Competing Identities

The autobiographical narratives published in the Zaporizhia collection demonstrate that Ukrainian identity, if not the Ukrainian language, managed to overcome its largely peasant character and orientation in the USSR.

Molodyk enjoyed a measure of luck, as his personal 'urbanization' began before the mass collectivization of the village, the industrializa­tion of the towns, and the influx of tens of thousands of unfortunate peasant migrants into Zaporizhia.

Not until 1926 did he move to Zaporizhia again, this time to enroll in the less prestigious pedagogical training school, which accepted peas­ant children, clearly without regard to their financial circumstances. By that time Ukrainization was under way, and the language of instruc­tion in the training school was Ukrainian. A capable student, Molodyk was also in charge of courses intended to Ukrainize the government apparatus. It fell to him to teach courses in the Ukrainian language to staff members of the newspaper Selians'ke zhyttia (Peasant Life), whose readership was the Ukrainian-speaking village.

Molodyk, who taught Ukrainian and Russian in the 1930s, as well as mathematics in primary and secondary schools, was fortunate enough to escape the fate of many members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia of that day and avoid imprisonment. But he was not spared that fate in the mid-1940s, when Soviet forces returned to eastern Ukraine. In November 1944 Molodyk was arrested by agents of the MGB (Ministry of State Security, the successor of the GPU and predecessor of the KGB) in Dnipropetrovsk on a charge of belonging to the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). The charge was completely false, and the arrestee did not even know what the OUN was. To all appearances, the investigating officer did not remind him of his activities during the period of Ukrainization. But Molodyk was sentenced to long years of imprisonment, as was his wife, who was also completely innocent. Naturally, the bitter experience of the camps could not fail to infuse Molodyk's later recollections with an oppositional attitude. Nor could he avoid contact with actual OUN members from western Ukraine in the camps, although there is no mention of this in the memoirs.

The notion that the very idea of Ukrainian national liberation was legitimate and that there was, consequently, nothing 'shameful' about fighting for it is present directly or indirectly in Molodyk's view of Ukrainian history in general. At times he interprets even the Soviet historical narrative of the 1950s and 1960s in a manner that allows him to leave space for the idea of Ukrainian independence. In Molodyk's memoirs, Ukrainian history begins in 1654, but the 'reunion' of Ukraine with Russia, glorified in Soviet historiography of that day, was not intended, in his opinion, 'to abolish the independence of Ukraine.' According to Molodyk, after 1654 there remained a Ukrai­nian state whose attributes were a government, the Ukrainian lan­guage, and an army. In defining the territory of that state, Molodyk included not only the Hetmanate per se but also the latter-day Sumy, Kharkiv, and Donetsk oblasts, thereby legitimizing Ukraine's histori­cal claim to those lands.

Molodyk's assessment of the course of Ukrainian history is only partly reminiscent of Vasyl Rubel's no less patriotic synthesis dating from the 1920s. What they have in common is the representation of Ukraine as a victim of the policies of Russian ruling circles, as well as attention to the history of Left-Bank Ukraine and of the Zaporozhian Sich - the native grounds of both authors. What sets them apart is the absence in Molodyk's brief synthesis of Ukrainian history of the pri­macy of the social factor, so important to Rubel. Molodyk presents a narrative of Ukrainian history somewhat adapted to official historiogra­phy but clearly national in character. The poetry of Taras Shevchenko, with one of whose verses Molodyk concluded his memoirs, could have been only a partial source for that narrative.

As far as one can judge from the memoirs of Serhii Cipko, he was more influenced by a populist than a statist conception of history. For him, the leitmotif of Ukrainian history was the martyrdom of a peasant nation oppressed by a national and social yoke that ultimately turned into collective-farm slavery. The prophet of that kind of history was Cipko's beloved Taras Shevchenko, whom he cites at the beginning of his memoirs. Generally speaking, that idea was inherent in the Ukrai­nian national narrative of the early decades of the twentieth century and was employed and adapted according to circumstances, both by promoters of Ukrainization in the 1920s and by leaders of the Ukrai­nian national movement outside the USSR. Undoubtedly, the transfor­mation of the ethnocultural identity of Cipko's parents, whose national consciousness, by his account, 'was on a very low level,'⁶³ into the author's own modern national identity began in Ukraine. It most prob­ably culminated in the Displaced Persons' camps, where members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia worked actively to create a common all­Ukrainian identity for Galicians and Dnipro Ukrainians.⁶⁴ That con­sciousness was tempered in the emigre community in Great Britain, where Cipko headed a local Ukrainian school in his spare time. A dis­tinguishing feature of the postwar Ukrainian emigration in Britain was a considerable preponderance of men over women and a much higher incidence of inter-ethnic marriage than in other countries. Serhii Cipko was one of the Ukrainian boys who married non-Ukrainian women, but the national feeling awakened in him by the events of the 1930s and reinforced by years of emigration proved so strong that he managed to maintain a Ukrainian spirit in his family and bring up his children accordingly. Since it is usually women and not men who act as guard­ians of family tradition, Serhii Cipko was extraordinarily grateful to his wife for her understanding and support.⁶⁵ In his memoirs, Cipko inter­preted his past in Ukraine through the prism of the Ukrainian idea; hence Ukraine's achievement of independence and the author's visit to Ukraine after 1991 figure as the climax of his narrative.⁶⁶

How unique or, conversely, typical of southern Ukraine were the views of Molodyk and Cipko? A general knowledge of the situation in that region during the final decades of Soviet rule suggests uniqueness as the likelier characteristic. Molodyk was schooled not only by the Ukrainization of the 1920s but also by the camps. Cipko wrote his memoirs in the emigration after Ukraine's achievement of indepen­dence. The existence of very different attitudes in the southern Ukrai­nian society of Soviet times is indicated by the memoirs of the ethnic Russian Alekseev, which are extraordinarily rich in detail. Reading them, one becomes aware of a 'contextualization' of personal, family, and local history very different from that of Molodyk, Cipko, and Rubel. For Alekseev, history begins not with the heroics of Cossack- dom, as it does for Rubel and Molodyk, but with the conquest of the southern Ukrainian steppe by the Russian Empire during the rule of Catherine II.⁶⁷ It emerges from Alekseev's memoirs, however, that in southern Ukraine Ukrainian identity competed not so much with a well-developed Russian identity as with the muted but nevertheless influential all-Russian project. As regards nationality, the Russian self­identification of Alekseev, who grew up and lived his life in close con­tact with Ukrainians, remained less than fully formed. He is perfectly aware of the differences between Russians and Ukrainians but does not regard his Ukrainian neighbours as 'other' and, as noted earlier, refers to Russians from Russia as katsapy_r thereby setting himself apart from them. Towards the end of his life, listening to Western radio broadcasts, Alekseev is pained by the prohibitions on the Ukrainian language and associates himself with the Ukrainians when it comes to Stalin's crimes.⁶⁸ Alekseev uses the term russkie to denote both nation­alities, employing it when Eastern Slavs are contrasted with other eth­nic groups, such as Germans.

Zamrii's memoirs exemplify similar thinking, considering that he constructs his identity as that of an ethnic Ukrainian. Alekseev and Zamrii share a greater preponderance of social concerns over national ones than one finds in the other authors: both are seekers after truth, formerly poor peasants who hate the rich but are also dissatisfied with the Soviet-era bosses and outraged by the cynicism of the communists. Like Alekseev, Zamrii is a bearer of all-Russian consciousness. For him, the Soviet troops are 'liberators, glorious warriors of Mother Russia.' Just like Alekseev, Zamrii uses the collective term russkie when both ethnic groups are contrasted with a third - in Zamrii's case, with Jews. Zamrii is the only author in the Zaporizhia collection who comes across as an anti-Semite. For example, he explains his dismissal from the post of prison-camp guard by the appointment to the prison administration of Jews who began 'to throw out us Russians, including me, for no reason at all.'⁶⁹ Alekseev describes his own participation in the mass robbery of Jewish shopkeepers in Berdychiv in 1914 but expresses no anti-Jewish sentiments, blaming the whole incident on the encouragement of an unidentified warrant officer in charge of a detachment of recruits being shipped to the front.⁷⁰ Although the available sources are not comprehensive enough to warrant any con­clusions about the spread of anti-Semitic sentiments in southern Ukraine, it is noteworthy that anti-Semitic statements and/or descrip­tions of pogroms are encountered in the works of authors who shared prerevolutionary types of national identity.

The roots of the all-Russian identity assimilated by Alekseev and Zamrii should naturally be sought in the achievements of the all­Russian project in the years preceding the Revolution of 1917, but its vitality can be explained above all by the authorities' termination of the Ukrainization policy of the 1920s, residual elements of Russian nationalism in official propaganda during and after the war, and the advance of the Russocentric Soviet project during the final decades of Soviet rule. In southern Ukraine, the idea of one Soviet people, propa­gated in the 1970s and 1980s, amounted to little more than the camou­flaged idea of one Russian people that predated the revolution.

Most of the material presented in the Zaporizhia collection attests to the inarticulateness of the national identities of Ukrainians and Russians in their mutual relations over the greater part of the twentieth century. The authors of diaries and memoirs who internalized Ukrainian identity rarely considered it exclusive. In formulating that identity, they did not 'other' Russians in general but only greedy Russian tsars, or Stalin. Southern Ukrainian Russians, for their part, lacked the possibility of counterposing themselves to Ukrainians even in this fashion. The inad­equate articulation and non-exclusive character of national identities in southern Ukraine led in the 1960s and 1970s to the formation of a com­mon field of identity in which the Russian language and culture were dominant but still allowed for the existence of a distinct Ukrainian his­torical, ethnic, and territorial identity. The existence of Ukraine as a sep­arate republic of the USSR created conditions favouring the retention of a distinct regional identity attached to that territory and of certain republican institutions. The distinct republic also provided an umbrella for remnants of Ukrainian identity in the sphere of high culture and education: in eastern Ukraine these remnants were a legacy of the Ukrainization of the 1920s that no longer threatened the regime, while in the west they were a concession to the 'nationalist' sympathies of the population. In southern Ukraine, the new identity encompassing both Ukrainians and Russians included certain elements of both cultures. As the cases of Yaroshenko and Zamrii indicate, not only did Ukrainians read Tolstoy, but Russians, as one may deduce from Alekseev's mem­oirs, knew Ostap Vyshnia. It was this combination of contradictory but not mutually exclusive loyalties and cultural orientations that created the basis for the identity with which southern Ukraine entered the age of Ukrainian independence.