National History
If one were to choose a specific date for the beginning of modern Ukrainian historiography, the year 1895 would probably fit the bill. In December of that year the editorial board of the Ukrainophile journal Kievskaia starina (Kyivan Antiquity) published the prospectus of a survey of Ukrainian history and announced a competition for writers willing to produce such a work.
The most recent survey of 'Little Russian' history had been published more than fifty years earlier, in 1843.3 The winner was Aleksandra Efimenko, who subsequently published a History of the Ukrainian People (1906). There are several interesting observations to be made about the competition and its winner. First, the date of the competition indicates how late Ukrainian intellectuals turned their attention to the need for a national historical narrative. The Polish Society of Friends of Scholarship came up with such an initiative for Polish history as early as 1808, while the Russian Empire created the position of official historiographer even earlier, in 1803 - it was taken by Nikolai Karamzin. It was a sign of new times that a woman became the 'official historiographer' of Ukraine as a result of the 1895 competition. The Ukrainian women's movement was taking shape at this time, and the symbol of Mother Ukraine was becoming increasingly popular in Ukrainian national discourse.4 A sign of the tolerance of the Ukrainian movement at the time was Efimenko's ethnic origin: she was a Russian, born and raised in northern Russia, where she met and married her Ukrainophile husband, who had been exiled to Arkhangelsk gubernia from Ukraine. A sign of the weakness of the Ukrainian movement was that Efimenko did not hold a doctorate in history and had no university position.5Intellectual inspiration for writing a survey of Ukrainian history came from Mykhailo Drahomanov, a former professor of ancient (Roman) history at Kyiv University.
He was dismissed from his position in 1875 for allegedly conspiring to bring about Ukraine's secession from Russia and left for Switzerland to avoid imminent arrest. Inspired by the ideas of Giuseppe Mazzini, Drahomanov imagined Ukraine as part of a future European federation and called for a synthesis of Ukrainian history presented in a European context. He further maintained that the new narrative should go beyond national and confessional paradigms - a reference to the dominant interpretation of Ukrainian history as a struggle between Orthodox Rus' and Catholic Poland. Drahomanov wrote in 1891: 'Our history must be examined as a whole in all its eras... and in each of these eras we must pay attention to the growth or decline of population, the economy, mores and ideas in the community and the state, education, and the direct or indirect participation of Ukrainians of all classes and cultures in European history and culture.'6Drahomanov's ideas were taken to heart by Mykhailo Hrushevsky, who, according to David Saunders, was the 'Macaulay, Michelet, and von Ranke of Ukraine (or in East European terms, its Palacky, Lelewel, and Kliuchevskii).'7 Hrushevsky was the first historian to hold a university chair of Ukrainian history.8 The chair was established in 1894 at Lviv (Lemberg, Lwow) University in Austria-Hungary and officially designated as a chair of world history with special emphasis on the history of Eastern Europe. Hrushevsky published the first volume of his academic History of Ukraine-Rus' in 1898. In 1904 he not only presented a general outline of Ukrainian history as a national narrative in his article on the 'traditional' scheme of 'Russian' history but also convinced the Russian authorities of the need to publish his Survey History of the Ukrainian People, which presented a coherent narrative of the Ukrainian national past. Hrushevsky and his students at Lviv University responded very seriously to Drahomanov's idea of creating a Ukrainian historical narrative that would deal not only with politics and religion but also with economic, demographic, intellectual, and cultural history.
But their main concern was to establish Ukrainian history as a distinct field of study on a par with the history of Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Poland.9In carrying out that task, they faced challenges from all these historiographic traditions. One kind of challenge came from statist historiographies on both sides of the Russo-Austrian border. In 1853, once the shock of the Revolution of 1848 and the 'spring of the nations' had receded in the Habsburg Empire, the Austrian historian and advisor to the imperial minister of education Josef Alexander Helfert undertook to formulate an official view of the meaning, role, and tasks of national history (Nationalgeschichte). In a pamphlet entitled 'On National History and Its Current State of Cultivation in Austria,' he wrote: 'It is true that mankind is divided into a great number of tribes that differ as to language and color. But according to our ideas, national history is not the history of any such group defined by its racial origin. We think that national history is the history of the population of a territory that is politically united, subordinate to the same authority and living under the protection of the same law. For us, Austrian national history is the history of the Austrian state and people as a whole.'10 For the vast majority of nineteenth-century Russian historians, from Nikolai Karamzin to Sergei Soloviev, their national history was also defined not as the annals of a particular ethnonational group but of the state and those who had settled its territory.11
Another type of challenge came from Russian and Polish authors who subscribed to the ethnonational principle. Russian historians such as Vasilii Kliuchevsky employed a notion of Russianness in their writings that was quite broad in scope and included the three 'Russian' tribes - the Great Russians, Little Russians (Ukrainians), and Belarusians. Ukraine was a special case in the changing imperial narrative of Russian history.
The Russian dynastic historical narrative, which was constructed in course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, had always been based on the foundations of Kyivan history. So was the Russian national narrative. In dealing with the all-Russian historical paradigm, Ukrainian historians tried to delimit the past and establish a Ukrainian claim to many significant episodes of the imperial historical narrative, including the history of Kyivan Rus'. The problem that Ukrainian historians faced in relating their historical paradigm to the Polish one was different from the challenge posed by Russian historiography. In dealing with Poland, the task was not so much one of presenting Ukrainian history as a distinct process, separate from the Polish grand narrative (this had already been achieved by the turn of the twentieth century), as of giving the Ukrainian nation a sense of equality in relations with its historically dominant and culturally much more Westernized counterpart, which was also far more advanced in terms of nation building.12What were the main characteristics of the Ukrainian historical narrative? In defining the time frame of Ukrainian history, the new narrative presented the Ukrainian nation as more ancient than the Russian, and thus deserving of full support in its quest for sovereign cultural and political development, unhindered by interference from its younger sibling. In order to achieve that goal, the starting point of the narrative had to be moved as far back as possible. Consequently, the new narrative, worked out according to prevailing scholarly standards, established the Ukrainian claim to Kyivan Rus'. That approach put the Ukrainian narrative on a collision course with traditional Russian historiography, creating a conflict akin to the one between Swedish and Norwegian historians over the ethnic origins of the Varangians. In territorial terms, the new Ukrainian narrative linked the history of Orthodox Russian Ukraine with that of Greek Catholic Austrian Ukraine.
Hrushevsky, who managed this feat, could also be called the Henri Pirenne of Ukrainian history.13The new narrative of Ukrainian history followed the development of the Ukrainian people through a sequence of rises, declines, and revivals. Like Heinrich von Sybel and other German historians of his era, who created a myth of a German nation as a sleeping beauty awakened by the 'kiss' of the wars of liberation, Ukrainian historians believed in and worked towards the 'awakening' of their own nation.14 Not unlike the Russian narrative, the Ukrainian one was teleological, although its final destination was not the reunification of the Russian people but the emancipation of one of its parts from the oppression of another.
After the Revolution of 1917, the main competition for the Ukrainian national narrative came from various Marxist narratives of Ukrainian history. All of them were products of class-based discourse that focused mainly on the theme of social antagonism. In Marxist narratives, class figured as the main agent of history, as opposed to the state or the all-Russian nation, which had played that role in the old Russian historiography. During the 1930s, the class-based discourse of Soviet Marxist historiography was adjusted to serve the purposes of the imperial project, which meant keeping the non-Russian nations of the USSR under Russian control. Hence it was the gradual rehabilitation of the old imperial Russocentric paradigm that led the way to the creation of a new supranational Soviet narrative - the history of the peoples of the USSR. Was the emergence of the Ukrainian national narrative of any consequence for the construction of the official Soviet paradigm? Yes, it was. In Soviet historiography, the traditional Russian narrative was now divested of its Ukrainian component (except for the history of Kyivan Rus'), and a parallel Ukrainian narrative was permitted to exist within the framework of the obligatory 'History of the USSR.'15