The Curse of Empire: Ukraine, Poland, and the Fallacy in Russian History

A lecture by Martin Schulze Wessel, Chair in History of Eastern and Southeastern Europe at LMU Munich, head of the Collegium Carolinum, member of the German-Ukrainian Historical Commission.

Moderated by Serhii Plokhii, Mykhailo S. Hrushevs'kyi Professor of Ukrainian History and Director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University.

IN-PERSON and ONLINE via Zoom Webinar (live). Registration is required to attend online. 

About the Event

Before 24 February 2022, many observers saw Russia as a normal dictatorship in which the ruler was primarily interested in maintaining power. The full-scale attack on Ukraine and the way the war was waged and propagandised show that Russia follows a specific logic. The war is to be understood in the long tradition of Russia's expansion into Europe, which began at the start of the 18th century. Since then, imperial rule over Poland and Ukraine has formed the basis for the development of an East-West antagonism in international politics, which—long before the Cold War—also manifested itself ideologically. For a long time, Russia pursued its imperial claims to power over East-Central Europe in alliance with German states, Prussia and the Habsburg monarchy. Russia's adherence to imperial patterns can be described as the ‘curse of empire’, a political-ideological complex that characterises Russian politics to the present day. The lecture traces the continuities since the beginning of the 18th century, but also analyses the possible breaks in tradition. 

About the Speaker

Prof. Martin Schulze Wessel (1962) is Professor of Eastern European History at the LMU Munich. He studied Eastern European History and Slavic Studies in Munich, Moscow and Berlin and wrote his doctoral thesis on the Polish question in Russian-Prussian relations in the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1996, he became an assistant professor at the University of Halle-Wittenberg and wrote his second book on revolution and religious dissent in the Russian and Habsburg empires.

Martin Schulze Wessel was appointed Professor of Eastern European History at the LMU Munich in 2003. Since 2004 he has been Director of the Collegium Carolinum, the research institute for the history of the Czech Republic and Slovakia in Munich. In 2015, he founded the German-Ukrainian Historical Commission together with Professor Yaroslav Hrytsak (Catholic University of Lviv). From 2012 to 2016, he was President of the Association of German Historians. He has been a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities since 2008. In 2021/22 he was a Fellow at St Anthony's College, University of Oxford. Since September 2022, he has been Director of the Centre for Advanced Studies "Universalism and Particularism in European Contemporary History" at LMU Munich.

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This event is organized by Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) as part of the Seminar in Ukrainian Studies event series.

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