Post-Soviet Debates

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the creation of newly independent states on its ruins was a process that required historical legitimization. The new states also needed historical expertise to settle numerous terri­torial disputes that arose in the early 1990s.

In laying their claims to southern and eastern Ukraine, Russian poli­ticians and historians stressed its colonization during the reign of Catherine II, while their Ukrainian counterparts emphasized its rich Cossack history. The chapter 'History and Territory' discusses the development of Cossack mythology in pre-independence Ukraine and its importance for Ukraine's attempts to counter Russian advances in the first years of independence. Research on Cossack history was all but suppressed by the Soviet authorities in the 1970s; a number of scholars working in that field were accused of idealizing the past and dismissed from their positions at the Academy of Sciences.

'The City of Glory' analyses the Russian image of the Crimean naval base of Sevastopol as a Russian city par excellence. The story begins with the siege of that city during the Crimean War of 1854-6. The dogged resistance mounted by soldiers and sailors of the Russian imperial army and navy against English, French, and Turkish forces turned the defenders of Sevastopol into Russian heroes and the city itself into a symbol of Russian resilience. The myth of Sevastopol that took shape in the second half of the nineteenth century was largely a product of the merging of Russian imperialism and nationalism. The growing self-awareness of Russian society created a need for positive national models; accordingly, the heroism of the multiethnic imperial army and navy was recast as the heroism of Russian soldiers, and defeat in the Crimean War was compensated by this virtual victory of Russian arms.

Another historical myth whose origins predate the Soviet era and that is still very much alive in contemporary historical writing is that of the 'reunification' of Ukraine and Russia. As discussed in the chap­ter 'The Ghosts of Pereiaslav,' particular emphasis on the Pereiaslav Agreement of 1654, which extended a Muscovite protectorate over the Hetmanate, can be traced back to the eighteenth-century Cossack chronicles. In order to preserve the autonomous status of the Het- manate and their own liberties and privileges, the Cossack elites often referred to the Articles of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, which enshrined the rights granted to the Cossacks by the Muscovite tsar after the Pere- iaslav Council. As the tsarist authorities steadily reduced those tradi­tional rights, the Cossack officers continued to insist on the original conditions of 1654, promoting the Pereiaslav Agreement and its archi­tect, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, to almost mythical status. With the nation­alization of the Russian and Ukrainian historical narratives in the second half of the nineteenth century, Pereiaslav and Khmelnytsky took on an entirely new meaning in Russian imperial historiography.

The latter interpretation regained centre stage when the three- hundredth anniversary of the 'reunification' of Russia and Ukraine was officially celebrated in 1954. The theses issued on that occasion by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union imposed the Russocentric paradigm of the agreement and the subse­quent history of Ukraine on Soviet historiography as a whole. The attempts of some Ukrainian historians to discredit the 'reunification' myth by indicating its non-Marxist and Russocentric characteristics yielded no positive results, and the theses continued to rule supreme until the advent of glasnost. After the disintegration of the USSR, most Ukrainian historians discarded the 'reunification' paradigm, while most of their Russian colleagues continued to insist on it. In Ukraine the term seems to have been permanently discredited by its abuse in Soviet historiography. Even when President Leonid Kuchma tried to please his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in January 2004 by cel­ebrating the 350th anniversary of the Pereiaslav Agreement, the term 'reunification' was excluded from the presidential decree issued for the occasion. The response of Ukrainian society to this presidential initia­tive was nevertheless so harshly negative that the celebrations had to be scaled down, to the disappointment of the Russian delegation.

The word 'reunification' also remains highly controversial in Belaru­sian historiography. There the government of Aliaksandr Lukashenka promotes the use of the term with regard to the Muscovite conquest of Belarusian territories in the mid-seventeenth century, persecuting those historians who refuse to toe the official line. In late 2005 Henadz Sahanovich, the leading Belarusian historian of the early modern era, was dismissed from his position at the Belarusian Academy of Sciences after the publication in Moscow of the minutes of a historiographic dis­cussion in which he questioned the continuing use of the term 'reunifica­tion.' The debate continues, claiming new victims and testing not only the professionalism but also the civic courage of participating historians.

Apart from the Pereiaslav Agreement, another area of disagreement between Russian and Ukrainian historians of the post-Soviet era has been the history of the Second World War. There one can see two major fault lines, one going through the historical establishment of Ukraine, dividing the proponents of the national paradigm from those who advocate Soviet-era approaches to the topic, and another separating Russian and Ukrainian historians and cultural elites. The chapter 'Remembering Yalta' discusses the international controversy caused by the commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Yalta Conference, which brought together the leaders of the anti-Hitler coalition in Feb­ruary 1945. It analyses the position taken on the issue by Russian offi­cialdom and the Russian public, explaining the reasons for the lack of a clearly articulated position on the part of the Ukrainian government and public.

Russia's negative reaction to the attempts of Poland, the Baltic states, and later the United States to indicate the negative consequences of the Yalta agreements for the East European nations occupied by the Red Army gave evidence of growing authoritarian and neo-Stalinist ten­dencies in the Russian leadership and society. On the other hand, the debate on the decisions of the Yalta Conference and the outcome of the Second World War in Ukraine indicated quite clearly that the country still remains divided by memories of the war, in which western regions of Ukraine became the field of operations of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, while the population of eastern Ukraine supplied recruits for the Red Army. Ukraine's inability to reach a consensus on the meaning of the Second World War and the consequences of the Yalta Confer­ence, which defined the country's current western border and ensured its membership in the United Nations Organization, demonstrate that the 'search for a usable past' in Ukrainian society is far from over. There is, however, a prevailing negative attitude in Ukraine to the fig­ure of Joseph Stalin and his rule - a marked difference from Russia, where there are clear signs of the return of Stalin's popularity among the elite and the general public alike.