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Does Ukraine Have a History?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Mark von Hagen
Mark von Hagen*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Columbia University
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Slavic Review , Volume 54 , Issue 3 , Fall 1995 , pp. 658 - 673
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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1995

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References

Many friends and colleagues have contributed to my thinking about these issues, although none of them ought to be held responsible (and many might find my rendering of their ideas a betrayal of their original sense). Among those who have debated with me the longest are: Frank Sysyn, Zenon Kohut, Olga Andriewsky, Andreas Kappeler, Iaroslav Hrytsak, Roman Szporluk, George Grabowicz and Alexander J. Motyl. As will be clear from the footnotes, I also owe a considerable debt of gratitude, as do nearly all scholars concerned with Ukrainian history, to the late Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky.

1. Literaturna Ukraina (10 January, 1991). See also Orest Subtelny, “The Current State of Ukrainian Historiography, “Journal of Ukrainian Studies 18, nos. 1–2 (Summer-Winter 1993): 33–54.

2. One of the only comparable subfields of history in the US, namely in terms of domination by “professional ethnics,” has been Jewish history and, incidentally, Jewish history has gained academic respectability in ways that Ukrainian history has not. Other fields of history are also dominated by “professional ethnics,” especially Afro-American, Hispanic-American and Asian-American history, but these fields too continue to have a “taint” of political advocacy and thereby are generally deemed less than academically respectable. Women's history is, arguably, in an analogous situation. By contrast, we can compare the situation in Russian history, where emigre scholars have long ago been supplanted and supplemented with generations of non-Russian American historians. Accordingly, Russian history rarely is characterized as “rootsearching. ”

3. Recently Michael Flier, a non-Ukrainian, was appointed to the Potebnia Chair in Ukrainian Linguistics. The other two chairs, one in Ukrainian literature and one in Ukrainian history, are held by ethnic Ukrainians, George Grabowicz and Roman Szporluk, respectively. Although Professor Szporluk has supervised several excellent dissertations in the field (during his career at Michigan University), none of his students has secured a major academic position in the field in an American university.

4. For a recent discussion that treats parallel issues in the field of Slavic languages and literatures, see Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj, “Russian and Ukrainian Studies and the New World Order,” and Horace G. Lunt, “Notes on Nationalist Attitudes in Slavic Studies,” Canadian Slavonic Papers xxxiv, no. 4 (December 1992): 445–70. One might add that social scientists, by which I mean political scientists, economists, sociologists and anthropologists, have generally been quicker to recognize Ukraine as an important subject of study; the response of history and Slavic studies, by contrast, has been far more ambivalent and slow to emerge.

5. The term is attributed to Friedrich Engels; for a discussion, seejozef Chlebowczyk, On Small and Young Nations in Europe, trans. Janina Dorosz (Wroclaw: Zaklad Narodowy im. Ossoliriskich, 1980); Ivan Rudnytsky, “Observations on the Problem of ‘Historical’ and ‘Non-Historical’ Nations,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 5, no. 3 (September 1981): 358–68.

6. See the interesting reflections along these lines by Geoff Eley, “Remapping the Nation: War, Revolutionary Upheaval and State Formation in Eastern Europe, 1914–1923,” in Peter J. Potichnyj and Howard Aster, eds., Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1988), esp. 222 ff. Eley writes that “the faculty of attained statehood is an indispensable condition of historiographical legitimacy. “

7. See Seton-Watson, Hugh, “Is There an East Central Europe?” in Sinanian, Sylvia, Deak, Istvan and Ludz, Peter D., Eastern Europe in the 1970s (New York: Praeger, 1972), 3–12 Google Scholar; and Borsody, Stephen, The Tragedy of Central Europe: Nazi and Soviet Conquest and Aftermath, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies, 1980)Google Scholar, “Preface to the New Edition” and “From the Preface to the First Edition. “

8. See Meyer, H. C., Mitteleuropa in German Thought and Action, 1815–1945 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1955.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. True, both the Russian imperial and Soviet concepts allowed for some gradation of influence. Ukraine, for example, was denied sovereignty altogether, while the peoples still farther to the west (Poland in particular) had more symbolic and real autonomy—albeit always with considerable constraints.

10. The literature on the German Historikerstreit is voluminous. For helpful guides, see Maier, Charles, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988 Google Scholar; and Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, Entsorgung der deutschen Vergangenheit? Ein polemischer Essay zum ‘Historikerstreit’ (Munich, C.H. Beck, 1988).Google Scholar

11. See the surveys in Davies, R. W., Soviet History and the Gorbachev Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Laqueur, Walter, Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1991)Google Scholar; and my forthcoming article, “The Stalin Debate and the Reformulation of the Soviet Past. ”

12. American historical and social sciences have inherited something from both of these competing “imperial” traditions and thereby have perpetuated the marginalization of eastern and central Europe. On the one hand, Russian emigres, mostly adherents of great Russian statehood whether liberal, socialist or conservative, shaped the attitudes and research agendas of American historians of the Russian Empire from the onset; later intellectual emigrants from Germany, including the occasional Baltic German, played an important role in American academic life before and after World War II. The result has been that in the United States, east and central European politics has been typically taught as an extension of Soviet domestic politics.

13. For a critique of modernization theory on this score, see Connor, Walker, “Nation-Building or Nation-Destroying?” World Politics 14, no. 3 (April 1972): 319–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and his “Ethnonationalism,” in Weiner, Myron and Huntington, Samuel P., eds., Understanding Political Development (Boston: Little Brown, 1987), 196–220.Google Scholar

14. Hugh Seton-Watson, The New York Times Book Review (5 November 1967)Google Scholar. Indeed, the Columbia University sociologist Herbert J. Gans, in an important 1979 article, assured his readers that, despite renewed interest in ethnicity, “acculturation and assimilation continue to take place.” His comments on ethnicity focused on Jewish and Italian Americans (“Symbolic Ethnicity: The Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 2, no. 1 [January 1979]: 1–20).

15. The most influential and recent example of this approach is Greenfeld, Liah, Nationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992 Google Scholar.

16. Scholars have attempted various explanations for the distinction between eastern and western Europe with less of the judgmental quality of Greenfield's approach. See Perry Anderson's different patterns of political and economic development in his Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974); and John Armstrong, “Toward a Framework for Considering Nationalism in East Europe,” EEPS (Spring 1988). For a sophisticated and suggestive approach to post-Soviet developments, see Verdery, Katherine, “Nationalism and National Sentiment in Post-Socialist Romania,” Slavic Review 52, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 179–203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. “Non-Russian CIS Members Seek Return of National Treasures,” RFE/RL Daily Report, no. 12 (20 January 1993).

18. Mace, James, Communism, and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National Communism in Soviet Ukraine, 1918–1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983 Google Scholar, esp. chap. VII.

19. For a provocative survey of early Soviet nationality policy, see Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as Communal Apartment” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 414–52.

20. For a classic statement of this ideology, see Bromlei, Iu., ed., Present-Day Ethnic Processes in the USSR (Moscow: Progress, 1982 Google Scholar.

21. These include former communist party apparatchiks who discovered the national cause, most notably former President Leonid Kravchuk and current President Leonid Kuchma, but also members of the dissident cultural intelligentsia (Oles Honchar, Dmytro Pavlychko and Ivan Drach) and human rights activists (Viacheslav Chornovil, Ivan Dziuba, Levko Lukianenko) who formed the core of the Ukrainian popular front movement, Rukh.

22. See, for example, the proceedings of a conference at Harvard University, 12–13 May 1994, “The Military Tradition in Ukrainian History: Its Role in the Construction of Ukraine's Armed Forces. “

23. Katherine Verdery credits this phrase to Florin Toma in her “Nationalism in Romania,” 196. On the specific role of military defeats in nationalist consciousness, see Tonyjudt, “The Furies of Nationalism,” New York Review of Books (26 May 1994).

24. Polish history offers many parallels to this type of historical narrative. See H. Wereszycki, “Polish Insurrections as a Controversial Problem in Polish Historiography,” Canadian Slavonic Papers IX (1967): 105–21.

25. Of course, the language of instruction was changed from Russian to Ukrainian, but the teaching staff needed far more orientation in their new subject matter. Here, again, one of the ironies of the reform period became manifest: The renamed departments had to turn to their former ideological opposites, the once virtually ignored sections on the history of feudalism (also renamed to a less “vulgar Marxist” history of the Middle Ages), where the specialists on Kievan Rus’ and particularly on the Cossack Hetmanate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wrote their lowcirculation works for a narrow scholarly audience.

26. This tendency is not unique to Ukraine; rather it appears to be the pattern for all the post-Soviet successor states, including, and most especially, Russia itself. For example, in Russian history textbook competitions, authors are elevating the nineteenth century and relegating twentieth-century war and revolution to a minimal place in a narrative of “history of civilization. “

27. See Verdery, op. cit.

28. Some of the most helpful reflections on these problems come from the late Ivan L. Rudnytsky. See especially his “Ukraine between East and West,” Das oestliche Mitteleuropa in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1966): 163–69; and “The Role of Ukraine in Modern History,” Slavic Review 22: 2 (June 1963): 199–216, 256–62.

29. But non-Ukrainians must beware of imposing judgments on Ukrainians that their own national histories have difficulty upholding. Multiculturalism, after all, is hardly accepted without controversy in American public education.

30. The lack of consensus on this aspect of Ukrainian “identity” is reflected in the preface to a well respected volume entitled, The Ukraine, 1917–1921: A Study in Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press for the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1977) wherein the editor, Taras Hunczak, warns, “This volume deals primarily with the eastern Ukraine and only tangentially with developments in the western Ukrainian lands of Galicia, Bukovina, and Carpatho-Ukraine.” Hunczak acknowledges that revolutions were occurring in the western lands as well and that the events were vitally intertwined; nonetheless, the title of the volume remained The Ukraine and not, say, Eastern Ukraine, 1917–1921.

31. The rehabilitation of Hrushevsk'yi has figured prominently in the rewriting of Ukrainian history. Hrushevsk'yi's works have been republished after a long Sovietera ban; a central street in Kiev, formerly bearing the name of Sergei Kirov, has been renamed in his honor. On the beginning of the rehabilitation, see Klid, Bohdan W., “The Struggle Over Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi: Recent Soviet Polemics,” Canadian Slavonic Papers XXXIII, no. 1 (March 1991): 32–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32. Pelenski, Jaroslaw, “The Contest for the ‘Kievan Inheritance’ in Russian-Ukrainian Relations: The Origins and Early Ramifications,” in Potichnyi, Peter J. et al., eds., Ukraine and Russia in their Historical Encounter (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1992).Google Scholar

33. See Sysyn, Frank, “The Reemergence of the Ukrainian Nation and Cossack Mythology,” Social Research 58, no. 4 (Winter 1991).Google Scholar

34. See Kohut, Zenon, “The Ukrainian Elite in the 18th Century and Its Integration into the Russian Nobility,” in Banac, Ivo and Bushkovitch, Paul, eds., The Nobility in Russia and Eastern Europe, (New Haven: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies, 1983, 1985) 65–98 Google Scholar; Kohut, “Problems in Studying the PostKhmelnytsky Ukrainian Elite (1650s to 1830s),” 103–19, and Frank Sysyn, “The Problem of Nobilities in the Ukrainian Past: The Polish Period, 1569–1648,” 29–102, both in Rudnytsky, I.L., ed., Rethinking Ukrainian History (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1981)Google Scholar.

35. For a cogent summary of Lypyns'kyi's views, see Alexander J. Motyl, “Viacheslav Lypyns'kyi and the Ideology and Politics of Ukrainian Monarchism,” Canadian Slavonic Papers (March 1985): 31–48; and Rudnytsky, Ivan, “Viacheslav Lypynsky: Statesman, Historian, and Political Thinker,” in Rudnytsky, Peter L., ed., Essays in Modern Ukrainian History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 437–46.Google Scholar

36. For example, the declaration by the Imperial Academy of Science that Ukrainian was a language and not merely a dialect was marked as a major triumph of the Ukrainian movement.

37. Saunders, David, The Ukrainian Impact on Russian Culture 1750–1850 (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1985)Google Scholar. On the problems of a Ukrainian Baroque, see James Cracraft, “The Mask of Culture: Baroque Art in Russia and Ukraine, 1600–1750,” in Potichnyi, Ukraine and Russia, op. cit.

38. Here the alternate pulls of Polish and Russian culture raise parallels with Lithuanian national intelligentsias. For a discussion of the problems of a Ukrainian history of literature, see the writings of George G. Grabowicz, including “Ukrainian-Russian Literary Relations in the Nineteenth Century: A Formulation of the Problem,” in Potichnyj, Ukraine and Russia, and Toward a History of Ukrainian Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1981).

39. Drahomanov, “Avtobiografiia,” Byloe, no. 6 (June 1906): 182–213, esp. 187,

195. On Drahomanov's ideas, see Ivan Rudnytsky, “Drahomanov as a Political Theorist,” Mykhailo Drahomanov: A Symposium and Selected Writings, Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the U.S. 2, no. 1 (3) (Spring 1952), 70–130.

40. For some provocative reflections on this topic, see Geyer, Michael, “Historical Fictions of Autonomy and the Europeanization of National History,” Central European History 22 (1989): 316–43.Google Scholar

41. Similarly, Ukrainian and other post-Soviet elites’ aspirations for national sovereignty and self-assertion coincide with contrary trends toward international integration in Europe and North America.

42. James J. Sheehan, “What Is German History? Reflections on the Role of the Nation in German History and Historiography,” Journal of Modern History 53 (March 1981): 1–23; and his German History, 1770–1866 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

43. Weber, Eugen, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976.Google Scholar

44. Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.Google Scholar

45. “Pol'shcha-Ukraina: istorychna spadshchyna i suspil'na svidomist',” May 29–31, Kam'ianets'-Podil'skyi, sponsored by the National Association of Ukrainianists, the Institute of Social Sciences and the Institute of History of Ukraine (both attached to the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine).

46. See the Second International Festival of Jewish Art Music scheduled for October 1993 in Odessa, co-sponsored by the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture and Tel-Aviv University, Rubin Academy of Music.

47. This has been true in the past for similar conferences sponsored by Ukrainianists in Canada and the US: the Ukrainian side sponsored the “reconciliation” conferences and was able to attract historians of Poland or of east European Jewry only with considerable difficulty. See Potichnyj, P., ed., Poland and Ukraine: Past and Present (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1980)Google Scholar; Potichnyi, P. and Aster, H., eds., Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1988)Google Scholar; P. Potichnyj, Ukraine and Russia, op. cit.

48. See, for example, the collection edited by Shapoval, Iu. P., Pro mynule—zarady maibutn'ogo (Kiev, 1989)Google Scholar.

49. For the dynamics of this process that focuses mainly on the Russian historical debate, see my “The Stalin Debate and the Reformulation of the Soviet Past,” The Harriman Institute Forum (March 1992).

50. Rudnytsky, “Soviet Ukraine in Historical Perspective,” in Rudnytsky, ed., Essays.

51. Ironically (given the often stormy history of Ukrainian-Jewish relations), one successful model for the writing of a history of Ukraine that might accommodate the diaspora is Jewish history, which includes now the history of modern Israel.

52. This type of history is very close to what Francois Furet has called—in referring to the French revolution— “commemorative history.” What Furet advocates in place of such commemorative history is a more problematic approach to the past. See his “The Revolution Is Over,” in Furet, Francois, ed., Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Forster, Elborg (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), esp. 9ff Google Scholar. I thank Amanda Binder for this reference.