COMMENTARY: Illuminating Ukraine, its history and its neighborhood (11/05/00)

COMMENTARY: Illuminating Ukraine, its history and its neighborhood

by Bohdan Vitvitsky

For anyone interested in Ukraine, reading Roman Szporluk's "Russia, Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union" (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Press, 2000; 437 pp., $24.95) is like being a very lucky prospector during the California gold rush. As you make your way along the mountain stream, you keep coming across nuggets, some small, some medium-sized and others large. And at the end of the day, your knowledge and understanding of Ukraine, its historical context and its geopolitical environment become illuminated in a way that transforms that understanding. This is a must read.

The book is a collection of 16 of Prof. Szporluk's essays written between 1972 and 1997, preceded by a 30-page introduction written in 1999. The introduction itself is worth the price of admission. It analyzes in a condensed but insightful fashion a series of key issues. These are the relationship between Soviet modernity and ethnicity; the impact upon the Soviet system of its territorial expansion after 1939 (namely, Halychyna, the Baltic republics, etc.); the Russian-Ukrainian relationship; the stunted development of Russia as a normal nation; and, how and why it was possible for Ukraine to come into being as an independent state in 1991.

The 16 essays cover a breadth of subjects. Prof. Szporluk writes on very specific topics, such as "The Strange Politics of Lviv: An Essay in Search of an Explanation" and "The Press and Soviet Nationalities: The Party Resolution of 1975 and Its Implementation." And, he writes about more general subjects, such as "Nation-Building in Ukraine: Problems and Prospects," "Reflections on Ukraine after 1994: The Dilemmas of Nationhood," and "Ukraine: From an Imperial Periphery to a Sovereign State." But, since he is interested in understanding Ukraine's political neighborhood, he also writes on topics such as "History and Russian Nationalism," "After Empire: What?" and "The Fall of the Tsarist Empire and the USSR: The Russian Question and Imperial Overextension."

If one were to try and generalize, what Prof. Szporluk seeks to achieve is an understanding of a series of historical and other types of connections and relationships that have helped shape events in Eastern Europe. The relationships include those between Ukraine and Russia, Ukraine and Poland, Russia and Poland, and the historical one between tsarist Russia and the USSR. He is also interested in exploring how the processes of modernization and urbanization relate to the above relationships.

Prof. Szporluk's essays are enlightening for a variety of reasons. First, he digs for and discovers facts that were previously unknown or ignored. For example, he spent years tracking an obscure Soviet publication that led him to discover that the mysterious reductions in Ukrainian-language publications in the 1970s and 1980s were not, as some political scientists thought, simply the result of a kind of natural selection: Ukrainians preferring to read Russian rather than Ukrainian newspapers and magazines. What Prof. Szporluk instead found, as described in his "The Press and Soviet Nationalities: The Party Resolution of 1975 and Its Implementation," was that there was an unseen hand manipulating these changes in a carefully planned and sustained manner.

The essays also contain various interesting insights. For example, one of the themes that appears in a number of Prof. Szporluk's essays is the idea that the incorporation of western Ukraine and the three Baltic republics into the Soviet Union at the end of World War II ultimately had a harmful effect on Soviet interests. That is because the inhabitants of those lands were people who had a different collective historical experience against which to judge Soviet reality. The judgments of these people were inherently subversive of the Soviet order because these people saw right through the idiocy of the Soviet claims to having invented a superior way of life. Thus, what at first seemed like an unequivocal Soviet triumph, namely, the empire's territorial expansion, turned out to have a Trojan horse component.

Most of the discussion over the last 10 years about Ukraine's prospects as a country has focused on the functioning or malfunctioning of its economy. That's understandable. But another of Prof. Szporluk's valuable insights is that the "survival of Ukraine as an independent state ... will depend to a large extent on how it succeeds in bringing the world to its people - and its people to the world" (p. 388). What he means is that Ukrainians, as all others, want to and "should have direct access to the centers of civilization rather than being condemned to an inferior status," that they want to and "should be communicating with the world at large on their own rather than through intermediaries." As one 65-year-old Ukrainian woman explained to American journalists during President Bill Clinton's 1995 visit to Kyiv, "We want to be part of the world, not part of Russia.'"

Yet another reason why Prof. Szporluk's essays are so compelling is that they contain an extraordinary wealth of source materials relating to Ukraine. To cite but one example, Prof. Szporluk quotes a fascinating passage written in 1919 by Sir Lewis Namier. At the time he wrote the passage he was a young British Foreign Service officer who had observed developments taking place in and relating to Halychyna. The same Namier would later become a leading British scholar and receive knighthood. Back in 1919 he wrote: " 'They [the Ukrainians] strove hard to be a proper government. But a peasant nation exasperated by centuries of oppression and fighting for its life against landowners - and the foreign domination for which they stand - cannot be expected to show superhuman self-control. ... For all my personal loss and anxieties I do insist that grievous wrong has been done to the Ukrainians. Left in peace to establish a strongly radical but decent government, they might well have organized themselves. Driven to despair, insidiously pushed forward daily toward bolshevism and into committing atrocious crimes, they know that a Polish military occupation, as foreshadowed in the Foreign Ministers' decision of June 25 [by the Supreme Council of the Allied Powers in Paris], means disaster without end. And I insist that no number of atrocities however horrible can deprive a nation of its rights to independence, nor justify its being put under the heel of its worst enemies and persecutors" (p. 354).

Prof. Szporluk has held the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Chair in Ukrainian history at Harvard University for the last 10 years. His book is available from various vendors, including the Hoover Press (800-935-2882), amazon.com and others. Get it, read it, share it with your friends.

Bohdan Vitvitsky is a lawyer, writer and lecturer who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy and is a long-time contributor to The Ukrainian Weekly.

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