Reintegrating the Past
Mark von Hagen was certainly correct when he wrote that Ukraine needs a new history - and, one might add, a new historical myth. Throughout the nineteenth century, the period of the formation and growth of Ukrainian nationalism, the Ukrainian lands were divided between two major European powers, the Russian and Austro- Hungarian Empires.
The ideas of the nationalist movement were formulated mainly in Russian (Eastern) Ukraine and later adopted with only minor modifications by Galicians and Bukovynians in Austria- Hungary. It was another of Mykhailo Hrushevsky's major tasks to write the history of Ukraine in such a way as to offer a sense of common heritage to Ukrainian subjects of two empires who had been separated culturally, politically, and economically for centuries. Hrushevsky, a populist, accomplished that task by choosing as his subject of study the people and their ethnic territory instead of the state and by stressing on every possible occasion the elements of unity between the different parts of Ukraine. This approach to Ukrainian history has been adopted by most historians in post-Soviet Ukraine.What has been problematic about Hrushevsky's concept is the application of its ethnocentric paradigm to the history of the entire territory claimed by the independent Ukrainian state. By 1991, when Ukraine became independent, the territory that Hrushevsky discussed in his works was settled by millions of non-Ukrainians as well as Ukrainians. Moreover, urbanization, combined with powerful successive waves of Russian colonization, had brought about the linguistic and cultural Russification of millions of Ukrainians in central, southern, and eastern Ukraine. There can be little doubt that independent Ukraine, largely the product of one historical myth, needed a new myth to make its way forward after 1991. The scheme of Ukrainian history that seems to be finding more and more acceptance in Ukraine is one that accepts the basics of the Hrushevsky approach to pre-Soviet Ukrainian history and then shifts to the study of the history of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic ('the second Soviet republic,' as Yaroslav Bilinsky called it).
The Ukrainian SSR is viewed both historically and legally as the predecessor of the independent Ukrainian state. Within its post-Second World War boundaries it united the majority of the Ukrainian lands as defined by Hrushevsky, as well as some non-Ukrainian territories in the south and west.What has become a problem for historians and society at large is the treatment of the history of the Ukrainian Revolution (1917-20) and, even more so, of the Second World War, when Ukraine was sharply divided, with pro-Russian communists fighting pro-independence members of Ukrainian nationalist organizations. With the reemergence of independent Ukraine, the latter have apparently won, but the majority of the population who voted for independence clearly associate themselves not with the nationalist movement or the independent Ukrainian governments of 1917-20 but with the heritage of Soviet Ukraine. Integrating these two stories told by opposing sides into one 'written record' has proved a difficult task.