Introduction

Myroslav Shkandrij

This book examines four dramatic revolutionary periods that have shaped Ukrainian history over the last hundred years. The story is told from the perspective of “insiders”—the Bolshevik historians who first described the 1917-21 revolution in Ukraine, the citizens who were accused of nationalist conspiracies by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, the Galician press that covered the 1933-34 famine, the nationalists who fomented revolution in the 1940s, and, finally, the participants in the Euromaidan protests and Revolution of 2013-14.

Ukraine emerged from the Soviet Union as an independent state in 1991, and broke decisively from Russian domination with the Revolu­tion of Dignity in 2014. In the intervening years, its intellectuals reinter­preted the country’s history by incorporating the many episodes ignored or neglected in Soviet times. Four revolutionary upheavals have figured prominently in these accounts—the struggle to create a Ukrainian state after the collapse of the Russian empire (1917-28); Stalin’s “second” revo­lution and war against the peasantry, which culminated in the Great Fam­ine or Holodomor (1929-34); the nationalist struggle against Soviet rule during and after the Second World War (1939-47); and the Euromaidan demonstrations that were followed by armed conflict in the Donbas, the eastern parts of the Donests and Luhansk regions. Each episode involved a conflict with Moscow and its proxy forces in Ukraine, and each pro­duced dramatic social and political transformations. Soviet attempts at social engineering and the Second World War created waves of violence during which the country became a killing ground overrun by invading armies, punitive police forces and desperate revolutionary groups.

Some accounts of the Russian Empire’s disintegration and the Soviet Union’s creation barely mention Ukraine. The tendency has been to view the country’s history as of secondary importance to events in St. Peters­burg, or a side-show in the great dialectic between binary oppositions— communism and capitalism, democracy and fascism, the USA and USSR, the West and Russia. After 1991, however, scholars were forced to deal with a post-Soviet order and to explain the emergence of an independent Ukraine. They have also been obliged to take into consideration the flood of archival documentation released in Eastern European countries, which has presented new perspectives—personal, regional, and national.

The rewriting of history since independence has presented Ukrainians with an opportunity to assert their right to exist, to be recognized as a people, nation, and state. Narratives produced by the country’s intellec­tuals now often foreground the consolidation of a national identity over the course of the twentieth century, and the persistence of the dream of independence. The focus of these narratives has been on disruptive impe­rial interventions, the denial of a national identity by accounts that have sometimes claimed to serve more progressive political aims, or to rest upon more rigorous theoretical foundations. Among conceptualizations that have reinforced a Ukraine-denying dynamic, one might indicate Eric Hobsbawm’s view of October 1917 as the pivotal event in world his­tory, Russia’s claim to geopolitics dominance, or the widespread belief that strong powers are required to govern and control smaller states.

For these reasons, Ukrainian scholars have often entered the memory wars with the appearance of renegades. They have been obliged to tell a story that is both complicated and unfamiliar, to construct a counter­narrative that describes a country on the boundary between empires, prized for its resources by major powers and constantly instructed by other nations and states that it belonged to them. According to the counter­history told by Ukrainian scholars, imperial oppression and identity denial generated a subversive energy that for over a century has periodically exploded into violent upheavals. Ukrainian historians are today shaping these episodes into a coherent story. They see the four dramatic periods of social and political change as interrelated and connected, scenes in a tapestry that represents significant moments in the national experience and reference points in today’s debates over identity and cultural memory.

The essays in this collection consider how this process has occurred. They revisit key historical moments, examining them in the light of recent research and drawing on archival information. The first article reviews early Bolshevik histories written in the 1920s, often by authors who came from Ukraine’s Jewish community. They reveal the initial lack of support for the communist movement in both the national and communist phases of the revolutions that spanned 1917-22, and the friction between Rus­sian, Jewish, and Ukrainian party members.

The next section examines Stalin’s “second” revolution, which destroyed the generation that led the Ukrainization movement and Cultural Renais­sance of the 1920s. An article jointly written with Olga Bertelsen and based on research in the SBU (former KGB) archives in Kharkiv and Kyiv, focuses on the secret police’s fabrication of nationalist conspiracies in 1929-34.

The third section deals with the mobilization of revolutionary nation­alists in the 1930s and 1940s, and their role in the Second World War. One article looks at literature produced by the nationalists in the 1930s, especially at the cult of strong leaders and brave heroes. A second dis­cusses the short-lived state of Carpatho-Ukraine, which was created in the wake of the Munich agreement of 1938 and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. Although a quixotic venture, it played an important role in inspiring nationalists to work for a united, independent Ukraine. A third article examines the current controversial memory wars dealing with the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrai­nian Insurgent Army (UPA), and suggests why the events of 2013-14 have created a tendency toward hagiographic history.

Finally, the fourth section explores the way cultural memory has been shaped in the years following independence. One article looks at the turn in Soviet studies from revisionist approaches toward an admission of Stalin’s responsibility for repressive policies and mass murder. It argues that new research has been strongly influenced by information made public after former Soviet archives were opened in the 1990s. Another article draws on interviews conducted in 2015 with Ukrainian intellectuals who challenged mainstream reporting in the West during the events of 2013-14. The interviewees discussed civil society, nationalism, Eastern Ukraine, Western media coverage, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the prospects for ending the ongoing war. This is followed by an essay on seven meanings of the term “nationalism”—as used in Putin’s propaganda campaigns and as understood by contemporaries.

Five of the articles appeared over the past decade in various publica­tions, and have been revised for inclusion in this volume. Six new essays have been added. The resulting study highlights the way cultural memory is being reconfigured today, after decades in which the adjectives “Octo­ber,” “Bolshevik,” “Russian,” and “Soviet” provided the dominant frame­work for considering the Ukrainian past. Some articles will no doubt appear contentious to readers more familiar with Russian sources and narratives. The aim in this book is to offer a perspective that recognizes Ukrainian agency, provide scope for neglected “insider” or “local” view­points, and draw on contemporary discussions.

The presentation of some historical episodes will probably unsettle readers who prefer a simplified account, now popular in Ukraine, that describes a victimized people and its heroic liberators. These readers might be encouraged to consider Volodymyr VynnychenWs quip that Ukrainian history should only be read after taking bromide. His words have usually been interpreted as referring to the lamentable chronicle of oppression that constitutes a large part of the country’s history, but they are also a comment on self-inflicted episodes of destruction that have resulted from delusion, rage, and ignorance: “This is a wretched, senseless, helpless history, so painful, vexing and bitter that it makes sad reading [...]. It is an endless, unbroken chain of rebellions, wars, fires, hunger, invading armies, overthrows, intrigues, quarrels, perfidy” (Vyn- nychenko 1980, 285). His words are as much a call to self-examination and a re-evaluation of national history as they are a condemnation of oppressive regimes.

In any review of traumatic episodes and “difficult knowledge,” there is a danger of essentializing that which requires problematizing. Readers may be tempted to conclude that the episodes of violence are inherent to the society: the inevitable expression, perhaps, of “ancient hatreds,” or of a society made dysfunctional by some chronic condition—an urge to anarchy, a lack of faith in its own powers, an irrational drive or psycho­logical defect.

The final essay, which deals with the way popular memory is being formed today, mentions a slogan that became prominent during the Euromaidan—“Ukraine is not Russia”—a message directed against two kinds of commentator: the imperial-minded Russian who refuses to see Ukraine as a separate country, or at least one capable of independent existence, and the baffled Westerner who has barely registered the pos­sibility that a non-Russian identity exists in the region. The articles in this volume examine the century-long process behind the appearance of this slogan, which was already current in 1917. They review the four disruptive waves in political and cultural life that have caused the greatest disunity

Introduction 5 among Ukraine’s citizens, and today still complicate their articulation of an identity narrative.

Reference

Vynnychenko, Volodymyr. 1980. Shchodennyk. Tom pershyi, 1911-1920. Edmon­ton and New York: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the US.