From a young age then I was interested in global affairs, especially involving Europe.

I went to one grade school K-2 and another 3-6. In the second school, I can picture the library layout, and where among the Dewey decimal system shelves the history or geography books were, and specifically the long set of Enchantment of the World books which were basically one for each country, a full overview of the country with chapters on culture and food and history. I think I at one point or another read the history chapter for all of the European countries. Probably for many outside Europe as well.

The element of all of this which fascinated me most was the idea of changing boundaries, of countries that “don’t exist” suddenly “existing”, of huge changes in territory after wars. Poland is the best example of all of this. Go here for a deep dive into all of this! Or watch the video at the top! Suffice to say that before the 1700s Poland existed, then it was completely partitioned into Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Prussia, then after World War I, Poland was back, and then after World War II, its map changed a lot.

In our grade school textbooks, then, it was the evolving maps which gripped me. Major wars could be fully summarized by colored maps! Which of course abstracts everything horribly. It does, but really doesn’t, say anything useful about the actual people who lived in these places.

Maybe in 6th grade, maybe after getting to junior high, I found the Marshall Cavendish Illustrated Encyclopedia of World War I at the Rockford Public Library. 4,000 pages, and big pages at that (I’m guessing the page size was 10”x14”), with lots and lots of maps of battlefields, lots of pictures. The volumes began before World War I and went indepth into the Balkan Wars (which were in many ways precursors to World War I) and many other things. It took me multiple years to work through those 11 volumes, spilling into high school.

It was in high school when I locked in on things like memorizing all of the capitals everywhere, etc. There was “value” to this (good to know all of this for Scholastic Bowl!) but it was all very much a continuation of how I understood geography and history. Maps, countries, cities, borders, lists. Not a lot of cultural geography, definitely no meaningful social history. But… maps, countries, cities, borders, lists.

American history? So boring by comparison. Couple of big wars. Ooh, new states. But by the 1980s America was, shall we say, “resolved”. Europe? There were still two Germanys! Not resolved! Nevermind all of the ways in which America was not, and is still not, “resolved”. In terms of borders… resolved.

I went off to college. My freshman year I took a class on the Russian Revolution. My sophomore year on the French Revolution. My junior year on the Holocaust. I was pivoting from that raw borders-and-dates-and-lists mentality toward something richer. And, my advisor, Dr. Weis, his specialty was U.S. foreign relations. I took his class on modern Brazil, and every other class he offered. I was increasingly steeped in recent American history. In the end I double majored in history and political science and my thinking progressed far beyond what it had been.

Then I went off to grad school, and somehow I was entirely in American history, or at least American foreign relations. That class on modern Brazil I took as an undergraduate was the last time I took a class not focused on the United States. It’s not that there wasn’t still a level of interest in the old borders-and-dates-and-lists approach to European history or whatever. But I was subsumed in other things.

And then I wasn’t. I picked up my M.A. and have been out of academia for 21 years. I’ve still read. I’ve still paid attention. I’m still a sponge for a lot of things. But I’m a lot more steeped in the nuances of local politics in the U.S. than I am in the nuances of global economics.

A night before the invasion began, my wife basically asked for an explanation of what the hell is going on with Russia and Ukraine. And I started rattling a lot of things off. And, I think at a high level I have a solid grasp of the “issues”, and no more grasp than anyone else of what exactly is happening in Vladimir Putin’s brain.

But what I’ve recognized over the last day is that my thinking about things is ver ver much rooted in my older maps-and-boundaries understanding.

Watching just a bit of the MSNBC coverage after the Russian invasion began, one thing that struck me was how a couple of the people talking not only felt compelled to try and explain exactly why Putin is full of shit, but were visibly exasperated by the whole process.

Very long story short: Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian President, is from the eastern part of the country, and his first language was actually Russian. This is common in the east; the idea that there could ever have been an entirely “correct” boundary between Russia and Ukraine is the stuff of fantasy because there is no “correct” boundary between Russian and Ukrainian culture.

Ukraine is hardly the only place like this. Consider Belgium, where roughly half the country speaks Dutch and roughly half the country speaks Flemish. Consider the Dutch language itself, which has over 20 dialects. Americans don’t understand these things very well, because our concept of dialect tends to go something like this:

• Americans speak English

• Even the people in the South

• Even the people in Boston… we think

• Oh, the British speak English too, they’re the ones who created it, but their English is weird

• Canadians speak English too, eh, except those weird Frenchies

• Australians speak English too, and it’s weird like the Brits, but somehow cooler

• Why is it that when I call for customer service they send me to someone who can’t speak English

• Oh also we honor those Native Americans, ‘cause Chuck Norris said so

This is a ridiculous - but, I will concede, understandable - way of thinking about language, and I think it directly contributes to the American people being badly ignorant of what’s happening in parts of Eastern Europe, let alone places like Ethiopia where, oh by the way, there’s an incredibly brutal war going on that we never hear about.

So when these informed people were on the television explaining how Putin claimed Nazis are running Ukraine and how Russian speakers are mistreated and how it’s all nonsense… it was a bit jarring both how they deep they were going in explaining the lies, but also in how nonsensical all of it must sound to most Americans, who struggle with understanding where Missouri is, nevermind Ukraine, especially nevermind Donbas.

I’ve mentioned Transnistria before. I’m remiss if I don’t say a little more about it here, because suddenly it’s very relevant. This is Transnistria:

What today is Moldova used to be the Moldovan SSR, one of the 15 republics of the Soviet Union. Before that, much of it was Romanian territory, annexed by the Soviets after World War II. Moldovans mostly speak Romanian - and, well, look at the Moldovan and Romanian flags. The country though also includes a number of native Ukrainian and native Russian speakers. And the part of the country east of the Dniester River - “across the Dniester” transliterating as “Transnistria” - is a bizarre breakaway area, where the ethnic mix is somewhat close to 1/3 each Moldovan, Ukrainian, and Russian. This area declared independence that nobody recognized; has been used for years as a black market back door; boasts a flag still showing a hammer and sickle; it’s fascinating, and wretched, and so many other adjectives.

It also houses 1,500 Russian troops, give or take, and at its tip is less than an hour by land from the ancient sea port of Odessa, one of the cities under some level attack by the Russians right now. 1,500 isn’t exactly a lot of troops, but you don’t need that many troops if you’re just going to chuck some missiles and be generally threatening to an overmatched, outflanked neighbor.

And, now, we know why Transnistria truly exists.

It would be a weeeee bit far-fetched for me to just say, hey everybody, here’s what happening in Ukraine!

But over time I know I’ve thought about such things more than most people - I mean, years ago I started a (poorly kept up) Facebook page called Transnistria-Based Page, it’s not like anyone else did that - and so maybe I have useful insight for people. But if I do, I also think it’s helpful for people to know where that framework comes from. It comes from that 10 minute evolving map I posted at the top. And then it comes from reconsidering much of the rest of the world in terms of the particular kind of weird that America is.

Growing up in the 1980s, there was such an overwhelming premium put on a certain kind of conformity. And then into the 1990s, an extension of that conformity. All of it super-nationalist. But still, a particular kind of super-nationalist.

I think that the “American idea” is crumbling today. You know what else is crumbling? The “Russian idea”. Not in the same way. Not strictly because nationalism is crumbling - I actually think that nationalism is stronger than ever in a lot of places. Look at Poland, look at Hungary. The thing is that they are shockingly homogeneous countries. America is not. Russia is not. Is it that? Or is there more to it all?

The evolving map of Europe shows, among other things, how something can crumble and then reemerge. How what’s one thing today can be something else tomorrow. But, maybe not really. Or maybe what you see is a kind of mirage. Maybe a tiny mirage, like Transnistria. Maybe a much bigger mirage. Is Russia a mirage? Is Ukraine a mirage? I don’t think so. But it’s not that hard to sell people on ideas like that, now is it?

Vladimir Putin is acting out on a particular kind of worldview. All of the pieces that form that may be obscure to most of us, but in broad strokes, you can see how he is very much a continuation of centuries of what came before him, in Russia and elsewhere, and that’s without trying to get into the “Russian idea” at all.

I think what’s happening in Ukraine is vitally important to all of us. But maybe not so directly, or in quite the ways we might be thinking. I see the Russian invasion as a vain attempt to change the flow of history. But it’s not the only one. January 6 was another such attempt. A less powerful, more outright idiotic one, to be sure. But it’s not over. There are “Don’t Tread On Me” flags flying in my neighborhood. Probably yours too. And the “American idea” these people have is a lot closer to the “Russian idea” that Putin has than to how I choose to see America. Probably the same for you.

Know your history.

Know more history than just your own.

And, as reductive as it may seem, know your maps. All of them. Know more than just maps! But… Know your maps.