Narrating the Nation
The monumental 800-page survey of the pre-revolutionary Ukrainian past opened with the statement, ‘The Ukrainian people possess a heroic history that is centuries old and inseparably connected with the history of the great Russian people and the other peoples of our Fatherland ’ Although due attention was paid to the development of‘productive forces,’ the principal narrative line remained a story of statehood and nationhood The writers extolled Kievan Rus', the common heritage of the three fraternal Eastern Slavic peoples, as the ‘biggest and mightiest state in medieval Europe ’ The Pereiaslav Treaty reunited ‘two great Slavic peoples ’ In a claim shared with many other imperial histones, the authors stressed that by joining Russia, the Ukrainians had not endangered their national identity, on the contrary, this act ‘furthered the development of the Ukrainian nationality and its transformation into a nation ’62
Other jubilee publications of 1953—4 similarly suggested that the Ukrainians had reached full nationhood only because their ancestors had once joined the Russian Empire Thus, Ivan Boiko’s pamphlet The Tercentenary of Ukraine’s Reunification with Russia, which had an impressive print run of 300,000 copies in Ukrainian and 230,000 in Russian, praised the ‘wonderful fruits’ of Russian- Ukrainian friendship such as Ukrainian statehood (in the form of the Ukrainian SSR) and the reunification of all Ukrainian lands in one polity 63 The story of the empire thus remained a sum of the national narratives of the past Although Ukraine’s historical trajectory mouthed into the Russian Empire, the development of the Ukrainian nation remained the essence of its historical process The republic’s pedagogical journal, Radianska shkola, instructed schoolteachers to update the interpretations found in the standard textbook as follows
The textbook on USSR History for grade 8, edited by Professor A M Pankratova, presents the Ukrainian Peoples War of Liberation that began in the spring of 1648 under the leadership of the prominent statesman and military leader, the intelligent and far-sighted politician Bohdan Khmelnytsky, as a war against ‘landlords’ oppression and Polish domination ’ In reality, the Ukrainian peasantry, which represented the main force in the liberation movement, fought not only against feudal oppression in all its forms and manifestations, but also for national independence (za natsionalnu.
nezalezhntsi) The teacher should stress that, in the course of the Wir of 1 iberation, it was precisely this factor that contributed to the Ukrainian people’s increasingly insistent demands for reunification with the Russian people 64Volume 1 of the History generally received good press Both scholarly and political journals published highly positive reviews of the work, as did Pravda At the Eighteenth Congress of the Ukrainian Communist Party in March 1954 Nazarenko praised the book ex cathedra as a work demonstrating that the Ukrainians’ past had been connected inseparably with the history of the Russian people ’65 However, the first signs of political liberalization after Stalin’s death emboldened those Ukrainian intellectuals who saw the History as a retreat from the wartime promotion of national memory One of them, the decorated partisan commander and writer Petro Vershyhora,66 attacked the History in print In his essay on the partisan movement that appeared in number 4 (1954) of the Moscow literary journal Oktiabr, Vershyhora criticized Ukrainian historians for insufficiently glorifying the Cossacks as a patriotic and freedom-loving element’ ‘For example, the evasive History of Ukraine (Kiev The Ukrainian SSR Academy of Sciences Press, 1953) is, in my opinion, a disgraceful attempt to write history by leaving history out, by portraying the people’s development without the brightest page of their early life, a page embodying the creativity of the masses and, most of all, of the toiling peasantry, who expressed their patriotism in the Cossack partisan war This book is an example that should not be followed, a telling example of bureaucratic “double insurance” lacking the principal kernel of a historical study - patriotism ’67 Vershyhora did not stop there In April he submitted to Pravda a dismissive article on the History, accusing the writers of‘watering down everything heroic in the history of the Ukrainian people ’ No wonder that Soviet readers continued to be attracted to the works of the old Ukrainian nationalist historians ‘I have personally heard many times both in Ukraine and in Moscow from our honest Soviet people, whose interest in the history of the fraternal commonwealth was ignited by the tercentenary celebrations, that they were reading Hrushevsky, Kuhsh or, at least, Kostomarov, but not our Soviet historical works ’68
Functionaries organized historians to rebuff the patriotic Ukrainian writer Vershyhora was invited to Moscow, where the VKP(b) Central Committee ideological bureaucrats, Oleksu Rumiantsev and Anatolu Lykholat (both transplanted Ukrainians), denounced his views in the presence of four leading Russian historians (M Tikhomirov, N Druzhinin, A Novoselsky, and A Sidorov) and three Ukrainian specialists on the Cossacks (I Boiko, V Diadychenko, and K Huslysty) In addition, reviews of the History in Pravda and Voprosy istoru cryptically referred to Vershyhora’s ‘irresponsible riposte
The tercentenary prompted the final parole of Ivan Krypiakevcyh, the only remaining Ukrainian uithonty on rhe Khmelnytsky period.
In 1953 this former ‘nationalist’ and ‘fascist’ published timely works such as The Ties between Western Ukraine and Russia until the Mid-Seventeenth Century and ‘Bohdan Khmelnytsky as an Advocate of Ukraine’s Reunification with Russia.’ In the same year, the authorities promoted Krypiakevych to the directorship of the Institute of Social Sciences in Lviv.70 His monumental biography of Khmelnytsky appeared in a luxurious edition in 1954. Even though the book’s editor wrote several ideological insertions, fellow historians in Kiev found many of the ideas in this biography disturbing, undermining the imperial framework’s limiting power over the national narrative. Reviewers criticized Krypiakevych’s designation of the Cossacks as a ‘central progressive force’ in early modern Ukraine as an idealization. The author failed to stress that Khmelnytsky had wanted to reunite Ukraine with Russia from the first days of the war in 1648. Worse, he suggested that the Cossacks could have defeated the Poles on their own, but reviewers declared that this could have happened only with Russian assistance. Finally, Krypiakevych failed to provide a detailed critique of nationalistic historical concepts and did not sufficiently elaborate on the Ukrainians’ ethnic and historic proximity to the Muscovites.71The never-ending balancing act in historical narratives between the empire and the nation kept historians’ productivity low. In addition, the preparation of a ‘Stalinist textbook’ of Ukrainian history consumed the time and energy of the republic’s leading specialists for almost a decade. But by 1950 the project’s base institution, the Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Ukrainian History, had grown to eight departments and more than one hundred full-time researchers.72 During the post-war years, historians repeatedly proposed that their research expertise be used on other major projects in Ukrainian history, only to be rebuffed by the party bureaucrats each time.
In 1949 the Academy of Sciences petitioned the KP(b)U Central Committee to approve the preparation of a twenty-five-volume collection of sources, ‘The History of Ukraine in Documents and Materials.’ The project was conceived as a grandiose collaborative effort of the Institutes of Archaeology and Ukrainian History, several leading universities, and the Archival Administration. Scholars planned on producing the first seven volumes during 1949-50, adding six more volumes in each subsequent year until 1953. Although the Academy submitted a prospectus of the edition, the Central Committee simply shelved the 73matter.
Ukrainian functionaries could have had a variety of reasons for not approving this imposing enterprise. The perceived need to concentrate all efforts on the survey, financial constraints, and an unwillingness to accept responsibility for the ideological supervision of another major project all could have contributed to such an outcome. The authorities similarly turned down - twice - the request for a Ukrainian historical journal. Since 1943 the Institute of Ukrainian History has been publishing an irregular series of Naukovi zapysky (Scholarly Transactions), only three volumes appearing by 1950. In 1948 the Institute reported to the KP(b)U Central Committee that it was ready and willing to publish as many as five or six issues annually, perhaps under the title Pytannia istorii Ukrainy (Issues in the History of Ukraine). Party functionaries rejected this proposal outright. D. Hnatiuk, head of the Publishing Section of the Central Committee’s Press Department, attached the following resolution: ‘Into the files [V arkhiv\. I recommend creating a more modest title for the transactions.’74
The Institute renewed its request in late 1950, but party ideologues again concluded that the creation of a journal was completely unjustified’ and suggested that the historians submit their papers to Moscow’s Voprosy istorii. In the end, the Central Committee did not allow Ukrainian historians to start their own journal until 1957, long after the completion of the History and the beginning of de- Stalinization.75
Still, historians used the tercentenary to secure financing for the publication of a large corpus of historical documents, the three-volume collection The Reunification of Ukraine with Russia.
Despite its rather narrow title, this monumental publication began with documents from 1620 and provided unprecedented insight into the Cossack epoch. More than half of the documents in the collection (446 out of 747) appeared in print for the first time.76 In the process of its preparation, Ukrainian historians requested that the Lenin Library manuscript division in Moscow return to the republic 6,000 files from the collection of the historian Mykola Markevych (Nikolai Markevich, 1804-60) containing the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ukrainian documents. Nazarenko supported the request, but the Lenin Library secured the backing of the VKP(b) Central Committee and agreed to transfer only the microfilms.77Polish archivists, in contrast, proved eager to establish scholarly contacts with their Ukrainian colleagues. In October 1953 the Poles sent more than 2,500 microfilmed pages of historical documents on the Cossack period to Kiev, many of which were subsequently published in the three-volume collection. On 18 January 1954 (the day of the tercentenary) the Polish side presented the Ukrainian republic with thirty original historical documents. In May a delegation of the Polish Sejm donated another seventy-seven documents pertaining to Ukrainian history, including thirteen of Khmelnytsky’s original decrees and one letter by Shevchenko.78
Aside from this breakthrough with Cossack documents, the authorities did not encourage major projects in Ukrainian history. Apparently, the Ukrainian ideologues designated the forthcoming two-volume History of the Ukrainian SSR as the sole ideologically approved source to which teachers, propagandists, and general readers should turn for the proper interpretation of the Ukrainian past.
That said, the ‘Stalinist textbook’ of Ukrainian history was not intended for use in schools The history of Ukraine did not exist as a separate subject, although textbooks on USSR History covered landmarks of the Ukrainian past such as Kievan Rus', the Cossack Wars, and Shevchenko Significantly, Moscow allowed non-Russian republics whose national histones did not lay concurrent claims on such signposts of Russian patrimony to teach them as separate school disciplines Thus, in 1950 Armenian schoolchildren were spending 114 hours in grades 8, 9, and 10 studying their national history from a 1942 textbook 79
Ukrainian history teachers did discuss the republics past, but only briefly and only when Ukrainian subjects surfaced in the general course on USSR history Nonetheless, the Ukrainian publisher Radianska shkola translated the all-Umon standard textbooks into Ukrainian and published them in mass editions 80 Standard texts reflected the evolution of the Soviet concept of Ukrainian history, although in truncated and often confusing form In 1948 a section of Shestakov’s grade 4 textbook was entitled ‘Ukraine’s Struggle against Polish Domination and Its Incorporation into Russia ’ In the 1955 edition, the same section was called ‘Ukraine’s Struggle for Its Liberation from Oppression by the Polish Gentry and [Its] Reunification with Russia ’ The two editions also offered differing explanations for the union The 1948 version read ‘The end of war was nowhere in sight The Poles were plundering Ukraine To escape from this difficult situation, Khmelnytsky in 1654 reached an agreement with the Muscovite tsar Aleksei that Ukraine be accepted under Russian suzerainty’ In the 1955 variant one sentence sufficed ‘Expressing the Ukrainian people’s striving for union with the fraternal Russian people, Khmelnytsky approached the Russian government with the proposal that Ukraine be reunited with Russia ’81
The Ministry of Education recommended that, when covering Ukrainian topics, history teachers should take their students on tours to local historical monuments and to performances of Kocherha’s laroslav the Wise and Kornuchuk’s Bohdan Khmelnytsky The ministry also required that teachers find time to rebuff the falsifications of the Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists 82 It is not clear to what degree the average teacher was able to follow these prescriptions Clearly lacking the administrative capacity to control everyday school instruction, the authorities seemed to presume that teachers strictly followed the Moscow-approved textbooks and needed little guidance Since Kaganovich’s campaign in 1947, Ukrainian ideologues expressed no concern about possible confusion or nationalist deviations at the school level Rare ideological audits of history teaching appear to have been uniformly positive, inspectors did not pay special attention to Ukrainian issues, and mistakes noted usually concerned the intricacies of the contemporary international situation 83
Meanwhile, teachers did find the ever-changing official line on history confusing When in 1954 the CPSU Central Committee issued its authoritative Theses on the tercentenary, the teacher Kobyfa from Kirovohrad province welcomed them as putting an end to idle talk about Ukraine’s reunification with Russia ’ A certain Fesenko, a middle-rank ideologue from Chermvtsi province, also hoped that the document would ‘put an end to the different interpretations of this problem by the instructors in educational institutions ’84
Mobilizing cadres from the provincial party committees, the Ukrainian ideologues could organize audits of history instruction at regional universities and pedagogical institutes, but discovering major problems (and taking the responsibility for their occurrence) was not in their best interests Besides, after the campaigns of 1947 and 1951 historians themselves exercised extreme caution In late 1951 the KP(b)U Central Committee inspected the work of fifty-eight departments of history at various Ukrainian universities and colleges without discovering any nationalistic errors But since giving the historians a clean bill of health was ideologically risky, First Secretary Melnikov announced that most departments shared the same shortcomings The instructors ‘denounced bourgeois nationalist theories superficially and without real passion [bez bolshoi strastnosti},' occasionally relied on old textbooks or interpretations, and sometimes presented the Ukrainian past ‘in isolation from the history of the Russian people ’85
Until Stalin’s death and beyond, the uneasy symbiosis between Ukrainian functionaries and historians — a peculiar entanglement of control, denunciation, resistance, and collaboration — allowed both parties to survive within the oppressive environment of post-war Stalinism The casualties of this cohabitation were many historians accomplished little, ideologues could not completely control the writing and teaching of history, and teachers apparently struggled to instil in students both pride in their nation’s past and an appreciation of Russian imperial credentials