A friend shared with me a series of Ukrainian documentaries uncovering the tools Russian propaganda uses to mislead both the world and its own people about Russian and Ukrainian history, culture, and their respective roles in the world and how the Russian-Ukrainian war is the logical continuation of all of the above. I want to present these documentaries one by one and write (hopefully) detailed comments about each of them, mostly targeting my American friends.
The first documentary is about the history of Russia. Most of my friends likely remember only some episodes of Russian history that, for this reason or that reason, were mentioned in popular culture or were taught in school in relation to US history. The bottom line is that I do not expect anybody to have extensive knowledge of Russian history, so here is some explanation.
The first part of this documentary talks about the Medieval state Kyivan Rus (or Ancient Rus), with Kyiev being its capital and the language being the predecessor for three languages: Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian (and if you ask me, I’d say that nowadays Ukrainian is the closest of three to this old language). After the disintegration of the Kyivan Rus (the stage all the Medieval states went through) and after the Mongol invasion, the Moscow Principality gradually rose to power and eventually conquered most of the original Kyivan Rus land, but the rest of the world referred to it as Moscovia, not Rus. As this documentary states correctly, “Russia” as a name of the state appeared way later.
The most striking fact is that nobody ever made a secret of it! I was very much into history when I was in school, and by the time we started to study Russian history in the fourth grade, I already knew “all of it.” Nevertheless, I remember our textbook as clear as if I read it yesterday, and all of the above facts were mentioned there!
There were many facts I didn’t know about the newer parts of history; for example, I knew nothing about the joined annexation of Poland and the Soviet-Nazi parade in Brest, but everything related to Ancient history was well-known and was always in plain sight. I can’t explain why I never questioned the moral grounds of “conquering Siberia” and other colonial acquisitions. Let me repeat it again: while 20th-century history was heavily censored and presented as the “liberation” and the “fight for justice,” there were never any attempts for a similar cover-up of the earlier history. We all knew it, and we all thought it was OK.
Hettie's Reflections 