The original version of Risk, the Parker Brothers board game of strategic territorial conquest first known euphemistically as “the Continental Game,” had Ukraine occupying Russia, or at least the historically pre-imperial territory of Russia, along with Belarus, the Baltic Republics, and much of eastern Europe (see below). As a kid, I used to play the game with siblings and cousins; I don’t recall us making too much of that reversal — it made sense to us diaspora Ukrainians. But it also meant that defending Ukraine was really difficult, as it could be attacked from six directions.
I’ve been trying to find out how that huge Ukraine got into the design. The game was created in the early 1950s by French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse, best known for the dreamy 1956 film The Red Balloon (a beautiful film made even more so by Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 2007 remake The Flight of the Red Balloon; in retrospect, to us diaspora Ukrainians “Ukraine” was a bit like a red balloon, floating of its own accord like an imagined utopia well away from the world’s realpolitik). From what I’ve seen, the original version of the game, called La conquête du monde, had multiple names within territories; the one that became Ukraine had five names.
The game was redesigned by French game designer and philosopher Jean-René Vernes, and then bought out by Parker Brothers, a family-owned, Salem, Massachusetts based company famous for Monopoly, Clue, Sorry!, Ouija (acquired in 1966), and others, which created the original English-language version of Risk (the one we played, with the large Ukraine) in 1959. That was before the Cuban missile crisis, when westerners mostly knew Ukraine as a Soviet republic whose representation at the UN was fully subordinate to Russia.
I’ve heard theories that someone involved in the game design was Ukrainian (no doubt a diasporic one), but have not found anything to substantiate that. Was it a flight of fancy on the part of Lamorisse (a Persophile who died in a helicopter crash while making a documentary in Iran in 1970) or Vernes, who had spent a few years in a German PoW camp during world war two? According to Philip Orbanes’ book-length history of Parker Brothers, The Game Makers, the game’s tiny wooden armies were made by a Czechoslovak company, but Czechoslovakia’s location on the game board would have been an unidentified borderland of “Ukraine” and/or “Northern Europe.” Heading Parker Brothers at the time of the Risk acquisition was the company’s founder’s son-in-law Robert Barker, and a nephew, Eddie Parker, apparently played a key role in the game’s redesign (though the territorial map was hardly altered, from what I can tell). Neither of them seemed to show much interest in things Ukrainian.
Perhaps it was just the fact that Russia’s huge landmass would have been too large on the map of conquerable territories, and calling one piece of the six or seven that made it up “Russia” didn’t make much sense. “Ukraine” it was.
We might think of it today as an inspirational model for how to decompose the imperial-colonial construct known today as “Russia,” a decomposition some take to be inevitable.
