Defining the Ancient Past

Creating a ‘good Stalinist textbook’ required bringing the historical narrative into alignment with recent Soviet ideological transmutations In the immediate post­war years, partly as a belated reaction to Nazi theories of Slavic inferiority and partly as a creation of an august ancient past for the great Russian people, Soviet ideologues extolled the ancient Slavs The editorial in the first issue of the new Moscow journal, Voprosy istoru, announced in 1945 that the war had prioritized some historical problems, which had until then been seen as unimportant The journal’s first example concerned the origins of the Slavs ²¹

Ukrainians shared the same ancestry and, unlike Russians, still populated the heart of the ancient Eastern Slavic domain After the war, the republic’s archaeolo­gists immediately turned their attention to the Slavic past In the spring of 1946 Khrushchev requested Stalin’s permission to convene the First Ukrainian Archaeo­logical Congress His letter explained ‘The scholarly agenda of the congress will be subordinated to the further and more profound Marxist-Leninist interpretation of two problems The first central problem will be the origins of Eastern Slavs and the second will be the study of the relics of ancient civilizations \kultur\ between the Dnieper and the Danube, relics which clearly testify that an advanced ancient civilization already existed on that territory during the late Stone Age and the Bronze Age ’²² Moscow issued permission, and the Congress convened in Odessa in August 1946 Predictably, the participants claimed that the Slavs did not settle in Eastern Europe in the fifth or sixth century, as had previously been thought, but were descended from autochthonous agriculturalists The archaeologists also con­demned the Norman theory of the creation of Kievan Rus' and stressed the ancient roots of native Slavic statehood ²³ During the first post-war decade, the Institute of Archaeology of the republic’s Academy of Sciences promoted further research along these lines, earning in 1950 the praise of the Academy’s Presidium and the KP(b)U Central Committee ²⁴

The importance of this topic can been seen m the harsh criticism a draft of chapter 1 of the History of the Ukrainian SSR suffered precisely because it ‘muddled the question of the Slavs’ origins ’ The author, Lazar Slavin, a senior archaeologist, wrote that Soviet scholars ‘were proving’ the native roots of Slavs, while the Politburo commission thought that this had already been proved ²⁵ As late as 1952 the Ukrainian bureaucrats replaced Slavin with two younger archaeologists, who wrote the chapter anew The new version stressed that the Slavs were natives of Central and Eastern Europe, but Hrushevsky had been wrong to see the ancestors of the Ukrainians in the ancient Antes the sources ‘undeniably attest to the com­mon origins, as well as the linguistic and cultural unity of all southern and northern Eastern Slavic groups ’ By comparing Ukrainian archaeological data with the results of excavations in Pskov and the upper Volga region, the authors sought to confirm the cultural unity of‘proto-Ukrainians’ and ‘proto-Russians’ in the fifth and sixth centuries ²⁶

Presenting the ancient sedentary agricultural Trypilhan civilization (ca 3500­1400 BCE) as proto-Slavic was perhaps the single biggest temptation facing the authors Even members of the Politburo commission suggested stressing the fact that Trypilhan artefacts had been found both in the Kiev region and in Bukovyna, thus underscoring the ancient ‘cultural unity of the population of Ukraine’s Eastern and Western provinces ’ Some reviewers, like Professor D Poida of the Dnipropetrovsk Party Academy, insisted openly that the Trypilhans were the ancestors of the Slavs Although the 1953 edition of History did indeed point out that the Trypilhans had settled mostly in Ukraine, from the Dnieper west to the Carpathian mountains, the text was silent on the settlers’ relation to the Slavs Unlike the 1951 limited edition, however, in the final version it was claimed that the Slavic archaeological relics in Eastern Europe dated as far back as the second millennium BCE If true, this claim would have made the Slavs at least junior contemporaries of the Trypilhans, but the authors did not risk elaborating on the possible connection ²⁷

Preparing the chapter on Kievan Rus' presented a different quandary, because the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences did not have senior specialists on this period This topic had been problematic since the authorities denounced Hrushevsky in the late 1920s and 1930s for claiming Kievan Rus' for Ukrainian history Serafim lushkov, the authority on ancient Kievan law, formally remained a member of the Institute of Ukrainian History until 1950, but since 1944 he had been teaching at Moscow University and had not written much for Kievans ²⁸ The Institute usually assigned chapters on Kievan Rus' to Kost Huslysty, whose own research interests were in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries Whereas the Institute’s working plan for 1949 still showed lushkov as working on a book about Kievan Rus', the report for 1946—50 listed no monographs or articles on this topic Still, in his chapter for the History, Huslysty succeeded in portraying this state formation as the common cradle’ of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians He even published the chapter summary as a separate booklet, Kievan Rus' as the Cradle of Three Fraternal Peoples ²⁹

In 1950 Volodymyr Dovzhenok of the Institute of Archaeology published the pioneering book Military Arts in Kievan Rus' He concentrated on the history of the (Ukrainian) Dnieper region, although the last two pages contained a brief account of Aleksandr Nevsky’s victories over the German knights in the North during 1240-2 A reviewer for an authoritative Moscow journal criticized Dovzhenok for neglecting the military skills of the Grand Prince Andrei Bogohubsky of Vladimir-Suzdal The reviewer felt that the prince’s marches on Novgorod and the Dnieper area had been particularly important because the ‘Grand Prince engaged in the national defence of the Russian land ’³⁰ In his narrative, the Ukrainian archaeologist had, of course, intentionally suppressed Prince Andrei’s march on Kiev in 1169, when the northeasterners had captured the city, pillaged and burned its churches and monasteries, and killed many of its inhabitants It is astonishing that the Moscow reviewer wanted this episode not only restored but valorized Yet Ukrainian historians never extended their praise to the Russians’ ‘great ancestor’ Prince Andrei Bogohubsky Even in the much-edited volume 1 of the History of the Ukrainian SSR his march was characterized as a ‘feudal intermcine war,’ which resulted in the ‘ransacking’ of Kiev At the same time, a caution was issued against interpreting this war as a conflict between Russians and Ukrainians ‘it was a feudal war between princes who belonged to the same Old Rus' national­ity’³¹

Stalinist ideologues saw as one of Hrushevsky’s main sins his suggestion that the true successor of Kievan Rus' was the southwestern Gahcian-Vblhynian Princi­pality rather than the northeastern Vladimir-Suzdal After the war, Ukrainian functionaries displayed extraordinary sensitivity to any scholarly work on Gahcia- Volhynia In 1951 the censors banned the article ‘On Some Questions of the History of Ukraine,’ which the historian Fedir Shevchenko had written for the Bulletin of the Ukrainian SSR Academy of Sciences, because the author proposed that ‘the origins of Ukrainian statehood [were] in the principalities of south­western Rus', and especially in the Galician-Vblhyman Principality’³² It is signifi­cant that during the first post-war decade the sole book on the principality was published in the capital by the Moscow historian V Pashuto Reviewers justly welcomed it as the ‘first serious monograph on the history of the Western Ukrainian lands during the period of feudal fragmentation ’³³

When Ukrainian historians began working on the survey, the problem of exactly when the three Eastern Slavic nations had emerged from the Kievan ‘cradle’ and developed into separate ethnic groups remained unresolved Pressed by the ideological importance of dating the beginning of their people’s ethnic differ­ence from the Russians, Ukrainian specialists took the lead in the investigation of this issue Based on the linguistic data, the republic’s scholars proposed that the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian nationalities (narodnosti) took shape during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries The discussion in Voprosy istorn during 1949-51 affirmed this dating, which eventually predominated in the Russian and Belarusian historical surveys as well In 1952 the Moscow historian Mihtsa Ne­chkina acknowledged that, unlike her own textbook, the History of the Ukrainian SSR offered an innovative and sophisticated interpretation of the origins of the Russian and Ukrainian nationalities ³⁴