After Stalin

In Ukraine, the beginnings of de-Stalinization were marked by scholars’ attempts to undermine the Stalinist concept of the Ukrainian past. During a historians’ conference in the summer of 1956 Huslysty criticized the recent glossing over of the tsarist colonial practices and proposed that the contribution of ‘bourgeois’ historians be re-examined.

While established scholars criticized only the excesses of Stalinist myth-making, some student youth explored the boundaries between Soviet and ‘nationalistic’ versions of Ukrainian historical memory. In February 1956 Vasyl Kushnir, the Komsomol organizer in the Faculty of History of Uzhorod University, wrote in his private diary about a conversation with fellow students: ‘We discussed the ques­tion of whether Ukraine could be independent, and what it would be like now if it had been independent for a long time. I think by now it could have been among the world’s most developed states.’ In June 1956 he wrote: ‘Today we had a discussion about nationalism.

During the period 1956 to 1958 the authorities officially revoked the Stalinist denunciation of Sosiura’s poem ‘Love Ukraine’ and Dankevych’s opera Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Dovzhenko was allowed to publish, and, following his death in 1956, the Ukrainian intelligentsia idolized him as a film director of international stature. The Ukrainian cultural revival of the ‘Thaw’ period emphasized national patri­mony, the continuity of the Ukrainian cultural tradition, and pride in the national past. Literature and the arts turned to folkloric and historical themes, and both establishment intellectuals and young radicals publicly articulated their spiritual bond to the Ukrainian past. In 1968 a leading prose writer, Oles Honchar, published the allegorical novel The Cathedral, valorizing the Cossack yore and criticizing the state’s destruction of Ukrainian historical monuments, while a young poet, Vasyl Symonenko, celebrated in his samizdat poems the nation’s eternal life and the Cossack blood pulsing in its veins.²⁷ Reclaiming Shevchenko as a symbol of the nation, rather than of socialism and Ukraine’s ties with Russia, young intellectuals established their own alternative to the official pilgrimages to the poet’s tomb. On 22 May, from 1966 to 1971, they gathered at Shevchenko’s monument in Kiev to mark the anniversary of the poet’s reburial in Ukraine.²⁸

Similarly, the return to ‘national history’ originated within official historiogra­phy, and only later did the authorities’ reaction channel this interpretation of the Ukrainian past into dissident self-publishing. In an article apparently written for publication in 1966, the established historian Mykhailo Braichevsky disputed the authorized interpretation of ‘reunification,’ arguing that the Cossack leadership had regarded the Pereiaslav Treaty as merely a military union, while the tsarist administration had understood it as an act of incorporation.

Although the republic’s authorities periodically suppressed ‘nationalist devia­tions’ in scholarship and culture, their own politics of memory remained deeply ambiguous. In fact, in Ukraine in the 1960s there probably existed a ‘de facto community of interest between political elites interested in decisional autonomy and cultural elites interested in expanded cultural expression.’³¹ The crackdown on Ukrainian dissidents during 1971-3 was followed by Petro Shelest’s removal as the KPU first secretary and the subsequent critique of his book Our Soviet Ukraine as allegedly idealizing the Cossacks, minimizing the importance of reunification with Russia, and promoting Ukraine’s economic self-sufficiency. While the first secretary unquestionably supported Ukrainian culture, western scholars have interpreted accusations of nationalism as the public excuse, rather than the real reason for Shelest’s demotion, which was the result of his opposition to renewed economic centralization, as well as of political reshuffling in Moscow.

Shelest’s removal was followed by a new campaign against the remnants of ‘bourgeois nationalism’ in Ukrainian culture and scholarship. After 1973 Soviet ideologues closely supervised the activities of intellectuals to ensure that the national narrative remained safely subordinated to the doctrine of Russian guid­ance. Yet the suppressed tensions within the official historical memory, which simultaneously celebrated the nation and the empire, remained unresolved. When the party’s ideological control over society began disintegrating in the late 1980s, the return to the national version of Ukrainian historical memory became a major political issue. As the sociologist Catherine Wanner has suggested in her recent study of post-Soviet Ukrainian commemoration practices, this thirst for historical debate was driven by a long-standing and widespread popular rejection of official Soviet histories.’³³ The rehabilitation of Hrushevsky, glorification of the Cossacks, and re-evaluation of the Pereiaslav Treaty rivalled in public attention issues such as Chernobyl and the Stalinist crimes. The emergence of an independent Ukraine in 1991 led to the implosion of the friendship myth and the reinstatement of the nationalist narrative as the official pedigree of the Ukrainian nation.³⁴

What Stalinist ideologues had once condemned as ‘nationalism’ became the official ideology of the independent Ukrainian state. The present-day Ukrainian establishment has reinstalled in the national pantheon great ancestors such as Mazepa and Hrushevsky and rejected class analysis. Yet it still embraces Stalinist heroes such as Danylo of Halych and Khmelnytsky, as well as the linear narrative of the nations ‘natural’ historical development towards the reunification of all the Ukrainian ethnic lands in one polity - a vision that the Stalinist ideologues shared with nationalist theoreticians and taught to Soviet Ukrainians. After all, in its search for a national ideology Stalinism arrived precisely at the starting point of the old ‘bourgeois nationalism’: the idea that an empire was a sum of its nations.