Peasant Historiography

Rubel's 'History' - most of which, judging by the text, was written in the late 1920s, just as linguistic Ukrainization reached its peak, may be considered a product of that policy.

As noted above, the text of this work was written in demotic Ukrainian. Many elements of Ukrainiz- ing discourse can readily be discerned in it, most notably the author's particular attention to Ukrainian folk tradition and lore, to which more than a few pages of the 'History' are devoted. In parts of Rubel's work, one feels the influence of programs of folklore collection carried on in many Ukrainian villages in the late 1920s by the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. But the Zeitgeist is most apparent in Rubel's attempt to incorporate the story of his family and village into a broader historical canvas - in this case, Ukrainian national history. To that end, Rubel makes use of a book lent to him by a neighbour, the Reverend Dmytro Popov.⁴⁶ Textual analysis reveals that this was a copy of Mykhailo Hrushevsky's Illustrated History of Ukraine, first published in 1912 and reprinted several times in huge press runs in 191718.⁴⁷ Excerpts from Hrushevsky's History endow Rubel's work with a clearly Ukrainian countenance as regards its conceptualization and even terminology. The people, who figure as khokhly in fragments written independently by Rubel, are transformed into Ukrainians in unmarked quotations from Hrushevsky, giving Vasyl Rubel's 'History' an entirely different tendency.

If Rubel accepts Hrushevsky's idea of Ukrainian history completely and without contradiction, he makes only selective use of the historical narrative created by Hrushevsky. Rubel copies only the account of developments in Dnipro Ukraine, beginning with the second half of the seventeenth century, into his work, and he devotes most attention to the Koliivshchyna (haidamaka) rebellion (1768) and the history of the Zaporozhian Sich (the Cossack headquarters on the lower Dnipro) and its abolition in 1775 by the tsarist government.

These are the components of Hrushevsky's all-Ukrainian narrative that find an echo in the family history of the Rubels or pertain to the history of southern Ukraine and are thus easily accepted and adapted by the peasant historian from Mala Bilozirka. For Rubel, Ukrainian history really begins only with the haidamaka revolts. In the family legend that he recounts, the founding father, a Cossack captain named Andrii Rubel, is presented as a participant in the most important events associated with the historical memory of Cossackdom and the haidamaka period. He supposedly joined the haidamaka forces of Ivan Gonta before the slaughter of the Jewish and Polish population at Uman, made his way to the Sich after the defeat of the rebellion, and established himself in the Poltava region after the liquidation of the Sich and the imprisonment of its otaman, Petro Kalnyshevsky. From there his elder son,

Havrylo, moved to Mala Bilozirka. Andrii Rubel allegedly maintained a good opinion of Maksym Zalizniak (another leader of the 1768 uprising), Gonta, and Kalnyshevsky to the end of his life and inveighed against the Russians.⁴⁸

It is hard to say what is true and what is invented in the Rubel family chronicle, but in Vasyl's account it is given a twist that makes it compatible not only with Hrushevsky's historical narrative but also with the official Ukrainian communist narrative of the day, propagated by Matvii Yavorsky and his students, which placed particular emphasis on the role of the toiling peasants and class warfare in the history of Ukraine.⁴⁹ Judging by Rubel's 'History,' the founder of the Rubel line, Andrii, lamented Gonta, Zalizniak, and Kalnyshevsky not as abstract heroes of some kind but as 'fine defenders of the oppressed common people.' As for the Russians, Andrii Rubel was allegedly dissatisfied not with Russians in general but with plundering 'Muscovite generals.' Rubel explained his moderate antagonism towards 'Moscow' by its role in suppressing the struggle of Ukrainians against their overlords, inasmuch as it 'interfered and put an end to the whole cause of liberation from serfdom.' Such a class-oriented critique of Moscow was an entirely legitimate component of Ukrainizing discourse and of the Soviet Ukrainian historiography associated with it.

Such an approach also eased the acceptance of Hrushevsky's historical conception and its adaptation to new conditions. Hrushevsky himself had devoted considerable attention to the struggle of the popular masses for 'social and national liberation.'⁵⁰

Rubel, however, went much further than Hrushevsky in stressing the social aspects of Ukrainian history. With all due respect to the Cossack mythology and its role in the history of Ukraine and of his own family (the author emphasized that his family had never been 'cattle,' as the serfs were called, but was descended from a free Cossack haidamaka), he devoted his attention primarily to the peasantry, with which he identified himself and whose social identity he fully shared and articulated in his records. Rubel copied precisely those fragments of Hrushevsky's work that concerned the fate of the peasantry. He begins his excerpts from the Illustrated History with the subsection that Hrushevsky titled 'Cossack Officers and Commoners.' Rubel calls it 'The Beginning of Serfdom' and precedes the text borrowed from Hrushevsky with the phrase, 'We shall begin with the political measures applied to the peasantry.' His most interesting borrowing is from a subsection of Hru- shevsky's work titled 'National Life in Eastern Ukraine,' which he reduces to two words, 'National Life,' while condensing the whole subsection to one single paragraph that bears no relation to national life but relates Hrushevsky's view of the gentrification of Cossack families. Khmelnytsky's name is deleted from the text at this point. Perhaps this was done because Rubel had written nothing about the Khmelnytsky Uprising earlier and did not wish to complicate the reader 's reception of his narrative, but more probably the author was echoing the prevailing tendency in the representation of Khmelnytsky in the 1920s: as an exploiting lord and an enemy of the toiling masses he was not, of course, entitled to a place in peasant history.⁵¹

Rubel's presentation of Russo-Ukrainian conflicts in class terms was also in keeping with the spirit of the times.

Having recorded a family story about a fight between khokhol wagoners and katsap traders that had allegedly begun when one of the Russians called Danylo Rubel a 'khokhol mug,' Vasyl Rubel noted: 'Not infrequently, the police had to intervene in these clashes between nat[ional] minor[ities] that were irreconcilable on class grounds; in this hatred and struggle.' The fight was thus presented as one that had arisen on the basis of class, not nationality: after all, in this instance the Ukrainians were peasants and wagoners, while the Russians were peddlers and traders.⁵² Judging by the preface to Rubel's 'History,' his work would have had a very definite class orientation if it had been completed. Rubel was setting out to relate 'how people, having divided into classes, fought over that well- known "serfdom"'; how Andrii Rubel and the haidamakas had 'slaughtered the lords' (that part of the plan was carried out); the beginnings of the revolutionary movement in 1904-5; the Revolution of 1917-19; the 'partisan warfare' and the violence inflicted on the peasants by a [probably White] 'punishment detail.' Although the author wrote of the revolutionary events: 'It is not life but torment; the devil only knows what it is,' he greeted the reader with the 'new life' and planned to bring his history up to the 1930s so as to relate 'what fine things they had given people.'⁵³

Rubel's very purpose and programmatic idea, as well as its realization in his 'History,' give a good general impression of the penetration of the Ukrainian national idea into the southern Ukrainian peasant milieu during the years of Ukrainization. That penetration was due in part to the influence of works written by the leaders of the Revolution of 1917 (in this case, Mykhailo Hrushevsky's Illustrated History). Another channel whereby the Ukrainian national idea penetrated the village was the Soviet press of the day. The official discourse of Ukrainization was based on the primacy of the social factor and the idea of class struggle, and the Ukrainian idea was sometimes perceived by the peasantry in that particular coloration.

In Rubel's work, the social aspect clearly prevailed over the national one, in complete accordance with official Soviet dogma of the time. However, it is obvious from the concluding lines of Rubel's 'History' that the famine of 1933 forced him to reconsider his former optimistic prognoses about the 'new life' and to condemn the new order - if not entirely, then at least its key symbol, the five-year plan, which should be interpreted as meaning the policy of collectivization and exacting grain from the village by force.⁵⁴ It appears that Rubel and his wife remained independent farmers until 1936, thinking it better to pay exorbitant taxes than to join a collective farm.⁵⁵ One may conclude that in the case of Vasyl Rubel and those of like mind, the wave of enthusiasm for class-based ideology passed relatively quickly.

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Source: Plokhy S.. Ukraine and Russia: Representations of the Past. University of Toronto Press,2008. — 412 р.. 2008

Peasant Historiography

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