History
u3a History Group
Thanks to the scholarship of Bobby Hamilton and the hospitality of Evelyn King, the History Group spends ninety minutes on the first Monday morning every month scrutinising many aspects of world history. This has in the past included the failure of the League of Nations, the problems we confront in Syria, the threat posed by Russia to British interests over the last three centuries, the Rights of Man, and the lives and legacies of Stalin, Zhou Enlai, and John Maynard Keynes amongst many other topics. The group meets in Waldron. Anyone interested in joining us may like to contact Tim Williams on 01435 812273.
PAST MEETING TOPICS
JULY 2022 Transportation
JUNE 2022 Kemal Ataturk
MAY 2022 Islam
APRIL 2022
U3A HISTORY GROUP
The Heathfield and District u3a History group grappled on 4th April with the thorny question of how Putin managed to convince the Russian people (and himself) that it was right and necessary to wage war on Ukraine. It turns out that KGB-trained Putin believed he had history on his side on the one hand, while on the other the Kremlin concealed or sanitised all subsequent truth. We were enlightened by a timeline and detailed research by Bronwen Laurenson, by a lengthy article published by Putin himself in 2021 and by Catherine Belton’s 2020 Sunday Times best seller Putin’s People which revealed how Putin and his KGB entourage seized control of private companies, took over the economy, siphoned billions and criminally abused their power to silence opponents and extend their influence in the West.
Whilst fearing that NATO was encroaching on Russia’s western borders, Putin rooted his claim to Ukraine on an imperialist interpretation of history, dating back to the end of the first millennium when the so-called Kievian Rus was established by the Viking Prince Oleg. The next three hundred years saw the Golden Age of Kiev during which Christianity was established. Slavs then conquered the northeast and Mongols over-ran southern and eastern Ukraine (the word Ukraine means borderland).
Poland, Cossacks, Austria and eventually Catherine the Great all got their hands on Ukrainian territory in turn, Russia taking Crimea by the 19th century. Thereafter Ukrainian nationalism surfaced, only for the country to be forcibly taken over by the Soviet Union in 1921. Peasant resistance was crushed and harsh quotas were set for the collective farms by Stalin, resulting in a famine that killed around 7 million in the 1930s.
With the collapse of communism in 1991 Ukraine again became independent but democracy did not proceed smoothly. By 2015 Russia was backing separatists in eastern Ukraine, resulting in the so-called Minsk Accords which were never fully implemented (the ‘Minsk Conundrum’). Presidential elections gave Vladimir Zelenskiy 73% of the poll in 2019 and by February 2022 Putin had amassed seemingly overwhelming troops and equipment threatening Ukraine’s eastern borders. The outcome, one day, will be history.(Tim Williams)
MARCH 2022 William Morris