announcer: you are watching american history tv, all weekend, every weekend on c-span3. up next, university of kansas professor nathan wood natha.n wood looks at the state -- professor nathan wood looks at the state of eastern european countries in the aftermath of world war i, and following the collapse of the german, austro-hungarian and russian empires. he discussed the reasons for the violence and chaos that continued in countries such as bolshevik russia, and in newly-formed states such as poland and hungary. the national world war i museum and memorial in kansas city, missouri hosted this talk as part of their annual symposium. >> it is a pleasure to be in this portion with our next speaker. dr. nathan wood is an associate professor at the university of kansas, where he teaches and researches 19th and 20th century eastern europe. his publications include a co-edited cluster, the 2019 modern modernity derailed them of the urban experience in three polish cities during the great war. --becoming metropolitan, urban selfhood, and the making of modern kraków, poland. he investigates early adapters, journalists, artists and the state in poland. he is right on board with your planes, trains, and automobiles joke earlier. looking at all of that from their introduction, he is also working on a world war i sourcebook which will include more material from the eastern front. ladies and gentlemen, it is a true pleasure to end this portion of our lecture with our friend dr. nathan wood. would you please join me in welcoming him? [applause] professor wood: good afternoon, everyone. what a pleasure it is to be here today. over the years, i have sought every opportunity to come to invite friends and others here to this jewel of a museum and memorial in kansas city. thank you laura and camille, for your organization of this supposing. i am also grateful to matt taylor and jonathan casey, who every spring hosts might i students in my world war class just below us downstairs. maybe we are going underground. may next to us. downstairs, nonetheless, and shows him the archives, the materials kept in this absolutely awesome collection. after the bolshevik revolution of 1917, there was a period of relative calm on the eastern front, as the bolsheviks tried to withdraw russia from the war, and the negotiations associated with the treaty sought to provide ukrainian grain to citizens who were starving because of the allied blockade. we heard about this blockade several times today. but instead of peace and bread that the bolsheviks promise, ,ivil war, instability nationalist violence, disease and hunger tore through eastern and central europe, displacing and killing millions. suffering continued long after the war was over, as citizens and leaders sought to come to terms with two major political visions to emerge from the war, revolution and nationalism, the sort of bolshevik-style revolution. as a wonderful german history has written in his book, "the vanquished," between 1917-1920, europe experienced no fewer than 27 violent transfers of power, many of them accompanied by latent or open civil wars. and he points out how. when you think about the tremendous geopolitical change that occurred during this period, you had an arc of violence from finland all the way down to greece, and as we heard just recently, in the former ottoman space in turkey. and he also reminds us ireland as well was experiencing similar war, and in many respects similar to the violence we see in eastern europe, where nationalism in particular fueled the kinds of conflict that arose in the vacuum of power due to warfare. so as we know, the habsburg romanoff, ottoman empires all collapsed, along with governments in bulgaria, greece and italy. and an interesting point, not since the early years war since the 17th century had a period of interconnected wars as inchoate and deadly as in the years after 1917-1918. as a wars overlapped with revolutions and counter revolutions between border , border conflicts between emerging states, postwar europe between the end of the great war in 1918 in july 1923, was the most violent place on the planet. even if we exclude victims of the spanish flu and those who starved as a result of the allied blockade, more than 4 million people died as the result of armed conflict. there were also millions of refugees. warsaw, kraków, poland, vienna, these cities experienced tremendous suffering. so my recent article cluster, article on kraków explored attitudes toward modern, technical civilization as citizens looked at the experience of warfare in their cities. and what we found is that contrary to a lot of stories about world war i, where we think of the war as ushering in the modern, for many urbanites the war interrupted or perverted the modern. things they were accustomed to, electric streetcars, running water, electricity automobiles, , bicycles, all of these things were jeopardized by the war effort. for example, at a certain point in the war, they had to tear pipes out of the wall of their buildings because there was such a demand for metal from the austria-hungarian army, the authorities. cars were useless as points were disassembled further metal and rubber. for their metal and rubber. there was such a shortage of horses. if you had a large dog, great dane or similar large species, it was forced to be part of the war effort as a pack animal, to carry goods through the city. and of course, the experience of military dictatorship, control, requisitioning meant people experience the sort of pervasive influence of military and their lives, but also hunger and suffering. one of my colleagues has written about warsaw in his book "minor apocalypse." that the war experience for catholic polish speakers was worse in terms of everyday life and sustenance in the first world war than in the second. i want you to pause and think about that for a moment. we think about the warsaw uprising, the tremendous suffering. i have read memoirs, many the same thing, that hunger and deprivations were more severe during the first world war than during the second. so this was a period of tremendous instability. always tell my students is you have to think about the eastern front as being more mobile than the western front, so you had troops moving back and forth across villages , across cities, so the possibility for violence to spread was tremendous. i was very grateful for professor bristow's comments on commemoration and memory. and in this part of the world, there is not much opportunity to commemorate the kinds of suffering that occurred during and after the war, because it similar to what we heard in the previous talk, it doesn't fit the narrative very well. for the bolsheviks, the narrative was a successful revolution. and for the nationalists, the narrative was creation of a new nationstate. and if you consider the experience of polish soldiers in this war, polish speakers fought on both sides of the conflict. they fought against each other, because some had been in the howard: the german army, or the austro-hungarian army, and others have fought on the russian side. how do you commemorate their experience? how do you commemorate that suffering? because the only narrative that really mattered to the state was the successful achievement of statehood. so when i go to poland now and i look in bookstores, as historians do come in the history section, i find that the section on world war ii is three or four bookshelves long, top to bottom. it is massive. the section on the people's republic of poland, the communist era coming future as , huge as well, continues to grow. and you can usually fit the number of books on the first world war ii a single shelf, sometimes fewer than that. i am pleased, however, that a lot of new work is coming out, both in polish language scholarship and in english, some of it by young germans who have been very influential for my own thinking. so let's proceed to what i would say are my major arguments. one is that the continued violence and suffering in the region was the result of the immense pressures of total war and catastrophic failure of each of the empires in the region to deal with those strains. all the empires failed. i agree that the ottoman empire probably would have soldiered on , in terms of the austro-hungarian empire. nationalists created the story that it was tottering and due to fail. nationalists created a story that it was the prison of the people. if you read the new history on the habsburg empire, the author makes a compelling argument that it is really the war that is the undoing of the empire, it is not fact that there were multiple nationalities vying for more political rights or greater opportunities. the empire was flexible enough in many respects to deal with that sort of conflict. but it was the war that was really catastrophic. and another one that professor johnson's excellent points was that it was the actual military dictatorship, the way the army ran the war, and the way the army had control over civilians, requisitioning your car, types your pipes from your walls, set curfews, dictate what you could and couldn't eat, confiscating things you tried to get when you went foraging in the countryside because you were so hungry. it is that that really sours people's loyalty to the empire. they went to the war for the most part loyal to their respective imperial rulers. secondly, and this is a similar point, and it is one that bears stressing, that the mere existence of multilingual and multi-ethnic diversity did not cause the violent. violence. historians that study the part of the world i study get frustrated with the concept of ethnic violence. it obscures way more than it illuminates. it is not a helpful concept. it presupposes diversity is itself a source of conflict. and that is simply not true. for most of human history, people have lived side-by-side with people not necessarily similar to themselves. they find ways to communicate, they find ways to do business. , meaning atability system you can understand, and there are laws, people may have antagonisms or phobias about those who are different from them, but they don't spontaneously combust into violence, for the most part. what happens, what causes the violence is entrepreneurs, what you might call nationalist entrepreneurs, or revolutionary entrepreneurs, activists. so when we speak of the violence that occurs here, we have to be precise. we have to be very careful not to say the polish did this that presume it accounts for all people there. most people, most of the time are in different to these sorts of things. they prefer to do with their families and be left alone. polish locals in the borderland regions famously, when they were surveyed after the war, called themselves just that, locals. we are from here. they didn't identify with polish nationalism or ukrainian nationalism or nascent belarusian nationalism. these peasants in the countryside said, we are from here. and they weren't being ignorant, they were actually being shrewd. they did not want to be a part of this fratricidal conflict that was roiling this territory. here is my clicker. so, this leads us to the next point, locals often experience the violence as a civil war the fratricidal conflict. , aand this is a point he makes very well in his new book on the eastern european civil war. and i will try to illustrate that point a little more later on, but people who primarily were catholic, polish-speaking peasants could still see primarily lithuanian-speaking or ukrainian-speaking peasants as their brothers, not as their enemies. it was the violence that escalated national divisions that later sort of hardened in this region. ok, another thing that made this so messy, of course, was two major ideologies of the 19th century, social equity and social justice, ideologies arising out of in many respects the french revolution, and national self-determination and democracy, both had a very powerful impact in trying to deal with instability in the region afterwards. and this is the the author makes point very well, it made the fighting no longer about a soldier representing his state and fighting for his emperor or his state. now it was an existential conflict. so now you have fighting about sort of fundamental existence, and increasingly, modes and mechanisms of identification and self identification. you are fighting for your life , for your family's life, for your very existence. and in that regard, the warfare that followed the great war anticipated the horrors of the second world war, which has superseded in public memory. so the first world war, i am glad to say in terms of scholarship, is getting more its due. we are understanding ways that the first world war in this part of the world has much more in common with the second world war, including genocide and civilian violence. right? a lot of times we think of that really coming to the fore with the second world war, but i have been telling my students for years, on the eastern european front and in the ottoman empire, people were already experiencing this kind of violence in the first world war. i know there were atrocities on the western front as well, but it is much more widespread here. ok so i would like to give i hope, of the things, that help me justify these arguments. the first comes from one of the most influential books i read in graduate school, and this was the memoir of a polish-speaking village mayor, who titled his book in english, from serfdom to self-government. and this book talks about his own realization, he says i did not know i was polish until i learned to read. so he acknowledged the fundamental dynamic where he lived in the village was between serf and lord, and when he became liberated, he increasingly identified with polish national sentiment from a polish self identification. but what is vitally important to remember is he could still be a loyal habsburg subject and a loyal polish patriot. that was not contradictory for him or many, many other people at the time. and his description of the war for me was just amazing when i first read this as a graduate student. when russian troops arrived, everyone in the village was test terrified. the village mayor had to go out and meet the lead officer and treat them with tremendous respect, ask him to quarter his horses in his barn, and as the successive waves of armies moved back and forth across his theage, the violence, deprivation got worse. and he noted that the hungarians were the first to treat his village like an occupied power. own army,ords, his the habsburg army, treated him badly. he writes that the last russian retreat, the enemy took away all males from 15 to 50 years of age, and all horses and cattle, but a few men managed to run away and get back home but the rest were deported to the urals. there were shortages of everything, fuel, fat, clothing, , coal oil, sugar, prices skyrocketed. desperate people resorted to looting and burglary, disease ravaged the countryside. austrians regained control and when theaustrians regained , they instituted rations, but the system was unfair, so farmers tried to hide their crops and wait for a better price. this often resulted in spoiled produce and grain benefiting no one. and so then when austrian ties began to shift at the end of the war, and more importantly when polish patriots felt the austrians betrayed them with a ceding some territory polish nationalists thought should be there, to ukraine, he got riled up in this up swell of polish patriotism. now remember, before he was perfectly capable of being a polish patriot and a loyal habsburg citizen, a mayor for exemplary mayor for four decades. so on february 18, 1918, there was a major strike, the mayor, who had been a loyal mayor, went to a gathering in a neighboring city, where he asked for a word at the end. the 75-year-old mayor denounced the central powers, removed the cross of merit awarded to him by the habsburg regime for his years of service, and gave it to the chairman and requested it be sent back to vienna. the village mayor faced with the ineptitude and brutality of his government during the war chose to side with the polish nation, whom he called his brothers and sisters, instead. so this is an example of how the war shifted toward nationalism. as a potential solution. another example that affected me it iny when i read graduate school was these intercepted letters from the front. these letters show the appeal of bolshevism. in both cases, these were soldiers who were captured and spent some time in russia, and in both cases, these are letters that they tried to write back to either friends in russia or their family back home, and in both cases they are spouting bolshevik language, bolshevik ideology, socialist ideology, essentially arguing, "what did my fatherland give me, stupid ox that i am? my reward is prison and persecution." this soldier has been captured by the russians. he bravely escapes from being captured by the russian, shows up for regular service, and because he has been in russia, the habsburgs didn't trust him and put him back in prison. come in confinement. he is obviously using the language of social revolution. so these ideologies are certainly arising in this area. era. what i think i have benefited from lately, from reading a new book, is this idea of war without end, or civil war that continues. his use of this terminology to include nearly all of the conflicts that are happening at the end of the war. so there is this quotation here where you can see that the war, which finished in autumn, has not died away, but has transformed itself into a state of permanent chaos. formally, the regular war has stopped, but the catastrophe of which the war was only the first act, goes on and on and is far from over. who knows if it is only in its initial stage. so this is written in april, 1919. fighting continues and is spiraling out of control. so what is going on? well, you see here on this map , poland had- sorry vilnius.t in poland fought the polish bolshevik war against the soviet union, the farthest point of polish advance. here is the furthest point of soviet advance. fought in one western area -- i hope to talk about that in just a bit. there was conflict with czechoslovakia over this border , and a conflict explicitly with germany. so you could look at these as all state to state conflicts, urges us to think about it as an interconnected civil war. there were paramilitary groups, local warlords. state forces often had difficulty mustering local troops. and disaggregating the size of the conflict on the ground was never simple. the soldierly experience was much messier than international and international conflict. the diary of a polish-speaking soldier, who titled his memoir, "swashbuckler," they were in the jewish part of a ukrainian village, broke into jewish homes there at night, pillaged and raped. he claims the women liked it, and then he observed it was not military-like to conduct their inspection by night. they should have done it by day. and he even reflected that what what happened was more like a pogrom. sense of tremendous violence and instability, and the kinds of fighting happening in the spaces were not traditional state to state conflicts, where officers had control. the ragtagbout buildup of these trips enforces, some of the soldiers had been fighting on the eastern front for a long time and just wanted to go to their families. they were forced at gunpoint to continue fighting, but now for a situation to try to achieve local aims. we have to remind ourselves of the way nationalism and socialism worked in the 19th century in this region. the 19th century was remarkably peaceful. there was a moment of what we ight call socialist violence in 1846 when polish peasants ose up and murdered local landlords and in a few instances, gave the heads of local landlords to local ustrian authorities. there were nationalist uprisings in the 1830's, in the 1850's. there were state-sanctioned programs. in the russian settlement. of course there was the russian evolution of 1905. but as victor prusin writes in his book "the lands between," despite animosities, the borderlands remained largely violence free. so, what makes the change? it is the experience of warfare, the instability of these new borders. here are some more examples of the kinds of violence that are happening in this region. when you think about it, going back to this map, there are bolshevik style revolutions in berlin, in munich, in vienna, and in budapest. essentially every state that collapsed had a socialist style, bolshevik style revolution. the very first polish government was led by a socialist. everywhere, the appeals of nationalism and socialism was apparent. the case of hungary is interesting, where you have -- they see themselves as national patriots. in hungary, the white guards sought to crush revolutionaries in a frenzy of violence. someone had spent time in the soviet union working with bolshevik leaders who himself led a bolshevik style revolution in hungary. they were in power for the spring and summer of 1919, then it crushed by the romanian and czechoslovak troops. as my predecessor at ku observed, there were some similarities between the hungarian revolution of october 1918 and at the russian revolution in march 1917. in both cases, revolution came as a result of economic breakdown at home. in both cases, the new leaders were middle and upper class liberals who wanted to keep or restore prewar boundaries. in both cases, the new governments existed side-by-side with workers and councils. after the communists took power, many former imperial officers served in the new red armies out of patriotism to defend the homeland. there were also differences. she points out that in russia, there was a complete breakdown of the old political and social structures, and a widespread peasant movement to divide the greater states. this did not occur to any significant extent in hungary, although the peasants turned against the government because its land reform was not sufficient for them. in russia, there was a well organized bolshevik party whose leader, lenin, proved to be not only the most ruthless, but the greatest political strategist in russia in this period. he made peace with germany and austria-hungary. in order for them to remain in power. and with trotsky, he led the bolsheviks to victory in the ivil war of 1918-1921. in hungary, there was not really a strong communist party. on the contrary, they had to make compromises with the social democrats. the main reason for his defeat was the joint attack of czechoslovak and romanian armies. here is a propaganda leaflet that would have been prevalent in the fall of 1919. mmisar of the co workers counsel was being shown as robbing a veteran. it is also an anti-semitic poster. when you hear how the white guards in hungary, who operated much like their counterparts in germany, thought about what they were doing, you heard the language of bolshevism and nationalism. here is a quotation from a hungarian officer. we shall see to it that the flame of nationalism leaps igh. we shall punish those who for months have committed heinous crimes. and since bolshevism, in the eyes of counterrevolutionaries, was a result of a "jewish conspiracy," their attacks were focused against jews. they listed 3000 jewish victims of the white terror. we have asked ourselves, to what extent is this ethnic conflict or civil warfare? here is a quotation from someone in lithuania, who essentially points out in a conversation he had with a local that it used to be one, but now there is a border. there is a war on. is that how things should e? don't we all go to the same hurch? isn't it a disaster that brothers are divided and ighting? even though people may have spoken different native tongues, hey still saw the kinds of fighting that were happening as opportunists trying to work out oundaries. the example of fighting in lundberg illustrates this point. i would like to use this as an example for the larger point. 101 years ago yesterday, ukrainian troops took an area, and jews in this city by and large remained neutral. it angered poles, who had been ominant in the city. there were clashes between polish and jewish paramilitaries. one of the things that has really interested me as i dug into this topic is to find out there were jewish aramilitaries. for example, a pogrom in krakow, polish youth and jewish youth both fought each other in the street to outdraw. the tragedy is it had not really occurred in the city before. it was the context of the war that made this possible. as the tensions between those who identified as poles and those who identified as ukrainians heated up, political leaders wanted a political solution. they did not want to endorse the violence that was beginning to happen. it turns out it was really hard to recruit soldiers for both sides. ukrainians wanted to get ome. many poles had to be forced at gunpoint to join the ranks. there was street fighting, there were atrocities, including rapes and violence against women and children. as you see in this painting from few years later, an effort to commemorate the polish taking of the city, teenagers feature prominently. this young woman in front there as part of the fighting. but they point out that these officers on either side had been fighting together on the austria-hungarian side. there were instances where they preferred to sit and smoke together rather than have their soldiers fight each other. and there were instances where city authorities or the part of he city that was not held by ukrainians, they would declare a cease-fire so the local poles who lived there could still go out and go shopping. port city authorities, despite the fact there was a war on, who is going to run the city now? what state is it going to belong to? the city waterworks, power station, were both under by national committees. there were efforts to ensure they could still get to the city. his was a city that had poles, ukrainians, and jews before the war, and now people are fighting over who gets to run the city fterwards. poland eventually won. over nine months, approximately 10,000 poles and 15,000 ukrainian soldiers died in battle. 25,000 polish speakers ended up in prison camps, and about 100,000 ukrainian speakers suffered a similar fate. these are really massive numbers in this region. there is little academic research done on this, but one study estimates of fifth of these prisoners of war died of infectious diseases. indeed, typhus was tearing through the region, along with the resurgence of tuberculosis, and as we heard today, the spanish influenza. it follows a similar pattern. the only difference is there were very few lithuanians. they wanted a capital city, lithuanian nationalists did, but there were not many lithuanians who lived there. the number of casualties were much lower. it was easier for the poles to seize the city. i think this is really fascinating. he says it is very striking that both in the taking of the cities, the topic of civil war between brothers resurfaces time and again. it shows the contemporaries who lived in this part of the continent characterized as they were by cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity, did not always think in clearly defined ethnic categories. it was the course and outcome of the civil war itself, the changing tactics and coalitions, the use of propaganda, like we saw that poster earlier with the jewish looking kolesar stealing from veterans, and violence itself was defining belonging. previously overlapping categories of identity were forced into new channels clearly distinct from one another. i would like now to just talk about a couple other instances of these kinds of violence. one very bad one to mention is something but i think we all sort of know about, and if there was anything universal about these soldiers, it was violence against jews. it was written in a fantastic book, "the jewish century," jews and armenians and greeks fulfilled particular roles in this part of the world. it did not sit well with the new scenario, where nationalists wanted to seize the reins of power. anti-jewish, anti. polish and anti-german violence started in the western borderlands. from 1917 on lands, the borderlands experience mass killing. in ukraine alone, some 1500 anti-jewish pogroms cost the lives of between 50000 and 60,000 people. the perpetrators were soldiers of the white, red, and ottoman armies. anti-jewish violence in the region transcended as a vision between the military victors and losers, and was much more pointedly a transnational phenomenon. this really was in many respects the most discernible form of ethnic violence. during the war, as the troops moved back and forth, people were increasingly, their loyalty was increasingly under doubt because, usually in this period, it was more of a religious identity. many jews had already perished in eastern europe as the russian and central power armies moved back and forth. this helps to explain the kind of violence that also occurred in the ottoman empire. astonishingly, ukrainians were hung as spies by austrian authorities because the presumption was they would be loyal to russia. there is an even better explanation for the armenian genocide. it made this kind of violence ossible. to wind down, i will show you a couple paintings that are of the russian civil war, but i think they help to illustrate the point i am talking about more in eastern europe. not exclusively just in the russian civil war. just the intimacy and proximity of the violence. you see here how there are troops coming in, firing directly at villagers in their homes. this painting here, i think it is really quite fascinating. on the one hand, it suggests refugees, people who are being forced from their home, and they are taking things of value. but speaking of taking things of value, i don't think this guy here with the phonograph and a very nice china plate is taking something from his family home. he has a leather jacket, a -- he has a rifle, and he is casually smoking a cigarette as he walks with these plundered items. and plundered definitely was a major feature of the instability in this region. one of the diaries that i used in my recent article about krakow during the war includes an entry in which a man writes about his home just outside of krakow. if you went to the salt mines, you went there. he says nine armed bandits asked if the lord was home, then broke in. they engaged in a firefight with his cook before fleeing. they were informed of the attack and he writes, they did nothing bout it. plunder is an important feature. of course, there is hunger and disease. in serbia in 1916 and 1917, there was a tremendous problem with hunger and disease. in the russian civil war, as many as 1 million to 2 million ied of starvation. in 1921-1922. between 3.4 million and 6.5 million people per year or infected in the territory of the polish republic in 1918 and 1919 with typhus. again, listen to how wide these numbers are. 68,000 to 130,000 likely ied. typhus ravaged russia, ukraine, and poland between 1919 and 1921. some of the records we have of this are from the very relief organizations that we learned about in that fantastic talk earlier today. american authorities would write back about the appalling conditions they witnessed. i will just note two of them. they noted the poverty due to the movement of troops through the villages and displacement of populations. hat created perfect conditions for the propagation of epidemic disease. in one village in northeastern oland, which has been recently vacated by the bolsheviks, the entire population of the village was huddled in a single building, which was itself in an advanced state of disrepair. in another case, relief organizations found a mother and her children huddling in a galvanized cistern like dogs in a kennel, because returning to their village they could not even find where their house had been. they simply could not even find it. that is how much the village had been destroyed. this obviously was a major source of instability. in the case of the russian civil war, requisitioning, something that stalin himself -- stalin cut his teeth being part of overseeing the requisitioning of food and livestock from the peasants -- was a way of starvation. we typically think of the starvation that happened in the late 1920's and early 930's. and yet, there were already millions dying of this sort of suffering. as i conclude, i want to give a really interesting example. vienna was also connected to this kind of instability. not exactly in the same ways i have been talking about, but another favorite book that i recommend, it is the diary of a viennese woman. she writes about her experience in the war, which she lost nearly all of her family members. her husband died very early on. he was a physician. she had a son who died in the war. she had another son who was blinded in the war. she had another son who suffered what we might call ptsd and then became a socialist and hated his own family, tried to shoot the other brother in the house. and she lost a granddaughter to he violence. and she writes in the end of her memoir that she hoped would be published and read in multiple languages, war is a crime. it is hatched by madmen who are a serious danger to society, though they appear to be of sound mind and are tolerated in our midst. these lunatics, by skillfully exciting and appealing to the noblest and most sacred feelings of which the human heart is capable, in fact millions with their war mania. they misuse these feelings such as patriotism, self-sacrifice, and death-defying courage with cynical unconcern to let them sink into the earth in streams of blood. war is a crime. she goes on making this point, and she ends with an anecdote. her grandson was playing with a friend, and they play acted war. the one boy was an austrian and his friend was a frenchman. and they were shooting at each other. she writes, i have never lost my temper with him and never struck him. but this time, each of the enemy powers got a box on the ear from me, which was none too gentle. it was the expression of my very deep and spontaneous indignation. his father and uncle were direct sacrifices to the war at the front. he was playing at more. -- war. in tears, he begged to be forgiven. i explained to him that war was the most abominable institution in the world, yet it ought to be utterly done away with. he must promise me never to play at war again. but daddy says when someone hits me, i must hit him back, he answered rather defiantly, and the frenchman hit me. there it is. when someone hits us, we think e must hit back. therein lies the secret of all wars. i am not downplaying this at all. i think her lived experience counts for something. this is important. this was the conclusion she drew from her baleful experience of the war. it reminds me when david kennedy was here and he talked about at the end of his talk about an experience with his uncle. he was privileged to hang out with his uncle and local leaders of the community. as they were driving home, he thanked his uncle. his uncle said, i was with those men in france. and they did things you would just never believe. kennedy concluded his talk by citing another book. john dower's book, "war without ercy." atrocities follow war as a jackal follows the wounded beast. i think that is an example of what we see here, these unintended consequences, the violence, and that splitting up of this region was due to the war and its ugly ending. i urge everyone to attend the talk about the ways the paris peace treaty try to work that out. thank you very much for your attention. [applause] lora: we are open for your questions. >> can i ask you to put up that major arguments like you have? i would like to understand what you are talking about. ok. please explain to me what an opportunist is. i don't understand that. is karl marx and opportunist? is vladimir lenin an opportunist? is adolf hitler and opportunist? what are we talking about? nathan: i am talking about the tendency we have in our language to speak of violence in sometimes sweeping terms, and to refer to ethnic violence in categories that refer to the whole group rather than paying attention to the actual actors. i guess by using this word opportunist, what i am trying to draw attention to is that particular people are making particular choices, but they are justifying what they are doing by saying it stands for a much larger group. so, yes, lenin is absolutely an opportunist in this regard. i am not quite sure how you are making the analogy with marx. >> all those years that karl marx spent in the library was just an act of an opportunist? nathan: i didn't agree with you on marx. i say that lenin is an opportunist. i think there is confusion with your question. but my fundamental point is we have to be cautious when we talk about the reasons for things happening in history that we don't ascribe them to a whole group of people. we have to pay attention to who has the power in these situations, who is making these sorts of things happen. it is not that there is an ancient hatred that makes violence happen. it is that they are opportunists. they are nationalists who make choices in particular situations hat help to foment that. once it starts, then ordinary people who experience personal violence, their brother was killed or their mother was raped, then they help to perpetuate that violence. that is what i was trying to get at at the end. it begets violence, perpetuates violence. but when we try to talk about the initial causes of the violence, we are looking backwards at this and saying, poland ukrainians could not get along. i think we are making a mistake. we are not paying attention to the actors who make this happen. lora: the nice thing about being t the symposium is this is a conversation that can continue over dinner. fabulous. [laughter] our next question? > can you discuss the proposed austrian and german decision to create a buffer poland in eastern europe as a client state or a buffer state between the russians and the central powers? it did not sound like that was met with too much success, from your comment quoting the polish mayor. but can you shed some light on that potential state? nathan: thank you very much for this question. we should note that both russia and the central powers proposed there would be an independent poland. they both did it for reasons that i would call opportunistic. they very much wanted to get the loyalty of polish patriots on their side. the german administration of warsaw was, as you would learn reading the professor's book "a minor apocalypse," exploited this. by claiming they might create a new polish state as a buffer zone, the most important thing the german administration was i don't think a lot of people believed it. it makes sense. the talks we had about the ottoman empire earlier, or about italy, people make promises. they make promises during the war. i think many of those promises are opportunistic. thank you. >> we will need to posit questions for now to continue at dinner, which hopefully you will be able to join us or be outside for a good conversational hour that will happen. could you shift to that reading list powerpoint slide? ladies and gentlemen, will you please put your hands together? [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] watching american history tv, all weekend, every weekend on c-span three. >> up next on lectures in history, guilford technical community college professor jeff kinard teaches a class about civil war weaponry and shares artifacts such as muskets, carbines, and revolvers. he describes how advances such as breach loading and rifle barrels allowed soldiers to fire fast