Multiethnic History
As the national paradigm took centre stage in Ukrainian historiography after 1991, the Ukrainian nation finally emerged victorious in its historiographic competition with dynasties, states, and the dominant Russian and Polish nations.16 While that change in perspective corrected numerous wrongs done to Ukrainians in Russocentric and Polonocentric narratives, did it do justice to the history of Ukraine as a country and territory?
This question should be answered in the negative.
Not only were significant portions of Ukrainian territorial and cultural history sidelined in the process, but large numbers of ethnic Ukrainians were allotted little space in the Ukrainian national narrative. Hrushevsky, for example, was criticized in his lifetime for replacing the early modern history of Ukraine with that of Cossackdom - an important but still a minority element of the Ukrainian population in its day. Hrushevsky also reduced the history of the nineteenth century to that of the Ukrainian liberation movement. Intellectual and cultural currents that were not part of the Ukrainian national project were left out of his narrative, which followed the rise, fall, and resurgence of the nation.17 Thus, neither Nikolai Gogol nor Ilia Repin, both ethnic Ukrainians born in Ukraine, made it into the mainstream of Ukrainian national history. Those who opposed the Ukrainian national movement - the so-called Little Russians such as Mikhail Yuzefovich, the instigator of the Ems Ukase (1876), which prohibited Ukrainian-language publications in the Russian Empire - became part of the story, but only as traitors and villains. The Russophiles of Galicia and the Ruthenians of Transcarpathia fared no better. On the other hand, there is a tendency to Ukrainize groups and institutions that never possessed an identity that might be called Ukrainian. Recent research on the formation of political, cultural, and national identities in the lands now known as Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus points to the danger of assigning to the masses of the population national identities that did not exist at the time and did not become 'majority faiths' at least until the twentieth century.18If not all Ukrainians made it into the national narrative of Ukrainian history, that is even more true of representatives of other ethnic groups. As Andreas Kappeler has recently noted, one cannot write the history of state institutions in Ukraine, its trade and economy, or its urban centres by focusing on Ukrainians alone.19 They certainly dominated the countryside but were a minority in the cities, which were dominated by Russians, Jews, Poles, and Germans. It would be unfair to state that minorities are completely absent from the Ukrainian national narrative, but as a rule they have been portrayed as aggressors, oppressors, and exploiters in the struggle with whom the Ukrainian nation was born. There is little doubt that the minorities must be included in the new narrative of Ukrainian history, not just as 'others' but as part of the collective 'we' - an all-important element of Ukrainian history that differentiated it from the history of other lands. Today there are positive developments to be noted in the research and writing of a multiethnic history of Ukraine.
The first attempt to write such a history was made by Paul Robert Magocsi of the University of Toronto. His History of Ukraine, almost 800 pages in length, was published in 1996 and became a multiethnic alternative to Orest Subtelny's more traditional narrative Ukraine: A History, which first appeared in 1988 and went on to sweep Ukraine in numerous editions of its Ukrainian translation.20 Magocsi managed to produce a much more complete history of Ukraine as a territory than did Subtelny, but there is certainly room for improvement. As often happens when new horizons are opened for historical research, the initiative comes from outside the profession.
That is certainly the case with Anna Reid's Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine, first published in 1997. Reid, a Kyiv-based correspondent for the Economist and the Daily Telegraph in the mid-1990s, tells the dramatic history of Ukraine through stories of individual cities and regions. She begins in Kyiv and ends in Chornobyl, using a chapter on the western city of Kamianets-Podilskyi to tell the story of the Poles and their history in Ukraine, a chapter on Donetsk and Odesa to tell the story of the Russians, and chapters on Ivano-Frankivsk and Chernivtsi to tell the story of the Jews and the Holocaust. Her chapter on the villages of Matusiv and Lukovytsia in the Ukrainian heartland tells the story of the Ukrainian famine of 1932-3. Reid does not attempt to reach a compromise or find a middle ground between the often conflicting stories told by her acquaintances. Instead, she tries to present different perspectives on the history of the land that all her acquaintances consider to be their home. What emerges from her book is a mosaic that represents the multiethnic character of today's Ukrainian nation as much as it represents its history, conceptualized in territorial terms.The mental mapping of Ukraine was impossible in the past and is hardly possible today without taking into account the diversity of Ukraine's regions. Historically speaking, Ukraine took shape as territories traditionally belonging to different political, economic, and cultural zones were brought together under the banner of ethnonational unity. Understanding a particular region means not only studying it in isolation but also comparing it with other regions of a given state. It also means going beyond existing national borders to take account of the historical connections that formed its unique character and identity. Among Ukraine's historical regions, the best-studied is Galicia in western Ukraine - the object of attention not only of Ukrainian but also Austrian, German, Polish, and American historians.
One of the latest additions to the field is a book by Alison Frank, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia. This is the kind of work that combines elements of economic, social, and political history. Yaroslav Hrytsak's recent treatment of the formative years of Ivan Franko presents a fresh look at political and cultural developments in Galicia and undermines many postulates of traditional Ukrainian historiography with regard to the national awakening of the nineteenth century.21 The innovative character of both books becomes more apparent if one considers that Galicia - a region that both Poles and Ukrainians have called their Piedmont - has been treated in both historiographic traditions almost exclusively within the context of the national paradigm.The political and social history of Ukraine's Donbas region in Eastern Ukraine has been another attractive subject for Western historians. It was treated in a number of studies, including Charters Wynn's Workers, Strikes and Pogroms, and a superb monograph by Hiroaki Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror in the Donbass. What is lacking so far is work on the comparative history of historical regions that cross national boundaries. For one thing, Ukrainian historiography would certainly benefit from a work comparing industrialization and its impact on political, social, and cultural aspects of everyday life in, for example, Ukrainian Galicia and the Baku region of Azerbaijan.
The main challenge in writing a multiethnic and multiregional history of Ukraine is to see another ethnic group or region not as an enemy but as a neighbour - not always an easy task when the history in question is as tragic as that of Ukraine. Anna Reid writes in Borderland that the Ukrainians inherited a legacy of violence. Back in 1917, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, a renowned Ukrainian novelist and at that time premier of the Ukrainian government, observed that one cannot read Ukrainian history without taking a bromide.22 The time has come to change that situation, not by prescribing a different medication but by treating the problem - the nature of the Ukrainian narrative.
New approaches to the history of the violent conflicts that have punctuated Ukrainian history over the centuries have yielded some very encouraging results, which are apparent in the work of scholars both in Ukraine and abroad. Natalia Yakovenko, now the leading Ukrainian historian of the early modern era, recently challenged one of the most powerful myths of the Ukrainian national narrative, that of the Khmelnytsky Uprising. She approached it not from the perspective of Ukrainian state or nation building but from that of its human cost, discussing the ruinous consequences of the uprising not only for its main victims, the Poles and the Jews, but also for its alleged beneficiaries, the Ukrainians. Yakovenko's new account of the Khmelnytsky Uprising, presented in an article entitled 'How Many Faces Has War?' was met with criticism in the Ukrainian scholarly press. She was accused of promoting the Polish viewpoint on the history of the revolt. Nevertheless, there are signs that Yakovenko's reinterpretation of the uprising, which cost hundreds of thousands of lives and left deep scars in the historical memories not only of Jews and Poles but of Ukrainians as well, will make its way into the new master narrative of Ukrainian history. After all, the second edition of her survey of Ukrainian history up to 1800 was recently issued in Kyiv and nominated as a major book of the year 2005.23
The construction of a new multiethnic and multicultural narrative of Ukrainian history requires the intensification of research on ethnic and religious minorities. The situation in the field of the history of Ukrainian Jewry, the second largest of Ukraine's minorities before the Second World War and one of its smallest today, is indicative of the challenges facing Ukrainian historiography with regard to the history of the country's minorities. When it comes to the Jewish role in the Ukrainian historical tradition, it has been depicted almost exclusively in negative terms.
Only in the first decades of the twentieth century did the situation begin to change. Mykhailo Hrushevsky went out of his way to discuss the plight of the Jews during the Khmelnytsky Uprising, producing one of the most sympathetic twentieth-century accounts of Jewish history in Ukraine. He also supported the work of the Jewish department of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in the 1920s. But with the advance of the Soviet class-based paradigm, Jews were cleansed from the pages of Soviet textbooks. As a group they were replaced by the socially defined category of leaseholders and tavernkeepers in the early modern era and figured only as 'Soviet citizens' when it came to the discussion of Nazi atrocities against the Jewish population of the USSR.Since 1991, Jews have remained largely absent from the Ukrainian historical narrative, but they are now being included in some aspects of it, such as the study of the Second World War.24 Ukrainian historians like Zhanna Kovba have been exploring the history of the Jewish community during the war, while such authors as John-Paul Himka, Marco Carynnyk, and Sofiia Grachova have placed the question of Ukrainian complicity in the Holocaust on the scholarly agenda.25 At this point there are three centres of Jewish studies in Ukraine. Nevertheless, research on Jewish history in Ukraine remains in its initial phase, as compared with the achievements of Moscow-based scholars. There is a clear need for the translation into Ukrainian of major Western works dealing with the history of Jewish communities in Ukraine.26
Writing a multiethnic history of Ukraine is of course an important way of dealing with the deficiencies of the dominant narrative of Ukrainian history. This exercise is useful from the political and the scholarly point of view. It helps present a much richer mosaic of Ukrainian history and replaces the confrontation of competing ethnic narratives with their coexistence. Nevertheless, writing multiethnic history does not mean moving 'beyond ethnicity.' It means, rather, diversifying the approach instead of abandoning the paradigm altogether. As Kappeler has noted recently, the multiethnic approach shares the same set of weaknesses as the ethnonational one, since it is liable to lapse into primordialism, a teleological approach, and the marginalization of non-ethnic groups and institutions. These problems can be overcome by means of transnational approaches to the history of Ukraine.27