Historical Perceptions

Ukraine has been under the rule of foreign powers, especially Poland and Russia, for long periods of time. As a result, in historical writings Ukraine has often been treated not as an entity unto itself, but rather as a sort of appendage to a larger state structure, whether the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Russian Empire, or the Soviet Union.

From such a perspective, the history of Ukraine was associated solely with the growth of the Ukrainian national idea, which skeptics argued could be dated only from the beginning of the nineteenth century at the earliest. Such perceptions of the historical past led to questions about the present and future. Faced with the existence of a Ukrainian national movement, those unsympathetic to Ukrainian distinctiveness would ask: If there was no Ukrainian state and therefore no Ukrain­ian history before the nineteenth century, on what grounds can one justify the creation of a sovereign state in the future? Because of the political implications as well as the scholarly significance of historical writings, it seems important that the reader be familiar with at least the main outlines of the various perceptions of the history of Ukraine. These may be classified as the Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Soviet viewpoints.

The Russian historical viewpoint

The various perceptions actually reflect a serious debate concerning the history of eastern Europe as a whole, or, more specifically, of the East Slavic peoples - the Russians, Belarusans, and Ukrainians.

What Is Eastern Europe?

The term eastern Europe is difficult if not impossible to define with precision. Logically, one might assume that the term refers to the eastern half of the European continent. After World War II, however, it came to have more a polit­ical than a geographic meaning: eastern Europe referred to the territory encom­passed by the new postwar boundaries of those countries (East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Albania) that had just come under Communist rule and that were at one time or another closely allied, if not subordinate, to the Soviet Union.

Such a definition produced obvious geographic anomalies. Greece and Aus­tria were excluded simply because they were non-Communist, regardless of the fact that both were as far east as or even farther east than some of the other “eastern” European states. Such an illogical conceptualization of eastern Europe is no longer defensible, on what were anyway rather tenuous post­World War II political grounds. This has become the case especially since 1989, as the former “eastern” European countries have abandoned Communist rule and as the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union itself have ceased to exist.

Accordingly, use of the term eastern Europe in this book will be based solely on geographic criteria. Since Europe as a continent stretches from the coasts of Ireland and Portugal in the west to the Ural Mountains in the east, the west-east geographic divide is roughly along the 25°E longitudinal line, which runs very near the present-day western border of Belarus and Ukraine. It is interesting to note that the exact north-south as well as west-east geographic mid-point of the European continent - one that was carefully calculated in the second half of the nineteenth century - is actually on Ukrainian territory, near the village of Dilove (formerly Trebushany), in the southeastern corner of the Transcarpathian oblast.

This means that geographic eastern Europe is made up of virtually all of Belarus and Ukraine, Russia west of the Urals, Moldova, most of Finland, Estonia, and Latvia, and half of Romania and Bulgaria. Hence, if geographic and historical criteria are combined, eastern Europe can be said to coincide in the main with the homelands of the East Slavs - Russians, Belarusans, and Ukrainians - and it is in this context that the term will be used here. The term central Europe as used in this volume will refer to territory encompassed by the present-day countries of Poland, eastern Germany, the Czech Republic, Slova­kia, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, and western Romania.

from Moscow and, later, St Petersburg since the early seventeenth century. Not sur­prisingly, both the Romanov dynasty and the Russian imperial state it represented encouraged the publication of works presenting a historical scheme that justified their existence. Among these works were the first two histories of Russia, by the eighteenth-century authors S.O. Mankeev (1715, published 1770) and Vasilii M. Tatishchev (1739, published in five volumes, 1768-1818). Both were elaborate tracts justifying the existence of absolute rule under the Romanov dynasty.

The best example of the dynastic approach to Russian history was the monu­mental twelve-volume Istoriia gosudarstva rossiiskago (History of the Russian State, 1818-29), by Nikolai M. Karamzin. Karamzin brought his historical coverage from earliest times to 1613 - that is, to the founding of the Romanov dynasty. He por­trayed the Muscovite tsardom from the fourteenth to the late sixteenth century as coincident with the era of Russia’s greatest well-being, especially because it was a time when autocratic rule was supposedly at its height. “Delivered by the princes of Moscow from the disaster of internecine wars as well as from a foreign yoke... and satisfied with the uses of authority, the people did not argue over rights.. In the end, all Russians began to look upon the tsar as a terrestrial god.”¹ The direct implication was that Russia’s nineteenth-century tsars should follow the autocratic example of their Muscovite predecessors.

An indispensable part of glorifying any state or monarchy is proving its proper genealogical lineage and descent. This is what in our times Bernard Lewis has so aptly called the foundation myth: the need for countries and peoples and powers - most of whom “arise from humble origins” - “to improve or conceal their undis­tinguished beginnings and attach themselves to something older and greater.”² In this regard, Russian historians could draw on a conceptual framework developed in the fourteenth century by medieval churchmen. At that time, when the Musco­vite state was in its early stage of development, monastic scribes recopied earlier historical chronicles, which they then “improved” and expanded in order to show the descent of their own secular rulers, the Muscovite princes, from the rulers of Kievan Rus’, who belonged to a dynasty that could be traced back to the ninth-cen­tury semi-legendary ruler of Novgorod, Riuryk. The Muscovite princes were osten­sibly the direct descendants of the Riuryk dynasty, which after the early seventeenth century was continued by the Romanovs. The Riurykid genealogical scheme, which argued for the historical continuity of Kievan Rus’, Muscovy, and the Russian Empire, was also given a prophetic ecclesiastical twist in the early sixteenth cen­tury, when a monk named Filofei sought an explanation for the capture by Muscovy (1510) of his native western Russian city of Pskov. In the wake of the earlier fall of Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern (second) Roman Empire, to the Otto­man Turks (1453), Filofei was content to explain that event and the catastrophe that later beset his native city as part of God’s larger plan: “All Christian empires will come to an end and, in accordance with the prophetic books, will merge with the empire of our sovereign, that is, the Russian tsardom. For two Romes have fallen, and a third [Muscovite Russia] still stands, but a fourth shall never be.”³

By the nineteenth century, secular historians had begun to explain Russia’s manifest destiny in eastern Europe not with genealogical or religious criteria, but rather in terms of political and sociodemographic patterns.

Although Karamzin believed that the inhabitants of what he called Great, White, and Little Russia constituted a single Russian people, by the early nineteenth cen­tury, linguistic and ethnographic research, together with the publication of con­temporary descriptions and travel accounts, was forcing many scholars to realize that there were, indeed, considerable differences among the various components of the so-called one Russian people, in particular between the Great Russians and the Little Russians, or Ukrainians. The confirmation of such differences not only would undermine the idea of a single Russian people, but also might threaten the link between medieval Kiev and Moscow and thus render precarious the whole framework upon which the Russian imperial conception of history was built. Hence, a suitable explanation for this potentially dangerous discrepancy had to be found.

The explanation was provided in the writings of Mikhail D. Pogodin, an influ­ential nineteenth-century historian and publicist for the Russian version of Pan­Slavism. In 1856, Pogodin put forth his depopulation theory, according to which the ancestors of the Muscovites had supposedly lived in the central (Dnieper- Ukrainian) lands of Kievan Rus’ from the tenth through the twelfth century, but had fled to the north after the Mongol invasion of the mid-thirteenth century. Later, in the thirteenth and, especially, fourteenth centuries, peasants from Polish- and Lithuanian-controlled areas in the west came into barren Ukraine. This new immigrant population represented the ancestors of the present-day Ukrainians. Thus, to Karamzin’s theory of the displacement of political centers was added Pogodin’s theory of shift in population.

This conception of the history of the East Slavs was adopted by perhaps the most influential of all Russian historians, Sergei M. Solov’ev, in his twenty-nine volume Istoriia Rossii s drevnieishikh vremen’ (History of Russia from Earliest Times, 1851­79) and by Solov’ev’s student Vasilii Kliuchevskii in his even more widely read five-volume Kurs russkoi istorii (Course of Russian History, 1904-21). According to Solov’ev, “At the end of the twelfth century [Kiev]... revealed its incapacity to develop any solid foundations for a single state. Following a definite path from the beginning, all the best elements of the land poured out of the southwest toward the northeast. Settlement moved in the same direction and with it the course of history.”⁴ Solov’ev’s deterministic view was complemented by Kliuchevskii’s stress on supposed psychological change:

As soon as the population of northern Rus’ felt that Moscow was capable of becoming the political center around which could unite its forces to struggle against the foreign enemy, that the Moscow prince could be a national leader in this struggle, a drastic change took place in the minds of people and in their relations.... All the suppressed and inarticulate national and political aspirations of the Great Russian race, aspirations that had so long and so successfully sought means of self-expression, then met with the dynastic ambitions of the grand duke of Moscow and carried him to the exalted height of national sovereign of Great Russia.

The Russian conception of eastern Europe’s history, as presented most elegant­ly in the works of Solov’ev and Kliuchevskii, continues to dominate most histories of Russia. It was the conception put forward by Russian emigre historians, the most influential of whom were George Vernadsky and Michael Florinsky, and it has been repeated in most textbooks of Russian history published in western Europe and North America during the twentieth century. Consequently, in these works the history of Ukraine, if considered at all, is treated as the history of one of Russia’s provinces. Moreover, since the Kievan period is treated as an integral part of Rus­sian history, Ukrainian history per se is considered to have begun in the fourteenth century at best, or in the seventeenth century. For some Russian writers, the very concept of Ukrainian history is illogical, since it is considered simply a political idea born in the nineteenth century - an idea, moreover, which was used by for­eign powers like Germany and Austria to undermine the unity of the Russian state.

Finally, there is the view that the very idea of Russia without Little Russia, or Ukraine, is inconceivable. The dean of twentieth-century Russian specialists of Kievan Rus’, Dmitrii Likhachev, best summed up this attitude: “Over the course of the centuries following their division into two entities, Russia and Ukraine have formed not only a political but also a culturally dualistic unity. Russian culture is meaningless without Ukrainian, as Ukrainian is without Russian.”⁶

The Polish historical. viewpoint

Somewhat related to the classic Russian conception of eastern European history, although clearly having other goals, is the traditional approach of Polish writers to the history of Ukraine. During the nineteenth century, Poland did not exist as an independent state. In such circumstances, Polish political commentators and writ­ers frequently looked to the historical past in an attempt to explain why they had lost their statehood and perhaps to discover what should or should not be done to regain independence in the future. In their search through Poland’s past, most frequently it was the seventeenth century and the problem of the Cossacks in what was then Polish-ruled Ukraine that was considered the crucial turning point and beginning of the decline of Poland.

The Polish perception of Ukrainian history was greatly influenced in the dec­ades before World War I by Aleksander Jablonowski in his seven volumes of his­torical studies (Pisma, 1910-13) and his Historya Rusi Poludniowej do upadku Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej (History of Southern Rus’ until the Fall of the Polish Com­monwealth, 1912). Despite his relative sympathy for Ukrainian national strivings in the late nineteenth century, Jablonowski concluded that historically the Ukrain­ian lands had never constituted a distinct entity nor the population of Ukraine a distinct people. Rather, in the sixteenth century, when Poland annexed Ukraine, Poles discovered an uncivilized frontier, into which they brought culture and state formations. While they recognized there had been a high level of culture during the period of Kievan Rus’, they did not consider it specifically Ukrainian. Moreo­ver, because Polish and Kievan princely families intermarried, and because Poland controlled parts of the Rus’ federation (especially its western borderlands) and even the city of Kiev itself during certain periods, there arose the view, especially after Poland’s incorporation of most of the Ukrainian lands in 1569, that the Poles had a legal and historical right to the Kievan inheritance.

Polish writers also implicitly accepted the theory of the Russian writer Pogo­din about the depopulation of Ukraine (southern Rus’) after the mid-thirteenth­century Mongol invasion. Into this supposedly barren wilderness of the Ukrain­ian steppe (Polish: Dzikie Pole “Wild Fields”) came settlers from the Polish- and Lithuanian-controlled lands of Galicia and Volhynia. Even if most of these people were East Slavs, they were under the organizational leadership of the Polish state and manorial nobility. Moreover, the cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity of the populations that came under Polish rule was tolerated in what Polish writers were fond of referring to as the democracy of the republic of nobles and common­wealth headed by kings of the Jagiellonian dynasty.

The era of Jagiellonian rule, which lasted from 1385 to 1572, was considered to epitomize the ideal Polish system of government, supposedly characterized by democratic institutions and, in general, by religious and national tolerance. Assum­ing the existence of such an ideal state, Polish writers quite naturally stressed that the country’s inhabitants, whatever their religious or cultural background, eagerly strove to identify themselves as free citizens of the Polish commonwealth. Within such a constellation, Ukraine, together with neighboring Belarus and Lithuania, was viewed simply as part of the eastern kresy, or borderlands, which had been fortunate enough to be included within that bastion of Western and Catholic civi­lization, Poland.

To be sure, there were times when these apparently peaceful and productive “borderlands of western civilization” (to quote the popular twentieth-century Polish-American historian Oscar Halecki) were struck by disturbances. Taking their cue from several monographs on the Cossacks and their most famous leader, Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi, by the early twentieth-century historian Franciszek Raw- ita-Gawronski, Polish authors generally have presented these disturbances as little more than barbaric outbreaks caused by destructive elements among the uncivi­lized Ukrainian masses. Sometimes the outbreaks would result in major upheavals, as during the Khmel’nyts’kyi revolution of the mid-seventeenth century or the haidamak uprisings of the eighteenth century. After they were put down and for­eign (Turkish, Tatar, or Muscovite) intervention was repelled, the Ukrainian fron­tier was rightfully restored to Poland as part of its cultural and political patrimony. This pattern lasted until the late eighteenth century, when Poland’s Ukrainian lands were forcibly annexed by Russia and Austria, who joined with Prussia eventu­ally to remove all of Poland from the map of Europe.

In essence, Ukrainian lands, especially those west of the Dnieper River (the Right Bank, Volhynia, Galicia), were considered an integral part of Poland. Hence, when the nineteenth-century efforts to restore a Polish state finally came to frui­tion in 1918, it was expected that its boundaries would “quite naturally” encom­pass Ukrainian and other eastern borderland territories in a reincarnation of the Jagiellonian state that would stretch from the Baltic to the Black Sea. As it turned out, such territorial designs proved impossible to achieve when Europe’s bounda­ries were being redrawn after World War I. A quarter century later, however, most Poles did expect that the Ukrainian-inhabited lands (eastern Galicia and western Volhynia) ruled by Poland during the interwar years would be returned to the reconstituted country at the close of World War II. Some Polish circles, especially among political exiles in the West, even kept alive the idea of reviving a Poland from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

Whereas the peripheral nature of Ukrainian developments was generally accepted in traditional Polish historical and popular perceptions before World War II, after that time Polish historians, initially under the impact of Soviet politi­cal influence in east-central Europe and the dominance of the Marxist approach to scholarship, considerably reassessed their views. The Cossack period continued to be of primary interest, but in the writings of postwar historians like Leszek Pod- horodecki, Wladyslaw Serczyk, and Zbigniew Wojcik, Ukraine is no longer treated simply as an appendage to Poland, but rather as a country with a distinct historical process from earliest times to the present. This positive reassessment of Ukraine - in part reflective of Polish post-Communist political accommodation to, and sup­port for, its large eastern neighbor - is evident in recent surveys of Polish history by Jerzy Topolski and Marek Borucki, among others. Nevertheless, it takes time for new attitudes to permeate any society, and still today it is not uncommon to find in Polish public opinion the conviction that whatever was positive in the Ukrain­ian past came not from indigenous forces but solely from the country’s association with the ostensibly civilizing influence of Poland.

The Ukrainian historical viewpoint

The beginnings of a specifically Ukrainian perception of eastern Europe’s histori­cal development can be said to coincide with the appearance of the first general histories of Ukraine in the eighteenth century. Despite their titles, which referred to the works as general histories of Little Russia, they were in fact accounts of the Zaporozhian Cossacks during the sixteenth and, especially, seventeenth centuries. The Zaporozhians and Ukraine were also the subject of works by Alsatian French (Jean-Benoit Scherer, 1788), German (Karl Hammerdorfer, 1789), and Austro- Hungarian (Johann Christian von Engel, 1796) authors.

The first half of the nineteenth century saw the appearance of the first multi­volume histories of Ukraine, by Dmitrii Bantysh-Kamenskii (1822) and Mykola Markevych (1842-43), both of whom stressed the role of the Zaporozhian Cos­sacks in the Ukrainian historical process. The most influential work of the period, however, was the Istoriia Rusov (History of the Rus’ People, 1846), of uncertain authorship, which first appeared in an unpublished form in the late 1820s. The popularity and influence of this work were perhaps due to the fact that it was more a political tract than a history. The Istoriia Rusov was one of the first works to treat Ukraine not as a province of Russia or Poland, but rather as an independent coun­try deriving from Kievan times. Ukraine attained its greatest heights during the Cossack era, and it began to decline only in the eighteenth century after coming increasingly under Muscovite, later Russian, rule. The ability of the Istoriia Rusov to provide a clear sense of historical continuity for Ukraine was to have an enormous impact on historians as well as on the poets, folklorists, and language enthusiasts active in the slowly emerging Ukrainian national revival.

The first half of the nineteenth century was also a time when the Romantic movement reached Ukraine. Both professional and, in particular, amateur histo­rians were receptive to Romanticism’s emphasis on the distinctive genius of indi­vidual peoples as an alternative to the previous and often exclusive emphasis on dynasties and state structures as the driving force of the historical process. Adopt­ing such populist-Romantic attitudes, a new generation of scholars led by Mykhai- lo Maksymovych, Mykola Kostomarov, and, at least initially, Panteleimon Kulish saw the Cossacks as the quintessential expression of the supposedly democratic and egalitarian ideals of the Ukrainian people. The new tone was set as early as the 1840s in the political program of the St Cyril and Methodius Society, published under the title Knyhy bytiia ukrains’koho narodu (Books of Genesis of the Ukrainian People). This book, authored by Kostomarov, presented a personified Ukraine that “loved neither the tsar nor the [Polish] lord and established a Cossack Host... in which Cossacks were all equal amongst themselves.” Moreover, “day after day the Cossack Host grew and multiplied and soon people in Ukraine would all have become Cossacks, that is, all free and equal.”⁷ This idyllic scenario did not work out, according to Kostomarov, because of the intervention of outside forces - Polish landlords, Muscovite tsars, Catholic popes, and Jesuits.

The view that the people were the driving force in history also led populist writ­ers to try to discover the peculiar genius of ethnic Ukrainians, and by so doing arrive at both their uniqueness and their difference from Russians and Poles. Again, Kostomarov best summed up this approach in an article “Dvie russkii nar- odnosti” (“Two Rus’ Nationalities,” 1861), which subsequently came to be regard­ed as the gospel of Ukrainian nationalism.

Besides striving to depict the uniqueness of Ukrainians, an effort which under­mined the conceptual unity of the East Slavs, Ukrainian scholars began chipping away at another aspect of the Russian historical conception, the ostensible link between medieval Kievan Rus’ and Muscovy. In response to Pogodin’s argument that the population of the Kiev region moved north after the thirteenth-century Mongol invasion, Mykhailo Maksymovych (1857) undertook research that was con­tinued later by Volodymyr Antonovych (1882) and Mikhail Vladimirskii-Budanov (1890 and 1893), and that seemed to prove convincingly that central Ukraine was not depopulated in the fourteenth century, but rather that a society continued to

Kostomarov on Ukrainians, Russians, and Poles

The following excerpts are from Mykola Kostomarov’s i86i article “Dvie russkii narodnosti” (“Two Rus’ Nationalities”), published in the short-lived St Petersburg journal Osnova.

The Southern Rus’ [Ukrainians] are characterized by individualism, the Great Rus’ [Russians] by collectivism.... In the political sphere, the Southern Rus’ people were able to create among themselves free forms of society which were controlled no more than was required for their very existence, and yet they were strong in themselves without infringing on personal liberties. The Great Rus’ peo­ple attempted to build on a firm foundation a collective structure permeated by one spirit. The striving of the Southern Rus’ was towards federation, that of the Great Rus’ towards autocracy and a firm monarchy.

The Great Rus’ element has in it something grand and creative: the spirit of total­ity, the consciousness of unity, the rule of practical reason. The Great Rus’ can live through all adversities and select the hour when action is most fitting and circum­stances most favorable.

The Southern Rus’ people lack such qualities. Their free spontaneity led them either to the destruction of social forms or to a whirlpool of striving which dissipated national efforts in all directions. Such testimony about these two peoples is provided by history....

The relations between the Southern Rus’ and the Poles are quite different. If, lin­guistically, the Southern Rus’ are less close to the Poles than they are to the Great Rus’, in national character they are more akin to the Poles....

To be sure, there is a deep gulf which separates the Poles and the Southern Rus’, a gulf which may never be bridged. The Poles and Southern Rus’ are like two branches growing in opposite directions; one is pruned and has born refined fruit - the nobility; the other produced a peasantry. To put it more bluntly: the Poles are aristocratic while the Southern Rus’ [Ukrainians] are a democratic people. Yet these two labels do not reflect the histories of the two peoples: Polish aristocracy is very democratic; that of the Southern Rus’ is very aristocratic. The Polish nobility has tried to remain within the limitations of its own class; in Ukraine, on the other hand, the people have equal status and rights and often produce individuals who climb much higher and attain more for themselves, but in turn are again absorbed by the mass of the people from which they stem. Here and there this struggle often weakens the social structure, providing an opportunity for another people, who know the value of a strong community, to seize it.

source: Based on the English translation (with emendations for ethnonyms) in Dmytro Dorosh­enko, Survey of Ukrainian Historiography/Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. V-VI (New York 1957), pp. 137-139. function there until the Cossacks created new social and governmental structures in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Despite such seeming flaws in the tra­ditional Russian conception of eastern European history, the overall framework still seemed plausible.

The first serious challenge to the Russian conception came at the beginning of the twentieth century, from the pen of Mykhailo S. Hrushevs’kyi. In 1904, Hrushevs’kyi published an article entitled “The Traditional Scheme of ‘Russian’ History and the Problem of a Rational Organization of the History of the Eastern Slavs.” Continuing in the tradition of the Istoriia Rusov, he not only pointed out what he considered the illogical aspects of the Russian conception of the eastern European historical process, but also provided a framework for a Ukrainian histor­ical continuum that according to him began even earlier than the Kievan period and lasted past the Cossack era.

Even before the appearance of his seminal article, Hrushevs’kyi had begun to elaborate his framework for Ukrainian historical continuity in what was to become the monumental ten-volume Istoriia Ukrainy-Rusy (History of Ukraine-Rus’, 1898­1937). Although the ten-volume work reached only the year 1658, Hrushevs’kyi also prepared several one-volume historical surveys which covered developments from pre-Kievan times to the struggle for a “renewed” independent Ukrainian state just after World War I. Thus, in his article “The Traditional Scheme” and his popular one-volume histories - all backed up by the erudition of his ten-volume scholarly magnum opus - Hrushevs’kyi provided, for the first time, a Ukrainian conception of eastern European history that could rival the dominant Russian one. While subsequent Ukrainian historians such as Dmytro Doroshenko and Viacheslav Lypyns’kyi may have challenged many of the populist inclinations of Hrushevs’kyi in favor of a more statist approach to the past, Ukrainianists outside the borders of the former Soviet Union - in interwar Galicia, later in western Europe and North America, and more recently in post-Soviet Ukraine - have fol­lowed Hrushevs’kyi’s framework for the continuity of a distinct Ukrainian histori­cal process that begins in pre-Kievan times and lasts until the present.

The Soviet historical viewpoint

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent creation of the Soviet Union in 1922 changed the course of Russian historical scholarship. The change did not come immediately, however, and at least during the 1920s both Marxist and non­Marxist approaches appeared in historical publications. The work of a few non­Marxist Russian historians such as Aleksander Presniakov (1918) and Matvei K. Liubavskii (1929) was in part influenced by the arguments of Hrushevs’kyi. Con­sequently, they began to seek the origins of the Muscovite Russian state not in Kiev but in the northeastern lands of Rostov, Suzdal’, and Vladimir. On the other hand Russian emigre historians, led by George Vernadsky, continued to work within the framework of the nineteenth-century Russian historical conception of Solov’ev and Kliuchevskii.

In Soviet Ukraine as well, both Marxist and non-Marxist historians were able to research and publish, at least during the 1920s. The Hrushevs’kyi school contin­ued under the historian’s personal direction (he had returned from exile in the West to Kiev in 1924). Hrushevs’kyi’s basic framework was retained even by Soviet Ukrainian Marxist historians like Matvii lavors’kyi, who otherwise was concerned with emphasizing socioeconomic developments and the class struggle in Ukrain­ian history.

Beginning in the 1930s, however, when Stalin decided to eliminate all vestiges of any ideology that was not in keeping with his Great Russian Bolshevik version of Marxism, most of the members of the Ukrainian historical school, including Hrushevs’kyi, were exiled or imprisoned, and effectively silenced. Those who sur­vived were expected to accept the new interpretation of eastern European history. That new interpretation as it applied to the non-Russian nationalities of the Soviet Union was epitomized by the so-called lesser-evil formula.

In the new Bolshevik state, founded as it was on Marxist ideological principles adjusted to local conditions by Lenin and Stalin, the nationality problem was an issue of primary concern. Leninist nationality policy did not permit the excesses of tsarist Russian nationalism, which had denied the very existence of Ukrainians as a distinct nationality. While the Bolsheviks recognized Ukrainians as a nationality, they nonetheless expected them to live with Russians in the same state. Hence, the old Leninist revolutionary slogan that tsarist Russia was a “prison of peoples” had to be adjusted. A solution to this seemingly contradictory state of affairs was the theory of the “lesser evil,” summed up by the former Soviet historian Konstantin Shteppa in the following manner: “Although the annexation of non-Russian peo­ples to Russia was an evil - particularly when annexation meant the loss of their national independence - it was a lesser evil by comparison with that which could be expected to have resulted from their annexation to some other large state. Thus, Ukraine’s annexation to Russia in the seventeenth century had to be regard­ed, according to this theory, as an evil, but a somewhat lesser evil than absorption by Poland, Turkey or - later - Sweden would have been.”⁸

To diminish even further the negative impact of this “lesser evil,” Soviet Russian and Soviet Ukrainian historians emphasized, whenever and wherever possible, the friendship between the two peoples, their relationship being presented - because Russia had always been stronger and thus the “elder brother” - as having been particularly beneficial to Ukrainians. The most outstanding example of this friend­ship between the “brotherly Russian and Ukrainian peoples” was the so-called act of union reached at Pereiaslav in 1654, in which the Cossack leader Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi pledged his loyalty to the tsar. In honor of its 300th anniversary in 1954, the Pereiaslav act was celebrated with great pomp in the Soviet Union by means of various popular and scholarly events and numerous publications. The depiction of the act in Soviet textbooks graphically reveals the evolution of Soviet Marxist historical perceptions, as in the following summary.

In 1928, a brief history of Ukraine by Matvii lavors’kyi proclaimed that seven­teenth-century Ukrainians “did not know that a fate worse than that under the [Polish] szlachta [nobility] awaited them in the future at the hands of the Musco­vite dvorianstvo [nobility] and its autocrat - the ‘white tsar’.”⁹ In 1940, however, a textbook of Soviet history concluded that “Ukraine’s incorporation into the Rus­sian state was for her a lesser evil than seizure by Poland of the lords or Turkey of the sultans.”¹⁰ Finally, by the 1950s, incorporation purely and simply “signified a reunion of two great brotherly peoples which was to save Ukraine from seizure by Poland and Turkey.”¹¹ The fact that the 1654 act was being hailed 300 years later as an act of “reunification” rather than union reveals how Soviet scholarship had returned to a variant of the pre-revolutionary Russian framework for understand­ing the history of eastern Europe.

According to the accepted Soviet historical framework, which was clung to as a kind of dogma until the 1980s, Kievan Rus’ was the common cradle of all the East Slavs. The political and cultural traditions of that medieval entity were subsequent­ly carried on most forcefully by the “elder brother” - the Russians - first through their Muscovite state, later through the Russian Empire, and most recently by its Soviet successor state. As for the common Kievan patrimony, it was inhabited by what is described as the “Old Russian nationality” (and its inhabitants ostensibly spoke the Old Russian language). Moreover, it was not until after the Mongol invasion in the mid-thirteenth century, when the southern and western Rus’ lands were “torn away” from the rest of old Rus’, that the Ukrainian and Belarusan ter­ritories began to develop separate existences while under the control of Lithuania and, later, Poland. Thus, according to the Soviet historical framework, the Ukrain­ian and Belarusan nationalities (and languages) began to be formed sometime between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Suggestions of a separate Ukrain­ian development before that time (whether in politics, language, or national dis­tinctiveness) were condemned as “bourgeois nationalist” ideology. Such an ideol­ogy reflected the views of Hrushevs’kyi, whose historical scheme was considered “hostile,” “reactionary,” and a “threat” to another Soviet dogma - the centuries-old unity and friendship between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples.

In summation, present-day perceptions of the history of eastern Europe and in particular of Ukraine derive largely from historical frameworks formulated in the nineteenth century. These differ in varying degree according to whether authors wrote from a Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, or, by the twentieth century, Soviet per­spective. The Russian perception stresses a pattern of steady political growth, which begins in so-called Kievan Russia in medieval times and subsequently is con­tinued by the displacement of political centers and population to the north - first to Vladimir-na-Kliazma, then to Moscow and St Petersburg, and finally back to Moscow under the hegemony of the Soviet state. In such a framework, Ukraine has no independent historical existence.

The traditional Polish perception also fails to allow for a distinct Ukrainian historical process, since Ukraine is considered to be no more than a borderland of Polish civilization. Most of Ukraine, especially the territories west of the Dnieper River, is viewed as an integral part of Poland in which the only redeeming political and cultural developments of the past were those undertaken by the “defenders of western civilization,” the Poles.

The Ukrainian perception sees the formation of a Ukrainian ethos even before the ninth century and the beginning of medieval Kievan Rus’. Moreover, Kiev’s population was not entirely dispersed after the mid-thirteenth-century Mongol invasion, a time when Rus’ civilization shifted only slightly westward, to Galicia and Volhynia, before returning to Dnieper Ukraine in the form of a Cossack political entity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rus’-Ukrainian civilization was subsequently continued in the form of a national revival in the nineteenth cen­tury and the achievement - albeit short-lived - of independence in the twentieth century.

After World War II, the Soviet view became a variant of the pre-revolution­ary Russian view. Kievan Rus’ came to be seen as the cradle of all the East Slavs, although the Russian branch was depicted as the elder protector of the other two (the Belarusan and the Ukrainian) against the imperialistic tendencies of Poland and the Ottoman Empire before the eighteenth century and against western Euro­pean powers, especially Germany, in the twentieth century.

Scholars in the West, particularly in the United States, have essentially adopted the traditional Russian view of the history of eastern Europe. Kievan Rus’, Muscovy, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union are all seen as part of a single histori­cal continuum and are referred to in popular and often in professional literature simply as Russia. Those who accept the traditional Russian view are, in turn, quick to dismiss the framework of Ukrainian history formulated by Hrushevs’kyi and his successors with arguments that Ukrainian writings are suspect because they serve the political interests either of former anti-Soviet cold warriors or of extreme anti-Russian local nationalists. The rest of this volume will be less concerned with adopting or denying any of the existing frameworks than with trying to present in a basically chronological sequence the events that have taken place from roughly the first millennium before the common era (bce) to the present on the territory of what, since December 1991, is the independent republic of Ukraine.