Reconnecting Ukraine with East and West

In brief, the book is indeed a mosaic treating Middle Eastern and western motifs in Ukrainian history and culture. For many years, Soviet policy be­littled or banned discussion of these outside influences and contacts with the wider world.

This type of censorship was ferocious with regard to Mazepa, who was consistently labelled a selfish aristocrat and traitor to Russia. It did not mat­ter to the Soviet censors that when Peter the Great left Ukraine to its fate during a foreign invasion, it was he who betrayed Mazepa, not the other way around. And as for Voltaire and his early positive attitudes towards Mazepa and Ukrainian independence, these were simply censored out of everything written in the ussr after 1930. At that time, Stalin achieved his ascendancy, crushed the national intelligentsias in the Union Republics, and then “liquidated” the national Communists and re-imposed tight Mos­cow control over the entire ussr.

The case of Oriental studies is almost as clear. They began in the nine­teenth century, their importance alluded to by Hrushevsky in 1917, during the Revolution, when he wrote that “Ukrainians are one of the most orientalized... of the western peoples,”³³ and finally, were precariously established in Ukraine in the 1920s when Ahatanhel Krymsky (1871-1942) pioneered Turkish, Persian, and Arabic studies in the Pan-Ukrainian Acad­emy of Sciences. Krymsky had several promising students, who did some good work during the 1920s. But Stalin's rule and the end of the earlier Soviet policy of “ukrainianization” froze such developments. Krymsky was disgraced, the academy ferociously purged, the master's students and friends arrested or executed, and the few who managed to survive precari­ously, such as Vasyl Dubrovsky, a Turkic specialist, fled to the West during the Second World War. The lonely figure of A.P. Kovalivsky, who worked primarily in Kharkiv, not Kyiv, and wrote a valuable study of the Arab trav­eller Ibn Fadlan, was one of the very few prominent survivors. Ibn Fadlan visited the Volga, not Ukraine, perhaps a key to Dubrovsky's survival.³⁴

Indeed, after 1930 such an impartial source on Ukrainian-Muscovite relations as the Orthodox Christian Arab Paul of Aleppo (1627-1669), a Syrian Church deacon, who described his voyage across both Muscovy and Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky's Cossack Ukraine, was for many years virtually ignored in Soviet Ukraine and in the ussr generally, which banned his works.

In the mid-1980s, Paul's work was edited, published, and commented on in Soviet Ukraine's neighbour, the People's Republic of Poland, where schol­ars could already breathe a bit more freely. But the relevant parts on “the Land of the Cossacks” appeared in full in Ukraine only in the early twen­ty-first century. As indicated by this stunning example, “Oriental studies,” once so thoroughly censored, now flourish once again in Ukraine itself.³⁵

Indeed, it was not only Eastern sources such as Paul of Aleppo, and western European writers such as Voltaire, but even the very founders of so-called scientific socialism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (“Western” in both insights and prejudices), who were thoroughly censored throughout most of the Soviet period. So, for example, Marx's Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century, published posthumously by his daughter in the 1890s, never appeared in full in the ussr until its very last days, when the censorship was collapsing. Marx depicted Imperial Russian foreign policy in a very negative light and maintained that it was simply an extension of the brutal, aggressive, and exploitative policies of old Muscovy, and its predecessor, the Mongol Horde.

The contrast between Kyivan Rus' and Russia, however, was from Mykhailo Hrushevsky's time (1890s on) onward an axiom of Ukrainian history, and, of course, although he was not really a “Normanist” at all, Hrushevsky claimed Kyivan Rus' more or less for Ukraine alone. But also, Marx, who learned a fair amount of Russian late in life, applied himself to internal affairs in Russia, and in the late 1870s read some of the work of the nineteenth-century Ukrainian historian Mykola Kostomarov, and also of his contemporary, the Ukrainian emigre political philosopher Mykhailo Drahomanov. Marx noted Drahomanov's criticism of tsarist policy on Ukrainian literature and language, carefully read his description of Kyiv's 1840s oppositional Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius (patron saints of the Slavonic world), and was fascinated by the fiery, indeed revolutionary, poetry of Taras Shevchenko. More generally, he seemed to like republics of various sorts, including old Novgorod in northern Rus' (which he did think truly Slavonic) and a “Cossack Christian Republic” in Zaporozhia in central Ukraine, for both may have seemed to him somewhat “progressive,” and both turned out to be Muscovy's victims.

Marx also noted Kostomarov's description of the revolt of the Russian Cossack Stenka Razin (1630-1671), and his account of the Ukrainian Cossack Hetman Ivan Vyhovsky (d. 1664), who wished to turn Cossack Ukraine away from Muscovy and back towards Poland. He probably misread some of Kostomarov's intentions (he too had to deal with the Russian censors) and saw rather too much violence in Razin's revolt, and although he noted Vyhovsky's politics, he did not seem to see the long­term national significance of his political turn westwards, which Mazepa was to repeat, and again Ukraine more recently. But still, he clearly noted differences “in customs, character, ideas and ways of life” between “Little Russians” and Muscovites, and even strengthened Kostomarov's vocabulary from Ukrainian “dissatisfaction” with the Muscovites to “hatred.” Of course, such opinions, or even topics, could not be openly discussed in the USSR, where censors tightly controlled everything to do with Ukrainian nationalism and independence, and even these brief notes on Ukrainian affairs could not be printed.³⁷

Later Marxist literature stressed usually Marx and Engels's general view of the “non-historical and reactionary” nineteenth-century Slavonic peoples of eastern Europe, especially the Ruthenians or Ukrainians of Galicia, and the post-Stalin Soviets were all too happy to simply ignore anything that threatened their view of the world importance of Imperial Russia and the ussr. In the Soviet Union, Marx's Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century was published in full only in 1989 as the Berlin wall came crashing down, and his notes on Kostomarov's Vyhovsky only in 1993, after Ukraine itself had achieved independence.³⁸

It is these sorts of repressed contacts with the outside world, both east and west, though particularly the Middle East, that form the core of the present book. Never thoroughly discussed, and for decades completely censored, they did at times constitute a resonant dimension of Ukrainian history, art, literature, and legend. Their censorship impoverished Ukrainian culture in ways and deprived it of a normal and healthy cosmopolitanism. This book is a modest attempt to correct that historical error and enrich that culture with motifs that truly belong to it and are the heritage of every thinking and feeling person concerned with the culture of that oft-troubled but not entirely unique land.