Between Class and Nation

During the first years of the Soviet ideological mutation, Ukrainian ideologues, historians, and writers remained perplexed Was a retreat from class analysis a new official line’ If so, were they supposed to join the Moscovites in composing paeans to the Russian elder brother,’ or were they to glorify their own national traditions and national heroes’ Moscow could issue authoritative pronouncements only on major ideological issues arising in non-Russian republics Moreover, the official denunciation in the late 1920s of both the dean of ‘bourgeois nationalist’ Ukrainian historiography, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, and the republic’s leading Marxist historian, Matvn lavorsky, produced confusing signals from above in Soviet Ukrainian intellectual life

The Ukrainian republic had its equivalent of Pokrovsky in the person of lavorsky, a highly placed scholar-bureaucrat who served as the party’s mouthpiece on questions of history lavorsky authored several Marxist surveys of Ukrainian history focusing on economic processes and class struggle Just as Pokrovsky did on the all-Umon level, lavorsky attacked ‘bourgeois historians,’ represented in the Ukrainian case primarily by the former president of the ‘counter-revolutionary’ Ukrainian People’s Republic, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, who had returned from emigration in 1924

As was the case elsewhere in the Soviet Union, Ukrainian historical scholarship flourished in the 1920s Following Hrushevsky, the non-party historians of the time endorsed the integrity and continuity of Ukrainian history, working within the master-narrative of the nation They produced numerous valuable studies of Kievan Rus', the Cossack period, and nineteenth-century Ukraine Most of these scholars expressed their sympathy for the ‘exploited masses,’ a trope that was, after all, not a Marxist invention but part of the pre-revolutionary Ukrainian populist tradition

Meanwhile, lavorsky and other party historians were developing a new official narrative of Ukraine’s past concentrating on class struggle In his popular textbook, A Short History of Ukraine, lavorsky unequivocally proclaimed, ‘We do not care what princes we once had and what hetmans fought against Poland We need to know how our people lived and worked and how they struggled against the lords who exploited them, both the Ukrainian and foreign ones ’⁷ While rejecting the n mon as a frame of historical analysis, lavorsky was decidedly negative about the I Iki uni ms’ experiences within the Russian Empire If‘the Ukrainian toiling m isscs hie! not known the n ih it life [under the tsars] would be worse than under

the Polish lords,’ the peasants soon learned to hate Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who brought Ukraine under the tsars.

Although cast in the terms of class struggle, lavorsky’s Ukrainian history remains a distinct historical process, with even the 1917 Revolution presented as being radically different from the events in Russia because of the hegemony of the ‘petit-bourgeois’ peasantry in the Ukrainian revolutionary movement. This ap­proach to Ukrainian history made lavorsky one of the primary targets during the crackdown on ‘national communists’ in the late 1920s.⁹ The fierce campaign against lavorskyism continued until 1931, running hand in hand with the purge of Ukrainian non-party historians. lavorsky himself had launched the latter campaign in 1928 by accusing Hrushevsky of construing a classless Ukrainian historical process and stressing the national factor over the social one. Subsequent attacks, including those by KP(b)U Central Committee Secretary Andrii Khvylia and by the young historian Mykhailo Rubach, openly denounced Hrushevsky as a ‘bourgeois nationalist.’ At the time, Hrushevsky had just published volume 9, part 1 of his multi-volume history of Ukraine, dealing with the Khmelnytsky Uprising. Although the populist Hrushevsky did not stress the importance of the war for Ukrainian state-building, he was accused of doing so with the aim of diminishing the significance of this seventeenth-century ‘peasant revolution.’ In the early 1930s his views were already reclassified by official historians as ‘national-fascist.’ In 1930 authorities transferred Hrushevsky to Russia, where he died four years later. Many of his students were arrested for participating in the Ukrainian National Centre, the nebulous underground organization that he supposedly headed, and disappeared into the Gulag.¹⁰

lavorskyism, too, was officially condemned — lavorsky himself was arrested in 1933 for his alleged participation in the subversive Ukrainian Military Organiza­tion¹¹ - but class history and the condemnation of Russian colonialism still predominated in Ukrainian history writing.

Shaken by the official denunciation of ‘nationalism’ in history, the republic’s intellectuals did not hasten to rehabilitate the state and military traditions of Kievan Rus' or those of the Cossacks. The events potentially connecting Ukrainian and Russian national mythology, the seventeenth-century Cossack war with Po­land and the resulting union with Muscovy, were still interpreted in the spirit of class history. In 1930 the rising authority on the period, the historian Mykola Petrovsky, argued that, contrary to what was said in the Eyewitness Chronicle, the Ukrainian people could not rejoice at the news of the union. Oleksandr Sokolovsky’s novel Bohun (1931) presented Khmelnytsky as an archetypal feudal warlord, opposed by Colonel Ivan Bohun, a spokesman for the masses. Naturally, union with the Russia of the boyars and serfs was not an option for Sokolovsky’s Bohun; instead, he advocated dependence on Ukraine’s ‘own forces.’¹³ The authoritative Great Soviet Encyclopedia endorsed this essentially Pokrovskian view as late as 1935 and characterized Khmelnytsky as ‘A traitor and ardent enemy of the Ukrain­ian peasantry after the uprising. Khfmelnytsky] was a representative of the top Ukrainian feudal Cossack officers, who strove to obtain the same rights as the Polish feudal lords.’ The 1654 Pereiaslav Treaty ‘marked the union between the Ukrainian and Russian feudal lords and, in essence, legalized the beginning of the Russian colonial domination in Ukraine.’¹⁴

It is not surprising that in the mid-1930s the Soviet authorities saw the 1888 equestrian statue of Khmelnytsky in Kiev’s St Sophia Square as an embarrassment.

However, the signals from above remained confusing. In the same year that the authorities castigated Tulub for her harmful fascination with the Cossack past, newspapers criticized a Kievan production of Mykola Lysenko’s classic opera Taras Bulba (1890) as an attempt to belittle Ukraine’s heroic history. Left unedited by Lysenko at his death in 1912, this first national historical opera ended with the Cossack assault on the Polish fortress of Dubno, but the director of the 1937 production chose to be faithful to Gogol’s famous story, closing the opera with the scene in which the Cossack colonel Bulba is burned alive by the Poles. However, Pravda used the tragic finale of Taras to dismiss the work as an ‘anti-popular production’ exuding a ‘spirit of doom.’¹⁶

Nor did professional historians have a clear idea of the shape a new official politics of memory should take. Following the all-Union reform, Ukrainian authorities abolished the Association of Marxist-Leninist Institutes and the Insti­tute of Red Ptofessors in 1936-7, concentrating the study of history in the Institute of Ukrainian History of the republic’s Academy of Sciences ¹⁷ Neverthe­less, this centralizing effort did not lead to the production of a truly Bolshevik survey of Ukrainian history, which the party had urgently demanded Frightened by the growing tide of repressions, the historians were in no position to respond to the contradictory signals from above The institute began preparing a draft of a survey that did not survive but seems to have followed the lavorskian line, at least in the interpretation of the Khmelnytsky Uprising and the tsarist colonial policies m Ukraine ¹⁸

Before work on the survey could advance far, the 1937 Great Purge hit the institute hard Its first director, Professor Artashes Kharadzhev, Acting Director Hryhoru Shusarenko, and researchers K Hrebenkin, V Hurystrymba, T Skubytsky, and M Tryhubenko were arrested and shot in 1937 The charges against them included Trotskyism, Rightism, Ukrainian nationalism, and terrorist intentions - crowned by participation in a ‘counter-revolutionary terrorist rightist-leftist organization, headed by the Ukrainian Centre’ that worked closely with both ‘Trotskyist terrorists and Ukrainian nationalists ’¹⁹ Their practical subversive work, confessed the accused, consisted of idealizing the national past in a forthcoming textbook on Ukrainian history The arrested ‘nationalist’ Hurystrymba described his counter-revolutionary activities as follows

In one of our conversations in June 1935, Hrebenkin told me openly that the Ukrainians who work at the institute should take the initiative in editing the History of Ukraine to make this textbook a true document of history reflecting the glorious past of the Ukrainian people I agreed willingly and asked him what concrete steps we could take to accomplish this While visiting the Kharkiv Party Archive in 1935, I met with lesypenko During our conversation, I told him that we, a group of Ukrainian researchers at the Institute of History, had started working on a textbook on the History of Ukraine, and that we needed more people I stressed that our aim was to make this textbook completely accessible and understandable to the Ukrainian masses We needed to show the heroic past of the Ukrainian people in its entirety, their struggle for independence, and their colossal creative potential, in order to show that Ukrainians have always striven for independence That is, I made clear to him that we had decided to write this textbook in the spirit of idealizing Ukraine lesypenko agreed to participate in assembling the textbook with this goal in mind ²⁰

Thus, while the central press was extolling the great Russian people and their greatest national poet, Pushkin, Ukrainian intellectuals remained, at best, con­fused about how to appraise their national past and, at worst, silenced by undis- criminating repression