Local opinion: Can we learn the geography — and history — of war?

and analysis of the writer:

Mark Twain (who emerged as a writer during the Civil War) said “God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”

Some Americans anyway may learn geography from war, but not all. An American president, commenting to the press in advance of his summit with a war criminal (deemed so by the International Criminal Court), said the meeting would take place in Russia and that St. Petersburg is Leningrad. The summit was in Alaska and St. Petersburg has not been Leningrad since 1991. Except for a decade of being Petrograd, and three-quarters of a century of being Leningrad in the Soviet era, Russia’s second largest city was always named after Saint Peter.

With all due respect, Mr. Twain, learning some geography also means learning some history. In my opinion, no social studies teacher worth his salt teaches one without the other. But it’s “war” that interests people, especially children, not geography or history isolated in space and time. War is the glue that affixes people to the learning part.

It is true that until 1867 Russia owned Alaska. But maybe it is history, not geography, that the president doesn’t know — or both.

Israel, Gaza, the West Bank of the River Jordan and the Dead Sea, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, the Crimea, Ukraine, and other war-infected geographic spaces — are now infecting Americans with the confluence of war, geography, and history.

Now, the Russian invasion of Ukraine puts Ukrainian, Russian, and Eastern European geography and history front and center, but each near-meaningless without the other. Even our own Civil War cannot be fully explained without understanding the marriage of geography and history.

River to river, sea to sea (not to be confused with the Palestinian-Israeli fight over the phrase “from the river to the sea”) is the geographical and historical heartland of today’s fight between Russia and Ukraine. The “river road”—the Vistula River (Poland) to the Dnieper River (Ukraine) to the Black Sea. From the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea via river travel through the “Valley of the Rus”, as it was called, is the claimed origin-region of the Ukrainian, Russian, and Belorussian people. Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, located right on the Dnieper River, was in the heart of the Rus. The so-called Kievan State was born in the 9th and 10th centuries, and in the intervening millennium since has welcomed the remains of countless thousands of war dead — killed in turf battles over boundaries and resources. What has changed?

Kiev was in the geographic transition zone between woodlands and wetlands (where ancient Moscow was situated) and the huge magnificent fertile grasslands to the south known to us all as the steppes (almost half of Ukraine). The Valley of the Rus was the Eastern European transition zone between a Ukrainian-European identity and Russia’s hybrid identity — part European and part Asian.

The Valley of the Rus was also the transition zone between the Scandinavian north and the Byzantine south, and between Western and Eastern Christianity. Ukraine is European, knows it, and embraces it. Russia is a hybrid, culturally a mongrel, neither European nor Asian, neither modern nor ancient. The mongrel part may show up in strength but also in coarseness and cruelty.

To add a little more history to geography — for centuries the Mongols controlled the steppes. They regularly raided the wooded Muscovite villages to the north, and when the Russians finally defeated the Mongols for control of the steppes, the Russian czars adopted the Mongolian brutality.

Ponder how much geography, history, and culture may help explain Russia and America today. “God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”, as Mark Twain said, but are Americans capable of learning the lessons of war, geography and history? The Battle of New Orleans was fought, in substantial part, over control of our “river to the sea.” Fierce Civil War battles also were waged on the Mississippi River.

I think God created Mark Twain so that America could learn its identity. He’s ours, and no amount of cancelling Huckleberry Finn or Mark Twain “in eruption” will make him disappear.

Pinning down just how the Russian and Ukrainian identities overlap is a difficult task, and overlap they certainly do. But, learning some of the geography, history, and culture is a start. The examples of the overlapping abound.

For example, literary giant Leo Tolstoy gave us “Taras Bulba” to teach us about the fierce Zaporozhian (Ukrainian) Cossacks. And, the beloved Ukrainian-born writer Nikolai Gogol is claimed by both cultures. No amount of rewriting history will cancel either literary giant, but the outcome of war may very well determine and redraw the geographical future of both countries and cultures.

“Rivers to the sea”, the Ukrainian present married to its geography and history. Our own present married to our geography and history. Huck, Jim, slavery, and our “rivers to the sea” — our history, our geography, and our culture. War teaches all three, but the “learning” part remains in doubt.