Borderlands or Former Colony?

Meanwhile, the provinces west of Kyiv province - Volhynia and Podolia - were not always considered part of “Ukraine.” Certainly, this was mostly true for the Polish nobles who owned much of the land, as we can see in the writings of Honore de Balzac, who toured the region in the mid-nineteenth century (see chapter 6, below).¹¹ And we do not even speak of Transcar­pathia, Galicia, and Bukovina even further west - disputed “borderlands” claimed by various peoples.

Indeed, in the Slavonic tongues “Ukraine” means “borderland,” which sometimes serves as the organizing principle for books on Ukrainian history. Certainly, just as in the late Middle Ages what is today Ukraine constituted the eastern flank of “Christendom” facing the Lands of Islam (Dar al-Islam), so later it came to be the easternmost part of “Europe,” facing the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman Empire to its south, and various nomadic, non-Slavonic tribes to its east. As one recent historian has so eloquently put it, Ukraine has often been the very “Gates of Europe.” But was it really always a borderland, or “frontier,” as American historian William H. McNeill called it, or was it sometimes more “a colony?”¹³

In other words, was it ever a colonial entity to be used and exploited by its neighbours, and to be settled and absorbed, or was it something else? Many Ukrainian historians, beginning with Hrushevsky himself, saw the sixteenth-century Polish push into Ukraine as a colonial enterprise (as did some of the Poles themselves), and years later, during the Cold War, some anti-Communist Ukrainians in the West, especially emigres, saw Soviet efforts in Ukraine in terms of colonialism and imperialism.

[In Soviet times, Repin] was very seldom accounted among Ukrainian artists. This very fact testifies to that cultural process that began in Ukraine after the Pereiaslav Treaty of 1654 [by which the eastern part of the country became a vassal of Muscovy] and of which Repin is a concrete example. Ukraine produced geniuses, but because of its co­lonial status was not able to provide them with an appropriate field for their endeavors. They fell into the orbit of Russian culture, while at the same time reaching the level of [other] European achievements. Such persons in the best of circumstances retained [only] some distant memory of their homeland, and a feeling of obligation towards the spiritual betterment of their own people. Here Repin's case is amaz­ingly similar to that of the notable Ukrainian, Nikolai Gogol [Mykola Hohol in Ukrainian]. And he stands together with other famous prod­ucts of Ukraine such as [the artists] L. Borovykovsky, D. Levytsky, M. Gay (Ge), A. Kuindzhi, I. Kramskoi, and M. Yaroshenko.¹⁴

Throughout most of the Soviet period, such “colonial status” (Belichko's term) was thoroughly enforced, and such giants' Ukrainian connection was played down for the sake of Russian greatness. This was true not only of artists, but also of statesmen, scientists, musicians, historians, architects, and various literary figures, especially from earlier Ukrainian and Russian history, so that outsiders, even many scholars, were seldom aware of the very real differences between them and genuine Muscovite and Russian- origin figures.¹⁵

Moreover, within the nineteenth-century Russian Empire, state and society would brook no talk of Ukrainian separateness or independence, either in politics or in literature, although early in the century, it was still quietly discussed in positive terms by much of the nobility of eastern, or left-bank Ukraine (east of the Dnieper), most of it descended from the old Ukrainian Cossack officer class. Despite periods when Ukrainian traditions were more accepted, and Ukrainian literature was published (though as a local variant of Russian patriotism), in general, this older nobility and its heirs faced a solid wall of rejection by the Russians, or Moskali, as the Ukrainians called them.

The unanimity of Russian conservatives, liberals, and socialists on the question of Ukraine's incorporation and assimilation stems in large part from the fact that the country has always been seen as an early and crucial test case of successful imperial expansion and assimilation. Any challenge to its success has carried enormous consequences for the Russian self-image and has been dealt with in uncompromising terms. The dissolution of the Russian-Ukrainian link has always threatened the imperial identity of Russia itself, the symbiosis of nation and empire that Russian intellectuals have so frequently extolled. These intellectuals have always been called upon to provide justifications for imperial growth and to defend an in­creasingly monolithic conception of Russian identity. The very idea of a Ukrainian identity, of course, threatened both.¹⁶

Such was the situation in the Russian Empire right up to 1917, when suddenly the whole thing fell apart. The formation of the ussr gave the so-called Union Republics a certain leeway within the formula “national in form and socialist in content,” but over the next seventy years the Russian state's centralizing tendencies repeatedly reasserted themselves, and on the eve of dissolution it was a very tight-knit, frozen entity, with anything but the genuine federal system and democratic liberties that its constitution proclaimed. Indeed, some observers abroad would quite consciously refer to it as the “Soviet Empire,” and even the question of Ukraine's colonial status was sometimes adumbrated by emigres, though not much more widely than that.¹⁷

Ukraine's political independence after 1991 changed much of this, but the legacy of Soviet “colonialism” remains, although “post-colonial” historians generally ignore the country. In fact, they seem to group it with Ireland and, despite the two countries' common second-class status within vast imperial entities, set them aside, concentrating on Europe's former over­seas empires.¹⁸ Does this have something to do with the difference between those great maritime empires versus contiguous continental empires, or is there some kind of lingering ignorance, reverse racism, or, at least, moral inequivalence, at work here?

Indeed, many left-oriented, post-colonialist historians seem to know or care very little about either Ireland or Ukraine and often do not even dis­tinguish between Ukraine and Russia, despite notable differences dating back to medieval times.