THE MYTHS THAT MADE PUTIN’S WAR
[My A Short History of Russia was first written for President Reagan and his National Security Council in January 1985, first published on TTP in March 2004, and as an Archive in February 2024 to expose Putin’s myth of Russia’s history in his interview with Tucker Carlson. Here is distinguished historian Timothy Snyder exposing that myth on a much deeper level.]
Vladimir Putin, the author of the worst war of our century, believes that an ancient priestly chronicle sanctifies the endless bloodshed. The truth about that work of art, The Tale of Bygone Years, helps us to see the truth about Russia’s war.
Its hero, the Danish chieftain Rørek, leads us to another work of art, Shakespeare’s Hamlet. We will need the art to get at the tragedy. Putin is a cynical man, a master of post-truth politics. But at the bottom of the deepest cynicism can often be found one very naive idea.
Putin’s is that Russia has an ancient, unbroken and holy past that includes Ukraine.
The Tale, a hodgepodge assembled by medieval Kyiv monks in the early 1100s, became for him a kind of prophecy. In a pre-invasion text of his own and in a long interview with Tucker Carlson last year, Putin presents the life of Rørek as the starting point of a sacred history in which Russia, 900 years later, must invade Ukraine.
The answer was not Trump alone.
To paraphrase Winston the Wolf from Pulp Fiction, let's not start shaking each other's hands quite yet. American presidents since Harry Truman have tried to establish Middle East peace as their legacy.
Talking points are out instructing Democrats to stop using terms like “birthing person” and “LGBTQIA+” and to begin talking again like Normal People.
June 2002, the Vulture’s Mouth Glacier. In the deepest heart of the Gobi Desert of Mongolia, south of the Flaming Cliffs where Roy Chapman Andrews discovered dinosaur eggs in the 1920s, there is a naked spine of mountains called the Gurvan Saihan. In the Gurvan Saihan there is a deep gorge called Yol Alyn, the Vulture’s Mouth. And in the Vulture’s Mouth, there is a glacier.
