Remembering the Nation

When the terror subsided in 1938-9 and the new Ukrainian party leader, Nikita Khrushchev, began consolidating the republic’s elites, authorities encouraged the local intelligentsia to valorize the Ukrainian past Khmelnytsky’s spectacular reha­bilitation in 1938 cleared the way for the restoration of other ‘great ancestors,’ such as the Ukrainian equivalent of Aleksandr Nevsky, Prince Danylo of Halych (1200-64) The peasant-born Ukrainian bard Taras Shevchenko (1814-61) had always been a Soviet icon as a ‘poet of rebellion,’ but during the late 1930s he was increasingly cast as the greatest national poet and the father of his nation Ukrainian media, literature, and the arts began teaching the population to identify with their great ancestors warriors of Kievan Rus', the Cossacks, and nineteenth­century nation-builders In so doing, Soviet Ukrainian ideologues and intellectu­als subscribed to the modified version of national memory that the nationalistic Ukrainian intelligentsia had created in the late nineteenth century

The rehabilitation of national heroes was carried out not by decree, but through the efforts of individual Ukrainian writers and historians sensitive to the new ideological currents, whose vision was open to public discussion²¹ Initially, debates centred on the contradiction between the Marxist principle of class analysis and the ethno-patnotic criteria by which the new great ancestors were chosen The ideological reversal began with Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the Cossack leader who had created the first modern Ukrainian polity and, conveniently enough, presided over its union with Muscovy in 1654 As a ‘gatherer of Russian lands,’ the hetman had belonged to the old tsarist pantheon of great historical figures, but as a founder of the Cossack state, Khmelnytsky was also a hero for Ukrainian nationalists His ambiguous profile in the narratives of nation-building, however, was largely irrelevant for the class history of the 1920s, which denounced him as a feudal seigneur who sold out the Ukrainian peasantry to the Russian tsar and landowners

Moscow first signalled the possible rehabilitation of Khmelnytsky in an official communique on history textbooks in August 1937 The Politburo commission had detected the following major flaw in the manuscripts submitted to a textbook competition

The authors do not see any positive role in Khmelnytsky’s actions in the seventeenth century, in his struggle against Ukraine’s occupation by the Poland of the lords and die Turkey of the Sultan For example, the fact of Georgias passing to the protectorate of Russia at the end of the eighteenth century, as well as the fact of Ukraine s transfer io Russian rule, is considered by the authors as an absolute evil, without regard for the concrete historical circumstances of those times The authors do not see that Georgia faced at the time the alternative of either being swallowed up by the Persia of the Shah and the Turkey of the Sultan, or coming under a Russian protectorate, just as Ukraine also had at the time the alternative of either being absorbed by the Poland of the lords and the Turkey of the Sultan, or falling under Russian control They do not see that the second alternative was nevertheless the lesser evil ²²

Introduced here for the first time, the ‘lesser evil’ formula would enjoy a long life in Stalinist official discourse on the past According to the contemporary Soviet historian Mihtsa Nechkina, Stalin himself added the paragraph about Ukraine and Georgia while editing the text of the communique ²³ The ‘lesser evil’ paradigm represented a compromise between the traditional Marxist condemnation of imperial Russian colonialism and a new emphasis on continuity in state tradition between the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union But the 1937 pronouncement did not yet define the imperial annexation of Ukraine and Georgia as historically progressive, as would later Soviet ideological documents

The winning textbook, A Short Course on the History of the USSR, under the editorship of A V Shestakov, became a standard elementary-school history text for almost twenty years However, this text rehabilitated the Russian imperial tradi­tion rather cautiously In discussing Khmelnytsky and the incorporation of Ukraine, the authors quoted the revisionist ‘lesser evil’ formula, but the class vision of history still reigned supreme As a result of joining Russia, the Ukrainian people substituted one form of social oppression for another Khmelnytsky himself appeared to have been concerned only with the interests of the landowner class, and his turn to Russia was supposedly determined by political conjuncture rather than any ethnic or religious affinity between the two peoples ²⁴

In hindsight, one can see that the 1937 communique allowed historians much more leeway in the rehabilitation of Khmelnytsky and even reprimanded them for underestimating him as a military leader and patriot Yet, as had occurred with Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible, writers took the lead in reinstalling the hetman as a national hero The young Ukrainian playwright Oleksandr Kormichuk, whose dramas had already demonstrated his party loyalty, quickly completed a historical play, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, in which the hetman was portrayed as a great statesman and military leader, an essentially ethnic hero who had liberated Ukraine from Polish oppression and created the Cossack state (Significantly, the play did not stress the subsequent union with Muscovy)²⁵ But precisely because the ideological turn had been hinted at rather than prescribed, Kornnchuk’s vision of Khmelnytsky caused a debate

In 1938, when the prestigious Malyi Theatre company in Moscow accepted the play and went ahead with dress rehearsals, Kormichuk was suddenly summoned to Moscow to answer accusations that he had distorted history The reviewer of the drama, the Moscow historian Vladimir Picheta,²⁶ found that the text contained fictional characters and events and, more important, that the author did not portray Khmelnytsky as a defender of landowners’ class interests Discussion of the play in the Malyi Theatre on 16 October 1938 turned into a veritable battle over Khmelnytsky Defending his emphasis on national liberation rather than internal class struggle, Komuchuk presented his work as a Soviet Ukrainian answer to Polish historical mythology He reminded the audience about the famous nineteenth-century novel that had enshrined the Polish stereotype of the Ukrai­nian Cossacks, Henryk Sienkiewicz’s With Fire and Sword ‘That book argued that Ukrainians were beasts, infidels, that Poland was the master of Ukraine and that Ukraine once again belonged under its yoke It is not for nothing that the Polish fascists made that book a school text ’ The likelihood of a new war with Poland and/or Germany justified the promotion of Ukrainian national patriotism ‘What other ideas do you want’ And what kind of ideas are needed now, when the Polish gentry and the German fascists again intend to invade Ukraine, when the Ukrainian people might have to fight for their independence’’²⁷

Komuchuk prevailed over his opponents A further attempt by the literary critic Vladimir Blium to derail Bohdan Khmelnytsky by informing Stalin that it ignored the class approach to history failed The VKP(b) Central Committee’s Depart­ment of Propaganda and Agitation concluded that Bhum had misunderstood the notion of Soviet patriotism ²⁸ In the spring of 1939 both the Malyi Theatre and several leading Ukrainian companies premiered the play The republic’s newspa­pers hailed Bohdan Khmelnytsky as a work that evoked in the spectator a ‘deep love, respect, and interest in our people’s heroic past ’ The play earned official approval and was staged by theatre companies throughout the Soviet Union, including almost every theatre in Ukraine In 1941 Bohdan Khmelnytsky received the highest Soviet artistic accolade, the Stalin Prize, First Class ²⁹

Other Ukrainian writers followed Kornnchuk’s lead In 1939 Petro Panch published excerpts from his new historical novel, The Zaporozhtans, which glori fied the Cossack struggle against Poland in the decades immediately before the Khmelnytsky Uprising lakiv Kachura promptly completed the novel Ivan Bohun (1940), which followed the plot of Sokolovsky’s earlier work without placing the colonel in opposition to Khmelnytsky The composer Kost Dankevych wrote music to Kornnchuk’s play and was contemplating an opera about the hetman However, the management of the Kiev Opera Company secured the consent of a much bigger celebrity in the spring of 1939 it announced that Dmitru Shostako­vich had agreed to write an opera, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, based on Kornnchuk’s libretto.^,0

Historians were slower to adopt the new patriotic paradigm While the Learned Council of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Ukrainian History debated the new appraisal of Khmelnytsky, the resourceful Moscow writer Osip Kuperman (pen name, K Osipov) stole the historians’ thunder by producing the first positive biography of the hetman, though the book’s honization of Khmelnytsky remained conditional Throughout the text, Osipov stressed the hetman’s class interests’ as a landowner and his cruel treatment of the Ukrainian toiling masses Portrayed as a progressive event, the union with Russia was still labelled the ‘lesser evil ’^il In 1940 the Ukrainian historian Mykola Petrovsky published the first scholarly revisionist account of the Khmelnytsky Uprising, The Ukrainian People’s War of Liberation against the Oppression by the Poland of the Gentry and Ukraine’s Incorporation into Russia (1648-1654) The book downplayed the internal class struggle, speaking of the Ukrainian people in general and portraying Khmelnytsky as the leader of the nation At the same time, Petrovsky presented the union with Russia as something like the teleological outcome of Ukrainian history ‘The entire historical process, the entire history of Ukraine led in inevitable, logical succession to the Ukrainian people’s War of Liberation, to Ukraine’s incorporation into Russia, to the unification with the fraternal Russian people ’³² Unlike Kornnchuk, Petrovsky belonged to the so-called old specialists, the ideas that appeared revisionist to Soviet-educated scholars were to him simply a blend of Ukrainian nationalism with familiar pre-revolutionary historical models

In retrospect, this strategy of rehabilitating Ukrainian national history as part of a larger imperial discourse by connecting it with the Russian grand narrative appears as a precursor of later Soviet dogma However, the leading historical journal, Istonk-marksist, published a dismissive review of the monograph Himself a Ukrainian historian, reviewer A Baraboi plainly announced that Petrovsky’s theory ‘could not be characterized as Marxist ’ He doubted Cossack officers’ early commitment to the union with Russia and, more important, saw the book as failing to provide a Marxist critique of this class According to Baraboi, class struggle was the ‘mainspring of all historical developments in 1648-1654,’ whereas Petrovsky turned a blind eye to the ‘class tensions’ between Khmelnytsky and the leader of the peasant masses, Colonel Kryvoms The reviewer concluded by recommending that the book be completely rewritten ³³

While advocates of the concept of class history were fighting back in scholarly journals, those of national history were triumphing in the mass media In 1939- 40, the director Ihor Savchenko shot at the Kiev Film Studios a full-length movie Bohdan Khmelnytsky based on Kornnchuk’s play Two prominent apologists for the hetman collaborated in the film’s production, Kornnchuk wrote the script, while Petrovsky served as scholarly consultant Savchenko announced that his mam aim was to ‘purify the image of Khmelnytsky from the lies he had been coated in and to show him as a leader of the people ’ ^w The film, which shared much of its plot with Kornnchuk’s play, indeed provided a powerful portrayal of Khmelnytsky as the nation’s leader in its struggle against Polish oppression, whereas the theme of the subsequent union with Russia remained undeveloped When leading Soviet film­makers gathered in Leningrad in March 1941 to discuss the finished work, almost all stressed the topic’s importance for Soviet Ukrainian historical memory L Arnshtam observed that ‘Savchenko proved himself a real Ukrainian,’ while Fridrikh Ermler suggested that ‘this historical film will elaborate and promote the patriotic feeling that is now growing in Soviet society’ Savchenko himself dis­missed minor criticisms with a statement that ‘this movie was shot in Ukraine and is perceived differently there ’³⁵

Bohdan Khmelnytsky was released in April 1941 and became a major event in Ukrainian cultural life With the beginning of the Soviet-German war in June, the film was mobilized as an important propaganda movie and was shown to the troops immediately before their departure for the front (Conveniently, Savchenko and Kornnchuk had presented the ‘enemies’ as both Polish landowners and their mercenaries, the German dragoons ) It is interesting, however, that reviews of the film did not emphasize the resulting union with Muscovy The critics and, likely, the general public understood Bohdan Khmelnytsky primarily as a film about the ‘Ukrainian people’s heroic struggle against the Polish gentry,’ a picture promoting ‘patriotism, love for the Fatherland, and hatred of the enemy ’^3S

The film had a profound impact on contemporary collective memory Millions of Ukrainians repeatedly saw this last pre-war blockbuster of Soviet cinematogra­phy In the early 1950s, when discussing Dankevych’s opera about the hetman, even the republic’s bureaucrats and intellectuals would time and again refer to Savchenko’s film as a true or proper depiction of the Ukrainian past In 1952 the historian Vadym Diadychenko would explain to an audience of party functionar­ies, ‘People as a whole rarely read special sociological or historical books, but many are acquainted with Bohdan Khmelnytsky on account of the well-known movie ’³⁷

The paradigm shift soon involved other historical personalities and periods In March 1939 Soviet Ukraine celebrated the 125th anniversary of the birth ofTaras Shevchenko on a scale unheard of since the Pushkin festivities in Moscow in 1937 1 he republic’s authorities renamed Kiev University and the Kiev Opera House.liter the poet, published a complete edition of his works, and erected no less than i hue majestic monuments to Shevchenko The unveiling of a statue in Kiev was Kiompanied by a mass rally with some 200,000 participants and speeches by khiushchev and other dignitaries from the highest echelons While the previous Soviet canon had included Shevchenko as the ‘poet of peasant rebellion,’ official uxts from 1939 glorified him as the ‘great son of Ukraine’ - the founder of its mt lonal literature and the father of the nation ³⁸ If it were not for the emphasis on Shevchenko’s ‘revolutionary-democratic’ views, this interpretation could have been mistaken for a piece of Ukrainian nationalist propaganda. Mykola Rudenko, a writer who was in his late teens at the time, testifies that the impressive monuments to the poet and the renewed cult of Shevchenko had a profound effect on his becoming a conscious Ukrainian.³⁹

In 1940 the Institute of Ukrainian History finally published a 400-page collec­tively written survey, History of Ukraine: A Short Course.