Alternative History

In the early 2000s, when members of the Archaeographic Expedition of Zaporizhia State University, led by Professor Anatolii Boiko, went to the villages of southern Ukraine to collect oral testimonies about the Ukrainian famine of 1932-3, they were in for a surprise.

The Zaporizhia collection includes diaries, family histories, and rem­iniscences that passed into journal entries and memoirs of people born in the southern Ukrainian steppes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of them stayed in the village all their lives, while others moved to the towns, and some even found themselves abroad after the Second World War. In an era when the official confis­cation of diaries or memoirs could cost the author his liberty or even his life, it was fairly uncommon to keep such records. Quite a few auto­biographies were written, but usually not for the purpose of telling the truth about one's life - rather to conceal it, explain it in an appropriate light, or deny an utterly 'incorrect' social origin, presence on occupied territory, or the existence of relatives abroad. Diaries were usually kept by schoolchildren, scholars, and writers; memoirs were written by gen­erals and certain political figures. That was known to all even in Soviet times, but few (including the authorities) suspected that such efforts had also been made by 'people from the street.'

Historians of the Soviet period have lately begun to publish studies of diaries and memoirs written 'from below.' Featured here are the records of workers who wanted to become writers; participants in the revolutionary events of 1917; autobiographies of party members and Communist Youth League activists or Baptists (many of whom came from Ukraine).² The emphasis in present-day humanities scholarship and historiography on the study of cultural development and identity formation (social, national, cultural, gender, and so on) makes these sources particularly interesting to the researcher.

Most of the autobiographical narratives published to date come from every milieu but that of the peasantry. There have been publications of memoirs of former peasants who later made brilliant careers, mainly in the Soviet army, as well as of many anti-Soviet emigrants, including General Petro Hryhorenko (who also came from southern Ukraine),³ but documents written by peasants themselves were either unknown or generally remained beyond the ken of scholars. The authors of all seven autobiographical narratives included in the Zaporizhia collection came from the village. To some degree, all the authors retained features of the peasant mentality, and in this sense, in one way or another, they reflect the attitude of the southern Ukrainian peasantry to the social upheavals and perturbations of the twentieth century.

Before examining some of these views and images, it would be use­ful to determine why our authors took up the pen in the first place. The question can be answered rather easily in the cases of Zamrii, Mol- odyk, and Cipko: their records belong to a fairly large category of memoir literature dating from the second half of the twentieth century, generally produced by authors nearing the end of their lives for the purpose of drawing conclusions from their experiences and leaving a spiritual legacy to their descendants.

Hundreds of diaries and memoirs dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, written by members of the gentry and representatives of the intelligentsia who sprang from various social origins, are known today. The recently published diaries of Mykhailo Hrushevsky may serve as one of many examples of such popularity.⁴ Apparently, the urge to write spread to the peasant milieu before and during the First World War and the Revolution of 1917. Several factors may be considered responsible for this. First, the developing network of zemstvo and parochial schools brought education to the village in the latter half of the nineteenth century, opening up the very possibility of writing autobiographical works. Second, the war brought members of the intelligentsia in officers' greatcoats and peasants in soldiers' cloaks into close direct contact. This was the people's 'going to the intelligentsia,' as it were. Third, the war and the revolution constituted dramatic life experiences that, in the eyes of our authors, were worth recording and lent themselves to being set down in writing (this becomes particularly apparent when one reads Yaroshenko's diary). Finally, the cultural revolution of the 1920s not only brought a previ­ously unheard of level of education to the village but also encouraged the peasant to take part in cultural life, participate in programs of folk­lore collection, contribute to newspapers, and so on.

What came from the pens of our authors impresses one with the freshness, range, and unconventionality of their historical palette, cap­tivating the reader with the candor and openness with which they recount their own experience and that of the epoch. In many respects, of course, the authors are less than exact in conveying the develop­ments and atmosphere of the time. Later impressions and experiences left their stamp (especially in the case of memoirs); perspectives changed; there was interference from Western radio broadcasts that advanced their own interpretations of events (as in the case of Alek­seev, who lived 'in the back of beyond' and was therefore able to listen to the Western 'voices' without jamming, to the envy of all city dwell­ers). For all that, the significance of our authors' testimony for recreat­ing the history of the 'little people' can hardly be exaggerated. The structure and dynamics of the history presented in these narratives are completely different from those familiar to us from the history text­books. The First World War, forgotten, ignored, and overshadowed by the revolution in the minds of younger generations, appears in our narratives as an event of the greatest importance, formative for many authors. Compared with it, the Second World War, which occupies such an important place in all current historical narratives, seems no more than a reprise of what was already part of our authors' experi­ence. In their records, the revolution appears not in the trappings of heroic uprisings, as presented in Soviet-era textbooks, but of human tragedies, while the Bolsheviks are just as criminal as other partici­pants in the conflict - to be sure, with the proviso that they managed to establish order of a kind and even gave the peasants land. What our authors could not forgive them was collectivization and famine. Here the peasants were completely at odds with the new order and its offi­cial narrative. Their opposition became implacable, and uncovering the gap between official discourse and the actual deeds of the authori­ties was the principal means of intellectual resistance.

The historical vision that emerged from the authors' life experience is sometimes strikingly original. To judge by some of Alekseev's gener­alizations, Lenin could figure perfectly well in the 'people's history' along with Stolypin as a ruler who gave land to the peasants, while Khrushchev, for example, might be lumped together with Stalin, since peasant land and private plots were subject to restrictions under his rule. For our authors, collectivization, famine, and war were not merely the crimes of one regime or another. Those crimes had faces, and the criminals had names. The struggle with abstract evil and lies, personified by concrete individuals - fellow villagers and neighbours - was a lifelong occupation, and the behaviour of representatives of one family or another was a memory to be handed down to descendants. That was also part of the motivation for writing peasant narratives.

The materials published in the Zaporizhia collection are a unique source for the study of many aspects of twentieth-century Ukrainian and Soviet history. Of these, it is worth specifying such major themes as the family history of the Ukrainian village and the industrialized city; the history of soldiers' perceptions and everyday life during the First World War; the peasantry's attitude to the revolution and the political forces that fought one another at the time; the Sovietization and atheization of the village in the 1920s and 1930s; and the man­made famines of 1932-3 and 1947. Among other subjects deserving special attention are the campaigns of repression in the 1930s, strate­gies of individual survival and social resistance under Stalinism, popu­lar loyalty towards various political and military forces during the Second World War, the cult of the Great Fatherland War in the Soviet Union, public opinion and internal opposition in the times of Khrush­chev and Brezhnev, and everyday life in the USSR. This list of possible subjects whose study would certainly be aided by the material pub­lished in the Zaporizhia collection is of course far from exhaustive. It remains incomplete even today, but the future will bring new ques­tions and approaches to which answers may be found in these sources. In the space of this chapter, it is clearly impossible to elucidate or even touch upon all the themes and subjects noted above. The task here is far more modest: to explore only one of the many themes that the sources published in this collection help illuminate.

What I have in mind is the history of the transformation of cultural and national identities in southern Ukraine. Autobiographical narra­tives offer a unique opportunity to reconstruct the formation of these identities, since they reflect the way of thinking of a relatively broad stratum of the region's population over a considerable period. They make it possible to raise the curtain to some extent on the making of modern Ukrainian and Russian identity and to establish, in general terms at least, the role of history and historical memory in the forma­tion of these identities. Our authors did not set themselves the specific task of discussing problems of national identity: for some of them, the national question was of less than secondary importance, and they cared more whether their friends or opponents were peasants or work­ers, rich or poor, rank and file or bosses, politically nonaligned or party members, than they did about the language they spoke or the national­ity to which they belonged. And therein lies the value of the narratives analysed below, for they reflect the generally unconscious or only partly articulated manifestations of a complex hierarchy of cultural identities that was only gradually being transformed into modern national consciousness.