How History Shapes Politics: Historical Memory and the War in Ukraine

Foreign. Welcome to Iona Asks, part of ubc, iona's undergraduate journal. I'm Ferdinand, your host. Today we're joined by Professor Florian Gosna, associate professor of teaching in UBC's Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies. His work focuses on the cultural history of Central and Eastern Europe, especially the connection between literature, memory and censorship. Today we'll talk about historical memory, how different countries remember the past, and how those traditions shape politics, identity, and reactions to the war in Ukraine. Professor Gassner, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. To start off, I'd love to get a clear picture on what the term memory even means. This context and in this context, we at this point mainly talk about the phenomenon of cultural memory or collective memories. And for that we're talking about the memory not so much as a single recollection, but as a social practice where people come together and negotiate on what they want to remember collectively, not just on a day to day basis, but as a society over a period of time in order to articulate, consolidate their identity, to create some sort of foundation from which they can then build societal ideas or further cultural ideas, or just how to keep society connected. And would you say this is mostly based on education, family stories, or official narratives like, where do you anchor that education is one of the most important things? Like if you not just look at Canada, but most western liberal societies, for many people, the only history book they will ever have read is the one they read in high school. When you go out and ask your friends who didn't go on to post secondary education, and you ask around, how many history books have you read or how many historical documentaries have you seen? Oftentimes that'll not be present anymore in their lives. So the period in which you're in school is for societies a really important period in which they can socialize the next generation to subscribe to certain societal ideals and convictions. Does this carry over into post secondary education? Well, post secondary education, when you're within the humanities at this point in time, is supposed to sensitize the learners for this social practice, just that it is a practice that we get together to negotiate these identities and that they are not immutable, that they are subject to negotiation and renegotiation, and that we as a society are constantly actively engaged in creating these narratives and passing them on to the next generation. I'd like to move to specific examples from different countries, and one country that kind of stands out to me is Germany, which is often described as having a very developed Ernabskultur they say so, where they have a culture of remembering things in the past, especially related to the Second World War. But could you describe its defining features since 1945 and how this could shape the reaction to the current war in Ukraine? And asking for the defining features. There is a very helpful starter to this conversation because since 1945 there has been an evolution of German cultures of remembrance, which have shifted significantly over the past 70 years or so. For me, always one of the most interesting points in German history, which is also relevant for Canadian history, for example, is something that happened in the 1960s. So you have the war ends 1945. And then in Germany there is by and large this feeling of the so called spundenul, the zero hour. And in the zero hour there's really not much memory work done, which means that a lot of the convictions that were articulated in Nazi Germany actually survived through that period. And one of, for me, the most fascinating historical periods in Germany is the 1960s. And I'm not talking about the student revolutions, but the Fischerkontorwehrse, because in Germany, the Nazis had created this cult around World War I. And from their point of view, World War I is something that had been forced upon Germans and therefore justify the atrocities of World War II. Or not necessarily the atrocities, because the Nazis weren't trying to publicize those, but the act of World War II, Germany fighting back, reclaiming its military. So then from the 1960s on, you move into what we consider German Ereneroungskultur nowadays, which is being sensitive for the part Germany played in war crimes, in starting wars, in marginalizing minorities, in persecuting and exterminating people. And so even though today there is this narrative that Germany after 1945 learned its lesson, it actually was a period that took at least two generations that Germany rewrote its own history in a way that it was accepting of its guilt and focused more on building the European project. And then that became the centerpiece of European German memory cultures. Building the German project. Would you say now that, you know we're three to four generations past the Second World War, does that create a difficulty for the remembrance culture in Germany? Is Germany kind of wrestling with that because of the disconnect, I guess, felt by some of the younger generations, or where do you see it going? It does seem, especially if you look in the media, it does seem often like this binary that Germans are remembering and then they're not remembering, and now they're remembering, and then there's a danger of them not remembering. But this effort to construct cultural memory is ongoing. So the people who maintained that Germany was not at fault in World War I, who maintained that Germany couldn't but go to war in World War II, who maintained that everything bad that occurred on the European continent is in some way due to foreign influence. And the French and the migrants, those were always there. They are right now much more vocal in public spaces. But what you see still is this fight. You have plenty of young people trying to make the point for Western liberal democracy, for the European project. And it is to be seen whether they remain victorious, whether they remain dominant against the people that always existed in other parts of the conversation who think, well, Germany was always the victim in the 20th century and there is no point in remembering this history. Yeah. And I would say we also see some actors from the party of the AvDev. I remember them mentioning something to the effect of the Second World War. That period was only a speck in kind of a thousand years of glorious German history, kind of trying to. The literal translation of that quote is it was a bird's shit in German's glorious history. And that quote, incidentally, was presented to not by one of the younger members, but by the oldest or most established member of that party. And so here we see that continuity, that this part of German memory culture was never gone. It's just with parties such as the AfD, it's got a new platform. Not to say that it didn't used to have in the 1960s, 1970s, a platform in the Christian conservative parties, because it certainly did have it there also. And when you look at this kind of culture of never again in Germany, do you think that can create tension in foreign policy? Let's say when it comes to the war in Ukraine, whether or not to, you know, give them arms. Or do you see some people in German society and discourse saying, look, we don't want to be seen as a country that's militarizing against Russia, let's say. And a lot of these people are also in the corner where they will identify as pacifists and think that, you know, you just need dialogue to arrive there. And I've had it more than once that people talked about, you know, if you look at World War II, in the end, there had to be like a negotiated peace, or in the end, people need to talk to each other. That is certainly true. But a lot of these people are from a generation, including my generation, that never had to fight for the peace, that never had to defend itself. And so their pacifism, again, has something A little bit to do with a limited understanding of history and that sometimes the aggressor simply is the aggressor and you are forced to go to war. But again, here are people who have. Now let me take a step back. This is a sentiment most often heard in eastern parts of Germany. So people who lived and grew up in the gdr, which identified itself as a socialist country, and socialism was supposed to bring world peace by uniting all peoples under a socialist banner. And this type of thinking about history was very aggressively pushed onto the population through school education. And so you can still see that the cultural memory, the cultural consensus that was articulated in the gdr, that people still believe in that viscerally, because that is what they were brought up with. And they're not being cynical or they're not being duped. They actually believe that only pacifism can this problem. And do you believe that education from the ger. Do you think that's the reason why Germany's relationship with Russia, at least among large parts of the population, is a more complex one than it is towards other nations when it comes to arming Ukraine, but also criticizing Russia or what Putin's government. There is a historical study that has this wonderful anecdote about going into high school classes in the GDR in the 1980s and then in the 1990s and talking to young people there. And they had all learned that you need socialism to defeat fascism and that the Soviet Union, because of its socialist qualities, was able to defeat Hitler and the Nazis. But in the same breath, they learned about the socialist history of the gdr. And at one point there was among students apparently the belief that the GDR fought against the Nazis, which is of course wholly incorrect. But there is this idea of aligning itself with the force for good in the east, the force for peace that came from the East. And so there's a lot of that still in the young people's education and in their socialization. Okay, that's very interesting. And I would kind of like to use that to segue into talking about Russia and how Russia uses its history very actively, especially in regards to World War II, kind of its former empire and also its protection claims of former Soviet states. Why do you think those narratives are so powerful? And why do you think that Putin uses these historical narratives to, for example, at the very beginning of the. I believe it was in 2021, before, right before Russia invaded Ukraine, he wrote a large essay on it as well. That kind of seem to refer to historical memory as well, one of the Most powerful human responses is a trauma response where you viscerally relive a memory. You don't remember it, but you are there the moment that it comes to mind. And for Russian society as a whole, and this is the linchpin for all of this, for Russian society as a whole, that's the 90s. I don't know how much students in North America learn about the 90s in the Soviet Union. It is from the western point of view. The 90s from what happened to the Soviet Union is narrated as a story of liberation. You have the arrival of McDonald's, you have the Monsters of Rock concert in Moscow with Metallica, Pantera, the Black Crows. Everybody's seen some of those videos. The legendary ACDC performance at that concert. It was this big celebration. The majority of the Soviet population, specifically Soviet Russian population, experienced the decade of the 90s, from beginning to the end, as the destruction of of the state, the destruction of their property, the destruction of societal values, abject poverty from one day to the other. Pensions were gone. All of these soldiers, tens of thousands of them who were wounded in Afghanistan, they lost their soldiers, their veterans benefits. The social system disappeared, the medical system collapsed, the currency imploded. There was a barter economy on the street. You didn't have heat in your house. People lived like four families in one apartment together. Was it truly a kind of country run by gangsters? At the time it was gangster rule. That was the only, that was how the economy worked at that point. One of my most troubling anecdotes from my circle of friends, I worked in Ukraine for a while and I asked a friend of mine about the 90s and she said, well, she was still pretty young at that time, but she remembers sometime in the mid-90s going with her mom. And she remembers they went to the store to get milk because at one point, it was the middle of the day, her mother just throws herself on the daughter, buries her underneath her and takes the daughter a while to come to. And like at the time she didn't really understand what was going on. But just on the other side of the street, somebody was being executed mob style. And the milk is so important because you remember like the milk popping open and being all over the road. And that was the reality of the people that where the only place where money was circulating was within the gangsters. And you had them at the very top taking over government institutions, manufacturing, heavy industry. But they also, you had the petty gangsters who ran the streets and organized the bartered economy. And I Sometimes see some people referring to what Russia is doing as trying to re establish the Soviet Union and the Soviet sphere of influence. And then others say it goes more back to the the Russian Empire. What do you think is more of an accurate representation of what Putin is trying to achieve and what kind of previous state form he's looking at to re establish? And without giving any percentages, at the end of the day, it's both. And this is where original question is, how does cultural memory work? How do memory cultures, collective memories work? Collective memories are a process of picking and choosing. There is, in the 1970s, 1980s, there was a active discussion among historians to which extent historiography is actually different from the writing of fiction. And the conclusion was that it's not different at all. It's the exact same process. Because writing a history consists of, if you even still accept that there are historical facts, which is something that is up to debate, but then you choose which facts you integrate and which ones you don't integrate. And for Canadian audiences, they know that very well because up until 2015, Indian residential schools did not feature history books. And then they were required to feature in high school textbooks. So the question is, were all the history books before that wrong? No, they still described correct facts about Canadian history, but they just chose to not include those aspects. And so what the Russian government since the early 2000s has been trying is to fuse the two. And with the two, I mean the imperial heritage and stalinism. Because the 90s were a lot about cleaning up with Stalinism. One of the first civil society organizations in the modern Russia that was active even before 1990 was memorial. And their only task was to unearth the crimes of Stalinism and to discover the bodies and get people reconnected with the loved ones they had lost in that period. And from the early 2000s on, suddenly the Russian government, under the direction of President Putin, started this initiative of rehabilitating Stalin, who since the 1950s was Persona non grata within the Soviet structure. But they made an effort to rehabilitate Joseph Stalin, and with great success. Because every year in Russia there is a vote. The most important figure in Russian history and more and more it would be Joseph Stalin who was at the top of that list. And the way they went about it is arguing that Stalin won World War II and that was the moment of glory. And then they connected that with essentially just racist ideology. That Russia in the west there is often this idea that Russia is the defender of Christian conservatism and one of the last defenders of White cultures and nothing could be farther from the truth. Yeah, I do find that quite interesting and an interesting statistic. I recently saw a lot of people in the US on the right, they say the conservative values Russia is kind of still very traditional. And so then I looked at divorce rates, and divorce rates in Russia are among the highest in the world, which goes against a lot of the traditional kind of narrative that the Russian state kind of spews and that people on the right in the west kind of believe. And church attendance is also significantly lower than the United States, for example. But also this image of Russia as this white state, a lot of people apply that to Poland, also is significantly more appropriate as descriptive in Russia, because Russia is one of the most multi ethnic states in the world. And so the Russian empire in the Soviet Union was always also founded on colonial racism because the idea was, well, these are our lesser brothers, the younger brothers, and it is our right to govern them. So the Russian government in its memory politics is doing two things. On the one hand, it is legitimizing its own rule. As the successors to Stalin, who won World War II. We are in the right because we are the ones who beat fascism and Hitler. And on the other hand, we own all these lands and all these peoples that don't technically belong to an ethnic Russian state. But look at the Russian empire, how it built this wealth. And thus they achieve maximum effect. They legitimize their own government and they legitimize its control of the largest country on the world. How effective would you say Russian propaganda and its kind of memory culture is in actually getting the population that isn't ethnically white, so people living in Siberia behind it. Do you think that people in Siberia and people who aren't ethnically or aren't white, do they feel like the Russian state is providing for them and do they believe in the state propaganda or do you think there's a big disconnect? Well, the state is not providing for them like the average income. If you go to like where they're recruiting all the soldiers, buryatch is like $200 per month. And they are aware of being neglected. At the same time, when you talk about Russian propaganda, it is atrociously effective because they have in the 2010s, they eliminated any sort of media that is beyond that reports beyond what the government wants society to know. Once they invaded Ukraine, they eliminated even the marginally controversial media offices. But the main gateway is always school. And this is a great topic actually to talk to people in Canada about or Even the United States, because you are probably familiar with the whole idea school is leftist indoctrination. You may have heard that one before. Yeah, it's something that's going around and it is always important to. If you want to fight back against that, you have to first concede that that is that not the leftist, but school is indoctrination. It's. We write that in our constitutions. The Bavarian constitution, which is I'm most familiar with, explains exactly what school is supposed to do. It's supposed to make young people good patriots who believe in God. It's an old constitution. It's. It's a. But the whole point of school is to socialize next generations to believe in the state they live in. But you know where the difference is between, for example, the Canadian school system and the Russian school system is that the Canadian school system is governed by board, and the boards have members and directors, and people can be voted into those boards. And then these boards democratically vote on which textbooks to include how the curriculum looks. So countries like Canada, like Germany, we are very transparent about the indoctrination we are looking for, and we create avenues to democratically intervene at that. So. And you know, in the United States, people are currently unhappy with the school boards are doing. So they have themselves elected and they try to change it. And that is a democratic process. Of course, they're getting themselves elected by saying, this is undemocratic and I need to stop this, and they're just being duplicitous. They are not arguing in good faith. In Russia, that does not exist. There is one curriculum that is decided, decided at the federal level. And at the federal level, there is like, not on the provincial level or state level, how you say it, in the states or in Canada, there are no school boards. There is just so basically the most powerful person in Russia on the mind of young people, is the person sitting in Moscow in government and choosing the history book, because that history book is going to be read by everybody. And as soon as the war in Ukraine started, they issued a new version of the history book, which already had Donetsk and Luhansk as part of Russia. And that talks about all these other territories of Russia. And this war has been going on for like, we are now 20, 25, we are through year three of this war. And you have to consider these are like, if this textbook was introduced when kids were 14, 14 to 18, that is such a significant milestone in a young person's life. And if this is all they heard in that time, that is the history they know. So you would say that the early education or education in general is the largest form of indoctrination in Russia at least, or are there any. What would you say is another form of indoctrination that the state does very well in Russia? Complete control over the media. There is this joke going around on X these days about one of the Russian negotiators saying that in the European Union there is so much censorship and he's writing it on X, a platform which in Russia is banned, where most of the social media platforms are banned and the Russian government even introduced, they have a kill switch that they technically can disconnect the Russian Internet from the rest of the world Internet in order to make sure that people don't see information they don't want them to see. It's not as aggressive as in China at this point. What would you say is the difference between the Chinese kind of censorship and the Russian censorship? Is China inching ever closer to what, what Russia's system is or are there still some fundamental differences? Oh no, the Chinese would be considered more aggressive simply because. And here's a fun experiment to do. I gave a talk about censorship and social media a while back and people were very upset about social media, understandably. And I asked them, well, how would you feel about a system where you can only register with your own name and you can only have one social media account and you need to register that account with your state ID so that your identity can be tested or checked, that you are really who you are? And there was a lot of acclaim for this model and then explained to them, yeah, that's what China is doing. There's just the one state run social media platform and you only have one account and basically everything you say online can be traced back to you. And that is the most efficient way of control because then you have everybody doing the censorship for you because they'll self censor before they say anything that could have them lose their job or lose access to education or minimize their access to healthcare and so forth. Yeah, that's self censorship is also something that I've kind of noticed, as some people mentioning in the US even at this point where at least you know, when you come to the U.S. there's talks of kind of immigration services being able to check what you've said on social media and other platforms. And it feels like at least in that regard the current US administration might be drifting more and more towards a system where people say self censoring as well, while at the same time Presenting themselves as the champions of free expression and free speech and haters of cancel culture. Yeah, I guess we could move to Ukraine. Specifically, how Ukraine's memory, traditions and identity narratives have evolved, especially since 2014 and then more recently after the full invasion in 2022. In that regard, Ukraine is such a fascinating example. And again, with relation to Canada, very relevant to our audience, I hope, at least, because Ukrainian memory, culture or commemorative practice of for the longest time took place outside of Ukraine, because Ukraine tried to gain independence at the tail end of World War I. They failed. And there was some support for national autonomies in the early Soviet Union, but that was cracked down on during World War II. And then you had the period after 1945 where national sentiment was banned in the Soviet Union, but there was a desire for an independent Ukrainian state. And Canada was one of the main locations where Ukrainian identity was articulated to this day. Like in the 1990s and the 2000s, the famine of the 1990s, the Holodomor became one of the focal points of Ukrainian identity. But the first Holodomor monument in the world was erected in 1983 in Edmonton. And Canada was where you had the Ukrainian folk dances and the Ukrainian folk songs and the Easter celebrations. Our listeners who are from middle or northern Alberta will know about Wegerville and the Ukrainian Easter egg, the Vagraville pistol and the massive sausage. So a lot of the memorial work was done here, and it had that folkloristic element a little bit to it. I mean, the Holodomor is not folklore, but you know, the dresses and the dances and Cossacks and the riding. And that then continued in Ukraine in the 1990s and 2000s, where you looked at, you know, the Cossacks and the Kyivan Rus, which is the conflict with the Russian. Well, the current Russian government, because they both lay claim to the same medieval history. But there has been a marked shift since 2014 and even more so after 2022, because the Russian model is based on this romantic idea of there being a pure nation and its kind come under attack and we need to defend it. And the Ukrainian nation over the past decade has adopted much more of the European model. We talked about Germanskultur before. And the German model is about imagining a liberal Western democracy that accommodates minorities and people living in the margins and creates a strong, if not utopian, but at least equal society. And Ukraine has shifted significantly. And to give you one telling example, after 2014, I think 2015, there was the first attempt to stage a pride parade. In the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, it was a small group and they were beaten up by thugs. They had to disperse after a while. 2022. Well, just before 2022, like, when it comes up, suddenly these pride parades are everywhere and supported by society. And the Ukrainian armed forces, when they recruit in 2022, they make a public statement about that. They actually accept homosexual servicemen, men and women, into their military. They even have their own back badges, unicorns. There's always that irony there. And so that they actually have this vision of a multicultural society, which Ukraine also historically is. You have a Muslim population, you have a Jewish population. President Zelensky has a Jewish background, you have Orthodox Christian, you have that special Ukrainian Catholic tradition. So they have this vision as part of the European project. In that sense, it's also very easy not to make the distinction between Russia and Ukraine and why Ukrainians won't just lay down their weapons and say, well, okay, we're part of a different government now. And it's going to be, you know, just as terrible as before, because Ukraine actually offers them a very different vision of the country and of the freedoms it provides for its individual citizens than what they have to look forward in the Russian empire. And when did you think that shift really set cemented itself? A shift away from kind of feeling, maybe as part of the Soviet Union, towards feeling more anchored in Europe and closer to the European Union? It's a generational shift, like the. If you look at the numbers, like the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, this is when people who grew up in the 80s were of age. And the 80s are so significant for Ukraine because that's when the reactor disaster at Chernobyl happened. And this was the galvanizing moment where Ukrainian society said, you know what? Maybe we're better served by people who are not sitting in Moscow and who apparently don't care about us. And so this is 20 years later now. So you have that young generation who's come to age, and then 2014, you have, you know, on the streets, the first generation that was born and had grown up only in a Ukrainian state. And at the same time, this Ukrainian state had been offering the opportunities to travel to Europe, to work in Europe. And slowly, and this is probably one of the main reasons for Russia's attack on Ukraine, slowly, there emerged this vision of a society that could work differently. Yeah. And during the Soviet Union in the 80s, 90s, or even 70s, did you already see expressions of national identity within Ukraine, or was it, for one, forbidden and two people just didn't care too much to express their national identity. Back then, it was mainly that it was forbidden is too strong a word because it was never officially forbidden. But national movements were systematically eradicated, for example, by nobody forbade the Ukrainian language. There were some periods where it was forbidden, but nobody came out and said it. But you simply say, well, if you work for the government, then you speak Russian. The problem, of course, is in a socialist society where the government owns all enterprise, as soon as you move into the city and have the good jobs, you are working for the government. And so a lot of this was eradicated, but the nationalist movement was consistently there. And again, there's a Ukrainian Canadian crossover here because I assume the listeners, even though they probably have mixed opinions, but they know who Kristia Freeland is. And Kristia Freeland is Ukrainian Canadian. And in the 1980s, there's a. Was a marvelous story in the Globe and Mail about this. A while back, she traveled to Ukraine to help organize the national movement there. So she. There's a huge KGB file because they followed her every move. But she apparently managed to evade and elude them more often than not. And she met with the national representation there and led discussions and helped them articulate the political program. And so this is when the Ukrainian identity that had been taking a rest in Canada, so to speak, returned back and connected with the national movement that was there at the time. So when Ukrainians came to Canada, they did feel a connection to Ukraine and not the Soviet Union. You'd say not all of them. Of course, you can't speak for everybody, but especially the closer you come to the present, like if you look at immigrants from 1908 who identify as Ruthenian, they will first and foremost identify as Orthodox Christians who happen to be from the Russian empire. But it's a funny thing about state sponsored violence that it often has the opposite effect. Rather than eradicating the movement, it will reinforce the under. If you target a group for their identity, eventually that group will think, oh, I guess we are these people because they're killing us for it. And this is also one thing always important to remember about the Ukrainian experience. We all grew up with the stories of our parents and grandparents. And if you're a Ukrainian and you grew up with the stories of your parents and grandparents, it goes kind of like this. You had the end of World War I, and so there was the death toll there. And then there was the attempt for independence, which was brutal, crushed by the Nastan Soviet Union. Then you had the forced collectivization of the 1920s with deportations and slave labor and murder. And then if you survived that, then you had the famine of the 1930s, which was again directed at Ukrainians. If you survived that, then in the late 1930s, you had the Stalinist purges with almost a million dead, a large portion of them Ukrainians. Then you had World War II, in which Ukrainians significantly per capita outnumbered the other victims of the Soviet Union. And then you have the suppression afterwards and Chernobyl. So the closer you get to the present, the more Canadian. Ukrainian expats living in Canada have this visceral connection to their homeland, because it has to do with losing grandparents, losing parents, losing siblings, losing. Losing their own children. And that's passed on from generation to generation. And when did most of them kind of come to Canada? Was it in the wake of the 1930s and a lot of more or when was the largest wave of immigration from Ukraine to Canada? We talked about three waves, and they were equally sizable relative to the population at the time. We have to consider population growth grows exponentially in the 19th and 20th century. So population of 1900 is not the population of 1930. And so the first wave is around 1900. And Canada is actively inviting these people to settle land west of the Red River Colony. They have the treaty lands with the first nations, and now they want to push the first nations out as quickly as possible to claim the land. So they get these settlers from Central and Eastern Europe, and a lot of Ukrainians are among them. But then, yes, the most motivated and most aggressive move out of Ukraine is probably actually the 1920s with forced collectivization. That's also when all the Mennonites come because their rights to live their religion freely is under fire. So they come to Canada for that. That's also when the Ukrainians come. And then again the 1930s, those who do survive or those who are able to leave during the famine, they also come. So the Ukrainians who came here typically always came under the effect of massive trauma. Okay, that's interesting. And just comparing the amount of people that came from Ukraine as opposed to the rest of the Soviet Union, it seems that Canada has a lot more people that came from Ukraine than, let's say, from Russia. Is there a particular reason for that? Is it kind of the aforementioned kind of three waves and the things that happened there that brought them, instead of many Russians to settle in Canada? On the one hand, Ukrainians were the most motivated to leave, but at the same time, you always have to consider that Russian immigration policies until the 1960s were deeply racist. And so Canada actually didn't want to have Ukrainians and later didn't want to have Hungarians. And after the Armenian genocide, they didn't want to have Armenians. Why, for example, not Armenians? Well, because according to the thinking at the time, Armenians were Asians. And at the time there was a ban on immigration from Asia. And so technically, Canada wanted, you know, they wanted Irish and British, maybe German, French in some parts, but there was distrust there always. But they couldn't get them because they had stopped migrating en masse. So they actually sent agents to Ukraine because they seemed like they weren't really white. But, you know, they sort of, you could work with them. So that also plays into that. To come to a close here for listeners who want to go a bit deeper, what's one book or piece that you'd recommend that helps make sense of these memory traditions? Well, for Canadian, for Canadian audiences, it always has to be national dreams. It always has to be national trees. I always forget the author, but it's a wonderful book that talks about all of the narratives that are central to the Canadian story, the Canadian Pacific Railway, the rcmp, and tells you how somewhat innocuous historical facts were turned into central tenets, Canadian mythology. And like the best example is always the Canadian Pacific Railway, which is, if you go to high school in Canada, it is. Well, they built the railway and suddenly people in east and west of Canada thought they were Canadian. And that was the goal from the beginning, which is, you know, not what it was. It was an economic enterprise to get goods from the ports in New Westminster and Vancouver into the rest of the country. And then in hindsight, it was re narrated in this sense. So if you're Canadian, national dreams is always a great starting point to start reflecting on how memory, cultures and cultural memory is articulated. Thank you very much, Professor Gusna. It was a pleasure for you having you join me. This was a very thoughtful conversation. I really appreciate your time and thank you to our listeners for tuning into Iona Asks. You can find more episodes through the Iona Journal of Economics website and on Spotify. Until next time,