The Great Ukrainian People

The Soviet invasion of Poland in August 1939 profoundly influenced the shaping of a new Soviet Ukrainian historical memory. Like many other imperial undertak­ings, this conquest reinforced the local population’s distinct ethnic identity and generally confirmed ethnicity as the fundamental category of Stalinist ideological discourse.⁴¹ The Red Army’s westward march was accompanied by a propaganda campaign structured along ethnic, rather than class, lines.

As the contradiction between class and national narratives of the Ukrainian past was being suppressed, a tension surfaced within the new imperial discourse between the Ukrainian and Russian grand narratives of national history. In addition to numerous newspaper articles, two brief surveys of the history of Western Ukraine were published in 1940 in Moscow and Kiev. These pamphlets reveal that the Soviet historians in the centre and in the Ukrainian capital understood the new politics of memory differently - and confirm that there was some room in official Soviet pronouncements for subtle interpretative debate. In Kiev, Serhii Bilousov and Oleksandr Ohloblyn presented the newly incorporated Western Ukraine as the age-old Ukrainian land.’ In Moscow, Vladimir Picheta announced in the very first sentence of his pamphlet that Western Ukraine and Belarus were ‘primordial Russian lands that had been part of the Rurikids’ empire.’⁴³ Notwithstanding the apparent, though not irreconcilable, opposition between Russian imperialism and Ukrainian national patriotism, both pamphlets adopted a new term already widely used by the press: the ‘great Ukrainian people.’

This term represented a remarkable addition, and one completely overlooked by scholars of Stalinism, to the previous only ‘great’ nation of the Soviet Union, the Russians, who were promoted to this status in 1937.⁴⁴ The official newspaper of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Komunist, first used this designation on 15 November 1939, in the text of the Supreme Soviet’s letter to Stalin: ‘Having been divided, having been separated for centuries by artificial borders, the great Ukrai­nian people today reunite forever in a single Ukrainian republic.’ The letter also referred to the Ukrainians’ homeland as ‘their mother, Great Ukraine.’ As well, the text of the law on the incorporation of Western Ukraine was peppered with the epithet ‘great.’⁴⁵ Mykola Petrovsky freely used the adjective in his Russian- language pamphlet, The Military Past of the Ukrainian People, commissioned by the Ministry of Defence and published in 1939 in the mass series ‘Library of the Red Army Soldier.’ According to Petrovsky, the Polish lords and their German mercenaries ‘were always beaten by our heroic ancestors.

References to the great Ukrainian people decreased in official discourse during 1940 and mushroomed again with the German invasion in June 1941, only to disappear, this time completely and for a long time, in about 1944. This curious episode of Stalinist semantics reflected the authorities’ attempt to use Ukrainian patriotism as a mobilization tool, but without abandoning the new imperial vocabulary. In a state with one dominant ‘great nation,’ the only way to boost the national pride of the largest non-Russian people was to promote them, tempo- i.irily, to ‘greatness’ alongside the Russian elder brother.

In ‘reunited’ Western Ukraine, the Soviet administration similarly promoted i lie national heritage in its Stalinized version. The authorities ‘Ukrainized’ Jan Ka/imierz Lviv University, renaming it after the nineteenth-century Ukrainian wntci Ivan Franko. The institutes of history, archaeology, literature, linguistics, folklore, and economics of the republic’s Academy of Sciences set up branches in I,viv. As the Soviet administration closed down the Shevchenko Scientific Society, the local ‘bourgeois-nationalist’ equivalent of the Academy, and two Ukrainian nationalistic’ military-patriotic museums, the university and the branch of the Institute of Ukrainian History gave jobs to practically all established West Ukrai­nian historians. The leading local specialist on the Cossack period, Ivan Krypiakevych, although no Marxist and a former student of Hrushevsky, became both the chair of Ukrainian history at the university and the head of the institute’s branch in addition to being elected a deputy to the oblast Soviet. In 1941 a then rare and highly prestigious Soviet doctoral degree in history was conferred on Krypiakevych without defence.⁴⁷

At the beginning of the German-Soviet war in June 1941 historical memory emerged as an even more important referent in Soviet ideology.

Although the Ukrainian press duly reprinted Pravdds lead articles, local func­tionaries and intellectuals did not simply proceed to glorify Nevsky and Kutuzov. Instead, the republics media intensified the promotion of the Ukrainian national heritage. References to Danylo of Halych, who had defeated the Teutonic knights, and to the Cossacks, who had prevailed over German mercenaries, appeared in the press from the very first days of the war.⁴⁹ Moreover, just as the Russians had fought a Patriotic War against Napoleon in 1812, so too had the Ukrainians fought their Patriotic War against the Poles and their German legionnaires in the mid-seventeenth century. As the Ukrainian writers stated in their open letter to Stalin, ‘It will not be the first time that the Ukrainian people smash the insolent German hordes. Danylo of Halych beat the German mongrel-knights and, during the sixteenth-century Great Patriotic War, the barbarous German mercenary cavalry learned well the strength of the Cossack sabre.’⁵⁰ As early as 2 July Petrovsky published a lengthy newspaper article, ‘The Martial Prowess of the Ukrainian People,’ which traced Ukrainian military traditions back to tenth­century Prince Sviatoslav, The historian also coined a definition of Ukrainian history that did not refer to class struggle: ‘The entire history of Ukraine is filled with the people’s heroic struggle for their freedom and independence against every kind of foreign aggressor.’ The Institute of Ukrainian History announced on 28 June that its researchers were preparing a pamphlet series about Ukraine’s heroic past.

Although it was designed to imitate and supplement the Russian catalogue of great ancestors, the new canon of the republic’s historic heroes actually asserted a concurrent claim to the foundation of the Russian grand narrative, namely, Kievan Rus'. No writer claimed this large medieval empire of Eastern Slavs exclusively for Ukrainian national memory, but the thirteenth-century Prince Danylo of Halych and his Galician-Volhynian Principality could be designated publicly as the patrimony of the Ukrainian people. Given the principality’s prominence in na­tionalist theories tracing the Kievan heritage though Galicia-Vblhynia to the Great Duchy of Lithuania to Cossack Ukraine, the valorization of Danylo was fraught with controversy. Could Ukrainians glorify the southwestern princes of Galicia- Volhynia if the Russians were extolling the northeastern princes of Vladimir- Suzdal as the heirs to Kievan grand princes? If Kievan Rus' was a common heritage of the Russians and Ukrainians, where did their separate historical mythologies begin? For the moment, though, nobody objected to the ‘Ukrainization’ of Prince Danylo.

On 7 July the republic’s government, parliament, and party leadership issued an appeal to the Ukrainian people, affirming the new pantheon of great ancestors, a pantheon modelled after the Russian one, yet unmistakably separate: ‘The fighters of Danylo of Halych cut the German knights with their swords, Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s Cossacks cut them down with their sabres, and the Ukrainian people led by Lenin and Stalin destroyed the Kaiser’s hordes in 1918. We have always beaten the German bandits.’⁵² Disproving this statement, the German advance, the hurried evacuation that it precipitated, and the Kiev catastrophe in September left the republic’s ideologues no time to refine the new canon of national memory. The next time the authorities were able to organize a major ideological rally, the First Meeting of the Representatives of the Ukrainian People, was in Saratov, Russia, on 26 November 1941.

As the Russocentric undertones of the central press matured during 1942—3, 11kiaini.tn patriotic propaganda in the local media was not suppressed but actually intensified The Second (30 August 1942) and the Third (16 May 1943) Meetings of the Representatives of the Ukrainian People adopted manifestos that the war historians would be reluctant to reprint in 1948 because ‘they did not mention the Bolsheviks ’⁵⁴ ‘The great Ukrainian people’ endured as a legitimate term in public discourse, forming the title of the editorial the official Radtanska Ukraina pub­lished after the Third Meeting Moreover, the 1943 pamphlet survey of Ukrainian history (discussed below) bore the title The Unshakable Spirit of the Great Ukrain­ian People ‘The freedom-loving Ukrainian people have always striven toward the unification [of the Ukrainian ethnic lands], toward the creation of their mighty state (derzhavy) on the banks of the Dniester and the Dnieper, without lords and slaves,’ wrote the poet Maksym Rylsky in Radtanska Ukraina in May 1943 ⁵⁵

During 1942 the Ukrainian State Publishing House in Saratov unveiled a series in Ukrainian of pocket-size pamphlets on ‘Our Great Ancestors,’ beginning with Danylo of Halych, Petro Sahaidachny, and Bohdan Khmelnytsky Other pam­phlets then in preparation featured portaits of Khmelnytsky’s colonels Ivan Bohun and Maksym Kryvoms, the leaders of anti-Pohsh peasant rebellions Semen Pain and Ustym Karmaliuk, writers Shevchenko and Franko, and Civil War heroes Shchors and Oleksandr Parkhomenko ⁵⁶ Late in 1942 a 200-page collectively written Survey of the History of Ukraine was published in Ukrainian in Ufa The book picked up the rhetorical device of the ‘great Ukrainian people,’ further downplaying the class approach and emphasizing state and nation building Prince Danylo is characterized as a ‘courageous and talented military leader and a patriot of his fatherland,’ while Khmelnytsky in addition is celebrated as an ‘exemplary Cossack officer and a progressive figure of his time ’ The narrative especially exalts the Cossacks, the authors designate the Khmelnytsky Uprising as a ‘War of National Liberation,’ which resulted in Ukraine’s incorporation into Russia - a ‘lesser evil’ that was not originally in the rebels’ plans The Survey earned a positive review in Moscow’s Istonchesku zhurnal⁵⁷

The Survey was intended to serve as a popular reference book, unlike the four- volume History of Ukraine, which was explicitly conceived as a university textbook Edited by the leading ‘rehabihtationist’ Mykola Petrovsky, volume 1 covered the period from ancient times until 1654 The book not only continued the valoriza­tion of the Cossacks, the chapter on Kievan Rus' also paid unprecedented atten­tion to the princes, with separate sections devoted to laroslav the Wise and Volodymyr (Vladimir) Monomakh, primarily to their state-building efforts and the promotion of culture The list of further reading contained many works by ‘bourgeois-nationalist’ historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth century Mykola (Nikolai) Kostomarov, Oleksandr Lazarevsky, and Mykhailo Hrushevsky ⁵⁸

The working conditions in Eastern Russia and Central Asia, where Ukrainian intellectuals spent the first two years of the war, hardly encouraged a serious elaboration of the historical genre in literature and the arts Not a single historical novel was written there, the authorities ‘planned’ to arrange the writing of two patriotic historical operas, Danylo of Halych and Bohdan Khmelnytsky, but work apparently never moved beyond the planning stage ⁵⁹ Some Ukrainian artists, however, proceeded to explore new historical topics At the exhibition of Ukrain­ian art in Ufa in the summer of 1942, Ivan Shulga presented the sketch of his painting The Peretaslav Council, the first attempt by a Soviet artist to portray the 1654 act of union with Russia As early as 1942 the Artists’ Union planned to organize a major art exhibition to celebrate the republic’s imminent liberation The exhibition’s theme was to be ‘The Great Patriotic War and the Heroic Past of the Ukrainian People ’⁶⁰

In 1942 the poet Mykola Bazhan published a long patriotic poem, ‘Danylo of Halych,’ depicting the prince as a great warlord and popular leader Although the poet typically referred to the thirteenth-century ancestors of Ukrainians as Rus' or Slavs, twice Bazhan used the word ‘Ukraine’ ‘All of Ukraine hears the tread of [Danylo’s] troops’ and As the first warrior in the Ukrainian fields ’ Apparently, at the war’s mid-point the poet’s ideological supervisors deemed acceptable such appropriation of the Galician-Volhyman principality to Ukrainian historical memory Subsequently, Bazhan received the Stalin Prize, Second Class, for ‘Danylo of Halych’ and his other wartime poems ⁶¹

Noticeable since the mid-1950s, the elevation of the Ukrainian ‘classical cultural heritage’ constituted another significant dimension of the new politics of memory During the war, the party ideologues organized widely publicized celebrations of Shevchenko and the founder of the modern Ukrainian musical tradition, Mykola Lysenko, in Ufa and Samarkand in 1942-3 The republic’s Academy of Sciences in 1943 considered the study of Ukrainian cultural patri­mony — the legacy of Shevchenko, Franko, Lysenko, the writer Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, the eighteenth-century philosopher Hryhorn Skovoroda, and the nineteenth-century philologist Osyp Bodiansky - its primary aim As soon as the republic’s opera companies had moved to Central Asia, they were ordered to start working immediately and stage ‘as their first priority’ Ukrainian classical works such as Semen Hulak-Artemovsky’s The Zaporozhian Cossack beyond the Danube (1863) and Lysenko’s Natalka from Poltava (1889) ⁶²

The patriotic writings of Shevchenko, Franko, and Lesia Ukrainka continued to be published in mass editions even when all the territory of Ukraine was under German occupation Indeed, Shevchenko’s poems and Franko’s short stories ap­peared in special editions ‘for [distribution in] the occupied territories ’ In May 1943 the Ukrainian State Publishing House (then operating in Russia), released a new edition of Shevchenko’s canonic collection of poems, Kobzar, in a run of 20,000 copies 1 he tribulations of war notwithstanding, the Moscow printing presses ensured what a contemporary reviewer called ‘a luxurious quality of print’⁶³ During 1942-3, the celebrated artist Vasyl Kasnan produced a poster series, ‘Shevchenko’s Wrath Is the Weapon of Victory,’ combining portraits of Shevchenko and lines from his poetry with background imagery of warfare The series was reprinted as leaflets and dropped from aeroplanes over the occupied Ukrainian territories ⁶⁴

The Soviet Ukrainian ideologues and intelligentsia had been well aware that their version of national memory faced competition from the nationalist narratives of the past that were circulating in the occupied territories The activities of the Western Ukrainian historian Ivan Krypiakevych particularly bothered the Soviet authorities Having been a darling of the Soviet administration in Lviv before the war, he now published a Brief History of Ukraine, which was hailed as a nationalist alternative to Soviet textbooks A cursory exposition of Ukrainian history in its national interpretation, the Brief History acquired political significance primarily because of its promotion in nationalist newspapers published with the permission of the German administration Thus, Vmnytski visti concluded its publication of the book with a statement summarizing the anti-Russian and anti-Soviet variant of Ukrainian memory

The time has finally come when the Soviet Union, that terrible prison and torture house of peoples, is weakened, primarily by the Ukrainian national liberation move ment, and is collapsing under the mighty pressure of the forces of revolution and liberation, as well as under the strong blows of German arms Bolshevism is collaps ing and our Fatherland is obtaining new freedom We must now build our life anew proceeding along the path of our ancient heroes who constantly fought for Ukraine s freedom From Sviatoslav and Volodymyr to Khmelnytsky and Mazepa, from Shevchenko and Franko to Mykola Mikhnovsky, Symon Petliura levhen Konovalets and many others, all of whom sacrificed their efforts for the Ukrainian cause We will follow in their footsteps and we will win freedom, independence, and unity for Ukraine'⁶⁵

It is not clear whether the quoted paragraph was written by Krypiakevych himself or was added by the newspaper’s editors Later emigre editions of his Brief History of Ukraine contain a similar conclusion with a nationalist canon of great ancestors

Besides this small book, the nationalist Ukrainian Publishing House based in Cracow and Lviv issued The History of Ukraine from Ancient Times to the Present by I Petrenko (Krypiakevych) and reprinted his 1929 short History of Ukraine for the People under the title History of Ukraine While Krypiakevych was also preparing a more substantial book under the same title, the publisher reprinted Dmytro Doroshenko’s Survey of the History of Ukraine, a work by a revered Ukrainian activist who was foreign minister of the short-lived Hetman State in 1918 In all these works the Ukrainian nation was treated as a subject of history and the negative effects of Russian domination were stressed ⁶⁶

Radianska Ukraina was disturbed enough by the nationalist competition in the construction of memory to ridicule it in a special article In July 1943 the paper mocked the nationalist historian Ivan Pohanko (literally, the ‘Rascal’), who was allegedly writing a Ukrainian history in response to Goebbels’s orders Unfortunately for Ivan, the paper reported, a certain older nationalist, Doroshenko, had already published an anti-Soviet account of Ukraine’s past The article ended with a satirical description of Ivan walking unhappily to report to his master, Reichskommissar Erich Koch, that his attempts at being a good little lackey had not been successful ⁶⁷ The publishers might not have known that ‘Pohanko’ was actually Krypiakevych, who carefully used different pen names for his publications

Fighting on two fronts, Ukrainian Soviet intellectuals also had to rebuff their nationalist compatriots in Canada In April 1943 the Soviet All-Slavic Committee learned that a ‘pro-fascist nationalist organization,’ the Canadian Ukrainian Com­mittee, presented Prime Minister WL Mackenzie Kang with a memo expressing the Ukrainians’ desire to obtain ‘their own independent state in Europe ’ The Moscow-based Slavic Committee enlisted leading Ukrainian scholars and writers to prepare rebuttals for publication in both Ukraine and Canada The poet Pavlo Tychyna wrote a particularly amusing article, ‘Keep Your Dirty Hands off Ukraine,’ trying to prove that ‘one cannot create a fully independent state in such a geographi­cal setting ’ Even Danylo of Halych had had to ally himself with Hungary and Poland The Ukrainian Central Rada of 1918 did not last long as an independent government before inviting the Germans in The Soviet Union, Tychyna implied, was by far the best deal for the geopohtically challenged Ukrainians ⁶⁸

Serious concern with concurrent nationalist propaganda surfaced in the Soviet Ukrainian press and ideological documents during late 1942 and early 1943 However, neither the actual activities of Ukrainian nationalists (who were discour­aged and harassed by the Germans) nor the Soviet authorities’ information about ‘nationalist propaganda’ (as evidenced by the archives of the KP(b)U Central Committee) seems to have justified such alarm Perhaps Stalinist ideologues denounced Ukrainian nationalism so strongly precisely because they had been aware of the tensions within their own historical imagination, where ‘nation’ sat uneasily with ‘class’ and the ‘great Ukrainian people’ competed for the citizens’ allegiance with the ‘great Russian people ’ A fierce anti-nationahst rhetoric re­flected the inability of Ukrainian functionaries and intellectuals to fashion a Soviet Ukrainian historical memory that would be completely separate from a nationalist understanding of national memory

T he simultaneous and poorly coordinated promotion of the Russian and Ukrainian national patrimonies in the first period of the war soon led both the ideologues and the Ukrainian intelligentsia to realize that their work was begin­ning to threaten certain basic structures of imperial ideology. In November 1942 the writer lurii lanovsky reported from Ufa to Moscow, to Kost Lytvyn, the secretary for ideology of the Ukrainian Central Committee, a fragment of a conversation among unidentified Ukrainian scholars: ‘Ukrainian nationalism passes during the war for patriotism, but after the war [the authorities] will square accounts with it.’⁶⁹ This lapidary political language of the time disguised a major problem with Soviet Ukrainian historical memory: the Ukrainian national history had come dangerously close to completeness as a self-sufficient story of the nation’s heroic trials and victories.