Kostomarov on Ukrainians, Russians, and Poles

The following excerpts are from My kola Kostomarov’s 1861 article ‘Dve russkie narodnosti’ (‘Two Russian Nationalities’), published in the short-lived St Petersburg journal Osnova.

The Ukrainians are characterized by individualism, the Great Russians by collec­tivism.... In the political sphere, the Ukrainians 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 Russians attempted to build on a firm foundation a collective structure permeated by one spirit. The striving of the Ukrainians was towards federation, that of the Great Russians towards autocracy and a firm monarchy.

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

The Ukrainians 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 Ukrainians and the Poles are quite different. If, lin­guistically, Ukrainians are less close to the Poles than they are to the Great Rus­sians, in national character they are more akin to the Poles....

To be sure, there is a deep gulf which separates the Poles and the Ukrainians, a gulf which may never be bridged. Poles and Ukrainians 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 Ukrainians are a democratic people.

source: Dmytro Doroshenko, Survey of Ukrainian Historiography!Annals ofthe Vkrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. V-VI (New York 1957). pp. >37-139.

Historical Perceptions 21 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', 1898-1937). 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.

The Soviet historical viewpoint

The work of a few Russian historians such as Aleksander Presniakov (1918) and Matvei K. Liubavskii (1929) was influenced by the arguments of Hrushevs'kyi. These scholars began to seek the origins of the Muscovite Russian state not in Kiev but in the northeastern lands of Rostov, Suzdal', and Vladimir. However, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the creation of the Soviet state interrupted the development of Russian historical scholarship. While 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 the Soviet Union - in both Russia and Ukraine - a new version of an old interpreta­tion developed.

In Soviet Ukraine, 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.

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 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 dvonanslvo [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 Bela- rusan territories began to develop separate existences while under the control of Lithuania and, later, Poland.

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 Hru- shevs'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.