In 2017, American journalist and filmmaker Johnny Harris was investigating life at the edge of nations.
It was a compelling idea. However, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting and Harris’s latest oeuvre tastes like something went off in the mix. There’s a foul taste that’s impossible for Ukrainians — or anyone with a passing interest in international affairs — to ignore.
On March 24, Harris posted a video on his YouTube channel called “Why is Russia so damn big?” where he shows Crimea as part of Russia.
In the 17-minute video, Harris, an international relations aficionado and Emmy-nominated producer, talks about Russia’s eastward expansion and its territorial changes over five centuries. He names the Kyivan Rus as Russia’s birthplace, delves into the Mongol invasion, and shows maps and photos to highlight different parts of the country.
He also includes a picture of the abandoned Hotel Polissya in Ukraine’s city of Chornobyl in the first minute of his video about Russia.
The documentary was viewed 1.1 million times and received over 10,000 comments, some of which pointed out his Crimea mistake.
Johnny Harris, American filmmaker and journalist, shows Crimea as part of Russia on a map included in his video published on March 24, 2021.
Harris is no novice in the field. As a journalist for Vox, an American news website, four years ago, Harris presented Emmy-winning investigative documentary video series called Vox Borders that featured stories about six borders around the world, from the Dominican Republic and Haiti to North Korea and Japan. They were a huge success as Harris tried to “humanize the lines on the map.”
However, for somebody with deep affection for borders, human stories and maps, the Russia video appears rather fragmented and one-sided.
Harris declined comment for this article.
The Crimea issue is a major problem. It has been seven years since the Autonomous Republic of Crimea was illegally annexed by the Russian Federation. The U.S. sanctioned Russia in response to its 2014 invasion and occupation of this Ukrainian peninsula. Most of the international community, including the EU and the U.S., does not recognize the annexation.
The loss of Crimea remains a deep wound for Ukrainians and Russia’s attempts to legitimize its conquest have only rubbed salt in it. In 2019, Apple changed the maps on its apps to meet Russia’s demands to show Crimea as part of Russia. Google has accommodated Russian interests as well. This was not well-received in Ukraine.
Harris also never mentions the fact that Kyivan Rus was not only the birthplace of Russia.
In the 2018 Honest History series, the Kyiv Post explained how the Kremlin falsifies the history of Kyivan Rus to undermine Ukrainian statehood. At its height in the mid‑11th century, Kyivan Rus was the largest state in Europe and, because of its control of key trade routes, one of the richest. According to the Russian Primary Chronicle, the state was founded in 882, when Prince Oleg, the brother-in-law of Rurik, founder of the Rus royal dynasty, conquered Kyiv, made it his capital, and proclaimed it the “mother city of the Rus.”
At the time, Kyiv was inhabited by Slavs who paid tribute to the Khazars, a confederation of mainly Turkic tribes who dominated the steppe in what is now eastern Ukraine, as well as eastern and southern Russia, the Caucuses, and parts of Central Asia as far as the Aral Sea.
Under Oleg, the various Rus states united into a single political unit stretching from the Baltic Sea, Lake Ladoga and Lake Onega in the north, to the tip of Crimea (though not the whole of the peninsula) in the south.
The area that is now southern and eastern Ukraine, though partly settled by Slavs, was mostly not part of Kyivan Rus. It stayed under the changing control of various tribes and invaders from the east.
After the reign of Grand Prince Yaroslav the Wise ended in 1054, Kyivan Rus gradually disintegrated due to feuding between the rulers of its various constituent principalities over the succession to the title of Grand Prince of Kyiv.
Kyivan Rus was finally doomed by the invasion of the Mongols from the east in 1237–1240. The state broke apart into separate Rus principalities that paid tribute to the invaders for centuries to come.
After a long period of domination by the Mongols and their Turkic successors, the Golden Horde, control of the area that had been Kyivan Rus was, by the beginning of the 16th century, split between two large states. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania controlled most of what is now Ukraine and Belarus, while the Grand Duchy of Muscovy occupied what is now the northeastern part of modern European Russia.
However, the grand dukes of Muscovy laid claim to all of the lands of the former Kyivan Rus, seeing themselves as direct successors to that ancient state. The successor state to Muscovy — the Tsardom of Russia — greatly expanded the area under Moscow’s control until it stretched through Siberia to the Far East. However, it still did not directly control most of the land that would one day become modern Ukraine. It also had yet to conquer the “mother city of Russia” — Kyiv, which was still under Polish-Lithuanian control.
But this was, perhaps, too cumbersome to include in the YouTube video and Harris merely concentrates on the Russian part.
David R. Marples, a historian and distinguished professor at the University of Alberta says the author of the video should have highlighted two main interpretations of Kyivan Rus.
“One is the Russian/Soviet one that it was the birthplace of the three Slavic nations, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus; the other is Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s view that it was the foundation of modern Ukraine,” Marples said.
“I cannot say which (interpretation) is correct, both have some validity. But this person just accepts the Russian version and goes on from there. He should have commented on the dispute of two main interpretations of Kyivan Rus if, in fact, he even knows about it.”
Simplification of very complex historical periods and lack of awareness of different views are the main problems highlighted by Marples. Samuel Ramani, a geopolitical analyst and a DPhil graduate from the University of Oxford shares the sentiment, adding that the narrative of the video is grossly oversimplified.
“Kyivan Rus is a homeland for Ukraine, Russia and Belarus — this is a contentious point, which should be emphasized and explained in any history of Russian expansion. It’s rather Russo-centric to not do that,” he adds.
In the video, Harris mentions that Russia’s expansion was a grand strategic design and a matter of Russians gradually pushing Mongols out. However, he doesn’t talk about how this had happened not only through military conquest but also through ideological and political unions.
Ramani says that Harris overplays the role of the Mongols in explaining Muscovy’s expansion.
“The Mongol threat factored into it but the Mongols were not this unitary horde — some Mongol chieftains struck instrumental alliances with Muscovy and levels of tension varied over time,” he said.
Another key factor was Muscovy’s centralization of power and institutionalization of leadership succession, which allowed it to exert dominance over other Russian states.
“Muscovy’s expansion was driven by a desire to exert hegemony over other Russian city-states- this is a critical aspect left out,” Ramani said, concluding that the video is “less empirically inaccurate,” but rather a very watered down explanation of history that can convince people to draw distorted conclusions.
