COMMENTARY: Does Ukraine have a history? (08/27/06)

COMMENTARY

Does Ukraine have a history?

by Mark von Hagen

Fifteen years after Ukraine's unexpected declaration of independence, the struggle continues over its place in the world. The Orange Revolution of 2004 didn't settle it. Nor did this spring's parliamentary elections. Last week, following four months of political paralysis, brought the surprise return, as prime minister, of pro-Russian politician Viktor Yanukovych, whose attempt to steal the 2004 presidential elections sparked the Orange uprising.

Although the Orange Revolution has been frequently interpreted as a demonstration of Ukraine's having finally repudiated its Soviet legacy and cast its lot with a democratic Europe, voters were in fact split, with a substantial minority in favor of closer ties with Russia and uncertain about moving away from a political economy dominated by powerful oligarchs.

These latter forces have influential allies in Russia who also advocate various forms of reintegration of Ukraine and Russia, with Belarus as one available model. The reintegrationists in these three east Slavic nations implicitly - and often explicitly - challenge the right of Ukraine to a sovereign, independent existence. They envision the recreation of a modern version of a Russia-dominated empire; not surprisingly, Russian and Belarusian officials see last year's Orange Revolution as a threat to their plans and have been stepping up their efforts to shut down or severely limit any potential opposition in society.

Among the "arguments" offered by the reintegrationists are historical ones, usually summed up as a version of "Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusans are members of one Slavic, Orthodox Christian nation" and are fated to have a common state, as they have for centuries. This view of the past, which had its origins in imperial Russia, insisted that the medieval state of Kyivan Rus' (10th-13th centuries) was the birthplace of Russian civilization and that Moscow/Muscovy was the rightful heir to Kyiv's legitimacy. During the 20th century, Communist ideologues in Moscow and Kyiv recast this argument as "the great friendship of peoples" with Russians as the "elder brothers" to all the other non-Russian peoples, above all, the Ukrainians and Belarusians.

Much as the reintegrationists lay claim to history to justify their political programs, so too do those in Ukraine (and Russia and Belarus) who are working toward the goals of building democratic, sovereign nation-states and integrating them into the community of modern Europe. This project has required that historians disentangle the histories of Ukraine and Russia in order to claim a separate existence for the Ukrainian nation even under imperial rule and various forms of 20th century occupation that have made Ukraine's history among the most tragic experiences in Europe.

Nationalizing Ukraine's past was well under way at the end of the 19th and dawn of the 20th centuries, but the Stalin revolution in the USSR drove that project underground and into the diaspora until a second break-up of the Russian empire in 1991, when the reassertion of an independent Ukrainian state and history was resumed with full force. Mykhailo Hrushevsky (1866-1934), the father of modern Ukrainian history, also became the father of the modern Ukrainian state when he was elected head of the Ukrainian Central Rada in 1917. During an early wave of Stalin-era repressions, he was arrested and exiled to Moscow; he died in a Soviet sanatorium under still mysterious circumstances. There was no place for such an advocate of Ukraine's independence - or even autonomy - in Stalin's dictatorial regime.

Today one of Kyiv's central boulevards - and the site of the Ukrainian Parliament and presidential administration - has been renamed after Hrushevsky as a symbol of the restoration of Ukraine's short-lived independence as a modern state in 1917-1918; a monument to the historian-statesman stands in front of the Pedagogical Museum that housed the 1917 Rada government and across the street from the Ukrainian National Academy of Science.

Other political figures from the Ukrainian past, from the Kyivan Princes Volodymyr and Yaroslav, the Kozak Hetmans Bohdan Khmelnytsky and Ivan Mazepa, the poet bard of the Ukrainian nation Taras Shevchenko, to the 20th-century hetman of the Ukrainian state (1918) Pavlo Skoropadsky, have been similarly restored to central places or reinterpreted in the new story of Ukraine's past.

But what is it about Ukraine's history that has made it distinctively "Ukrainian"?

For many Ukrainians in Ukraine and abroad, the answer to that question often comes down to a version of primordial unchanging Ukrainian traits that sound like an almost biological explanation for the survival of a nation that has withstood world wars, occupations, terror, deportations, famine, nuclear contamination and other plagues during the 20th century.

A major stumbling block for this theory, however, is the history of Ukraine itself; how anything close to a "pure" genetic pool was preserved on a territory that experienced occupation by and intermingling with (including intermarriage) a host of invaders from outside: Mongols, Poles, Russians, Crimean Turks, Germans, Austrians, Hungarians and Romanians to name a few. If we add to this violent history the collective biography of tens of millions of Jews who lived on the territory of what is today Ukraine - also under Polish, Austrian, and Russian rule - and also the numbers over the centuries of resettlers in Ukraine who fled serfdom or hoped to otherwise improve their economic opportunities, it's hard to conceive of what a genuinely primordial Ukrainian would be.

Moreover, reducing the question to one of biological survival is, in my opinion, unconsciously dismissive - if not insulting to - the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of inhabitants of historical Ukraine who have toiled to build institutions and movements to organize their cultural, religious, social and political lives. Such an emphasis on genes takes away the hard-won achievements of centuries of struggle by individuals and various forms of collectives to improve their lots and shape a better future.

It is those efforts of institutional and intellectual creation and creativity, with all their forced compromises with powerful outside forces in the region, that shaped and continue to shape Ukraine's distinctive paths in the past and present. Time and place, as the dimensions that organize historians' work, are key to understanding those paths. For most of the early modern and modern history of Ukraine, it has been located at the frontiers of powerful Eurasian empires and states; this "borderlands" character has shaped such key social institutions as the Kozaks, who built a state in the 17th century that was distinctive from both an ascendant Muscovite autocracy to the northeast and the declining constitutional monarchy of Poland-Lithuania to the west.

The Greek-Catholic, or Uniate, Church is an illustration of a hybrid institution shaped by its origins in the borderlands; Greek-Catholics, since the Union of Brest in 1596, have practiced the Byzantine rite (largely the same as the Orthodox Christians) but acknowledge the Roman Catholic pope as their spiritual leader. The religious communities of the Greek Catholic-Church confronted frequent persecution by both Roman Catholic (mostly Polish) and Orthodox (mostly Russian) Churches, but emerged in the 20th century as advocates for ecumenism and reconciliation of Eastern and Western Christianity.

The borderlands were also, importantly, multiconfessional and multinational; as such, the history of Ukraine's populations is shared with the history of Poland, Russia, Israel and other states. Certainly, this diversity contributed to very bloody interethnic conflict, above all in the 20th century. But this diversity also forced intellectuals to grapple with the dilemmas of intolerance and inequality; again, some concluded that ethnic purity and violence were the solution (including the Ukrainian Dmytro Dontsov and a Jewish counterpart from Odesa, Vladimir Zhabotinsky, one of the spiritual fathers of modern Israel). But the mainstream of Ukraine's intellectual life has more often embraced the diversity and tried to work out models for peaceful and productive co-existence and even cooperation.

Many foreign visitors who regularly commute between Kyiv and Moscow remark on how different the two capitals have become since 1989-1991; those differences are not any simple expressions of different "national characters" for example, the relatively pluralist religious situation in Ukraine (when compared to the more hegemonic power of the Orthodox Church in Russia) is not the desired outcome of any of the religious leadership. But nonetheless, differences there are, and differences there have always been. Ukraine is not Russia, in the words of now disgraced former president of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma; and Russian rule over Ukraine has, with very rare exceptions, not been conducted with the best interests in mind of the peoples inhabiting it. For that matter, Ukraine is also not Poland, Georgia, Belarus or Latvia. Time and place matter; Ukraine does have a history.

Mark von Hagen, Ph.D., is the Boris Bakhmeteff Professor of Russian and East European Studies at Columbia University and in 2002-2005 was president of the International Association for Ukrainian Studies. A version of this article was originally published in the Wall Street Journal.

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