Timothy Snyder, the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale, continues his lecture course on Ukrainian history with a session on the transition from Khrushchev to Brezhnev. He traces how Marxism, dialectics, consumerism, and nationalism interacted in the late Soviet period, setting up his larger argument about how the modern Ukrainian nation emerged. Snyder connects this history to the present, asking what it means for a nation to exist and why Ukraine's existence has been so contested, linking the question to Polish, Russian, and Jewish self-understanding as well as to the terror inflicted by both Soviet and Nazi rule. Part of his full Yale course on Ukrainian history, this class builds on prior lectures and assumes some familiarity with the syllabus, but stands on its own as an argument about nationhood, ideology, and the long buildup to 2022.