Between Class and Nation

Part 2 of the book discusses the 'nationalization' of Ukrainian historiog­raphy in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If one had to name the single most important historian whose works reversed the historio­graphic tradition established by the author of the Synopsis and sepa­rated Ukrainian history from the Russian imperial narrative, that historian would be Mykhailo Hrushevsky.

With his monumental ten-volume History of Ukraine-Rus' (1898— 1937), Hrushevsky established Ukrainian history as a separate field of research. In so doing, he completed the work begun by the previous generation of Ukrainian historians. One of Hrushevsky's predecessors was Mykola Kostomarov (1817-85), who introduced the theory of two nationalities into the study of Russian and Ukrainian history. Accord­ing to Kostomarov, the history of the Little Russian (Ukrainian) nation­ality was characterized by ideas of democracy and freedom, while that of the Great Russian nationality was marked by the dominance of autocratic tendencies. Mykhailo Maksymovych (1804-73) and Hru­shevsky's university professor, Volodymyr Antonovych (1834-1908), drew a clear distinction between Polish and Ukrainian history and argued for the Ukrainian identity of the population of Kyiv during the princely era. Following in their footsteps, Hrushevsky not only sepa­rated Ukrainian history from Russian but also claimed Kyivan Rus' exclusively for the Ukrainian historical narrative. He thus effectively dismantled the all-Russian historical narrative, depriving it of its tradi­tional beginning.

Hrushevsky's role as a political activist during the Revolution of 1905 is discussed in the chapter entitled 'The Historian as Nation Builder.' It highlights his activities as national awakener in the Russian Empire - a function similar to that undertaken by other East European historians of his time. Manoeuvring between the two competing national projects of the period, the Polish and the Russian, Hrushevsky tried to prevent his nation from being used as raw ethnic material for the formation of 'large' Polish and Russian nations. During the Revolu­tion of 1905, he advocated the unity of all democratic forces, including the Ukrainian and Polish national movements and the Russian liberal camp, in the struggle for the 'liberation of Russia,' a term that he used to denote the federalization of the Russian Empire with consequent territorial autonomy for Ukraine. As Hrushevsky's political goals for Ukraine changed from autonomy to independence, so did his interpre­tation of the Pereiaslav Agreement of 1654, which had brought Ukraine under the 'high hand' of the Muscovite tsar. If Hrushevsky originally believed that the agreement had guaranteed autonomy for the Cossack Hetmanate, he later decided that at the time of the Russo-Ukrainian deliberations at Pereiaslav Ukraine in fact possessed all the characteris­tics of an independent polity. As demonstrated in the chapter 'Renego­tiating the Pereiaslav Agreement,' Hrushevsky made a strong case for the thesis that the meeting at Pereiaslav produced an agreement result­ing from negotiations between the two sides and was not merely a manifestation of popular approval for the idea of bringing Ukraine under tsarist rule, as claimed by Gennadii Karpov and other Russian historians. Not all of Hrushevsky's arguments regarding the Pereiaslav Agreement are equally accepted by Russian and Ukrainian historians today, but his discussion of the subject, the most detailed and thorough one available, continues to influence interpretation of the Pereiaslav Agreement not only in Ukraine and Russia but also in the West.

The development of national projects in twentieth-century Russia and Ukraine coincided with the rise of Marxism, another powerful modern ideology that descended on the Russian Empire in its barbaric Bolshevik incarnation and had a lasting influence on both countries.

As a result of the Soviet authorities' 'class attack' on national histori­ography, not only the Ukrainian historical paradigm developed by Hrushevsky and his students but also the narrative created by the founder of Ukrainian Marxist historiography, Matvii Yavorsky, were outlawed as 'bourgeois' interpretations of history. In the conflict between Yavorsky and the leader of the Russian Marxist historians, Mikhail Pokrovsky, the latter emerged victorious, opening the door to Moscow's administrative takeover of Ukrainian Marxist institutions and later to the introduction of a Russocentric narrative of Ukrainian history under the officially approved rubric, 'History of the Peoples of the USSR.' The long-term impact of that narrative on the process of negotiation between Russian and Ukrainian historiography is dis­cussed in the chapters constituting the third part of the book.

While the official Marxist paradigm ruled the 'commanding heights' of Soviet historiography, what was the view of Russian and Ukrainian history from below? This question is posed in the chapter entitled 'The People's History.' It examines how elite visions of history (including that of Hrushevsky) were incorporated into the world view of the peas­antry, which had its own alternative version of history based on family legends and personal experiences of ordinary people who survived the turbulent events of the twentieth century.