A Teachable Moment

There are works of literature that offer insights to be found nowhere else.

Nikolai Gogol’s Taras Bulba could scarcely be more timely. A highly romanticized contribution to the development of distinctive Russian and Ukrainian identity, inspired by The Iliad, the novels of Walter Scott and the French chanson de gente, Taras Bulba is shocking in its graphic portraits of anti-Semitism, bloodlust, drunkenness and the antagonisms between Cossacks, Tartars, Poles and Jews.

An epic and violent tale of betrayal and revenge, the story’s context is the struggle over Ukraine that pits Russia against the Ottoman Empire and Poland. But for all its unabashed, unapologetic Russian and Ukrainian nationalism, the story, like all great works of literature, contains its own counternarrative. Bulba’s son falls in love with a Polish princess, and Jews play instrumental role in (temporarily) rescuing Bulba from death.

The novella can be interpreted as an action-packed Oedipal struggle of love versus family loyalty, as it was in the 1962 Hollywood version starring Yul Brynner and Tony Curtis, or, conversely, as in the 2009 Russian version, as an assertion that Ukraine is an integral part of Russia and that the Russian soul needs to resist the allure of the West.

The war in Ukraine presents us with a teachable moment: an unmatched opportunity to examine a complex topic at a moment when our students are most receptive to learning.

But the conflict also raises a difficult question. Can college instructors responsibly teach a controversy in real time? How do we ensure that a lesson doesn’t lapse into propaganda or oversimplify complex issues that demand nuance and expertise?

Also, won’t any attempt at dispassionate analysis trivialize the larger issues at play: the conflict’s human toll, the violation of national sovereignty, the massive displacement of peoples and human rights violations?

Isn’t it the case that objective analysis requires perspective and degrees of distance and detachment that are impossible in the heat of the moment?

Yes and no.

If one of the goals of higher education is to model inquiry and informed judgment, then we have a chance to do that right now.

Here are some of the issues we might bring into our classrooms.

Geography

Students might begin by investigating Ukraine’s geopolitical significance.

If geography, like biology, is destiny, then Ukraine is at once burdened and blessed. Situated at the borders of an expanded European Union and NATO and Russia, and once a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire, Ukraine—rich in agriculture and natural resources, including coal, iron ore, natural gas, manganese, salt, oil, graphite, sulfur, kaolin, titanium, nickel, magnesium, timber and mercury—has long been a political, cultural, economic, ideological and religious battleground.

Students might explore Ukraine’s shifting boundaries and its position between competing spheres of influence.

Media Literacy

Information literacy is never more important than during wartime. Wars prompt many of our strongest emotions, including jingoism and moral self-righteousness. War’s emotionalism makes it all the more important to strive to act rationally and recognize many news stories or opinion pieces for what they are: little more than thinly veiled propaganda.

You might ask your students what sources of information they are relying upon and explore how they might best distinguish fact from misinformation and disinformation.

Truth, we often hear, is war’s first casualty, and there can be no doubt that it is extremely hard to tell what’s true or false in the fog of war.

You might also ask whether the media is depicting the conflict in Ukraine and the plight of Ukrainian refugees differently than it does other countries.

Political and Media Narratives

The war in Ukraine offers our classes a rich opportunity to discuss how events are framed by politicians, journalists and pundits. Among the many competing narratives are these:

• That by invading Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is violating international law, refusing to accept Ukraine’s national sovereignty and seeking to rebuild the Russian empire.
• The Putin argument that that Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians are a single people; that Ukrainian nationalism is the result of misguided decisions by Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev; and that a Ukraine aligned with NATO represents an existential threat to Russia, which has legitimate security interests that the West has disregarded.
• That the United States, despite its history of foreign interventions and meddling in other countries’ internal affairs, and its past support for friendly dictators, has a historic responsibility to defend human rights, democratic governance and an open, rules-based international order.

It is essential to see the world through multiple lenses, including from the vantage point of our adversaries. That requires us to be willing to see events in Ukraine through the Putin administration’s eyes: that the United States has been engaged in an ongoing campaign to demonize and surround Russia, to isolate it economically, install missiles along its borders, train and arm soldiers on Russia’s periphery, and gain control over Europe’s sources of energy.

Then ask: To what extent is such an argument reasonable and warranted and to what extent is it misleading?

Policy Responses

During the Ukrainian crisis, we are witnessing both something old—a land war in Europe—and something new: international conflict waged through a variety of new economic and technological tactics.

Students might explore policy issues like these:

• What are the likely consequences of the economic sanctions that the Biden administration and European officials have imposed to punish Russia and create domestic pressure on President Putin to end the Russian offensive in Ukraine?
• How do the responses of the United States and its European allies differ from previous sanctions?
• How effective have sanctions proven in the past?
• Are the decisions of private corporations, including energy companies and social media providers, to suspend or exit operations in Russia appropriate?
• Should the United States and its European allies go further and impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, launch large-scale deliveries of military matériel and supplies into Ukraine, provide the Ukrainian government with real-time information on Russian troop movements, engage in cyberattacks, and arm and train Ukrainian soldiers and partisans—even at the risk of a direct confrontation with Russia?

Historical Analogies

Whenever an international crisis occurs, observers search for historical analogies to inform and guide decision making. However oversimplified, these analogies are often the best guide we have to decisions that will shape the future.

Here are several analogies that have been invoked during the Ukraine crisis:

• 1914: Whether or not World War I was in fact a product of miscalculation, misunderstanding and miscommunication, that’s generally the lesson drawn from the five weeks preceding the guns of August—and it certainly informed President John F. Kennedy’s response to the Cuban missile crisis and the threat of nuclear apocalypse. How, students might ask, can we ensure that misperception doesn’t result in a much larger war?
• 1936: Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has called for thousands of foreign fighters to join in his country’s defense. Similar calls took place during the Spanish Civil War, when thousands of foreigners aided Spain’s Second Republic against the Nationalist forces led by Francisco Franco and his German and Italian allies. In the end, however, a lack of support from liberal democracies and a lack of arms, along with divisions within the Republican ranks, led to the Spanish Republic’s defeat. Is it appropriate to encourage volunteers to intervene in the conflict?
• 1938: To avert war, Britain and France gave in to Hitler’s claim to the Sudetenland, the German-populated part of Czechoslovakia. Critics denounce the agreement as “appeasement.” Ukrainian president Zelensky has already reminded his international supporters that any concessions to Russia raised the specter of appeasement. Students might discuss the aptness of that analogy.
• 1956: Even though the CIA and Radio Free Europe encouraged nationalist and anti-Communist resistance to Hungary’s pro-Soviet government, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles suggested that the United States supported the “liberation” of “captive peoples,” when an uprising in Hungary took place in October and November of 1956, the United States did little more than create a special immigration quota in 1956 for refugees. To what extent are current circumstances similar or different than in 1956?

No international conflict is exactly analogous to ones that took place in the past. Still, these analogies might prompt us to ask what is the endgame, the off-ramp, the exit strategy.

• Is the goal regime change—and the risk that poses of a greatly expanded war?
• Is the aim to mire Russia in a prolonged Afghanistan-like quagmire, a guerrilla war backed by massive American and European arms deliveries?
• Is the objective a negotiated settlement that will allow the Putin administration to maintain face and that might compromise Ukrainian independence?
• Or are there other policy possibilities?

I certainly understand the reluctance of faculty to bring the Ukrainian crisis into their classes. I, however, take the view that confronting this topic head-on is worth the risks. It’s an unmatched opportunity to integrate authentic learning and critical thinking into our students’ undergraduate education.

Perhaps you recall Neil Postman’s landmark 1969 book, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, subtitled A No-Holds-Barred Assault on Outdated Teaching Methods—With Dramatic and Practical Proposals on How Education Can Be Made Relevant to Today’s World.

To call education a subversive activity, Postman makes clear, is not to equate it with indoctrination or brainwashing. It is to free students to question received opinions, think critically and make judgments based not on what they hear but by reflecting analytically on what they have learned.

Education, in that sense, is the true path to liberation.

Let’s reaffirm the Enlightenment faith: to question conventions, orthodoxies and prevailing beliefs, not to necessarily reject them, but to subject these ideas to the scrutiny of reason and independent judgment.

Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.