The Historiographic Tradition

Among Mykhailo Hrushevsky's manuscripts in the Volodymyr Ver­nadsky National Library of Ukraine in Kyiv there is a copy of his unpublished review of Osyp Hermaize's Ukraine and the Don in the Sev­enteenth Century, which appeared as an article and a separate offprint in 1928.¹ The review was written for the journal Ukraina, of which Hru- shevsky himself was the editor, but that particular issue failed to appear because of Hrushevsky's arrest in the early spring of 1931.² At the time the review was written, Hermaize was also under arrest, accused by Stalin's secret police of having participated in the bogus Union for the Liberation of Ukraine.

What were those ideas? Hermaize argued that future research on Ukrainian Cossackdom depended on a comparative approach and advocated a search for analogues in the history of the Russian Cossacks. Hrushevsky gave particular attention to that argument of Hermaize's but maintained that it was too early to undertake comparative research. He argued that one could compare only equally well researched sub­jects, noting that the Russian Cossacks had not been studied nearly so thoroughly as the Cossacks of Ukraine.

Hrushevsky's hopes that Ukrainian scholars would lend their Rus­sian colleagues a hand did not materialize, partly because the whole subject was about to fall under the rubric of completely or predomi­nantly prohibited topics of research. In the Ukraine of the 1930s, histori­cal textbooks turned the Cossack uprisings into peasant wars and revolts, marginalizing the Cossacks in historiography and turning them into the villains of the Marxist historical narrative. Contributing to that development was the takeover of the anti-elitist theories of populist his­toriography by Soviet Marxist historiography, as well as the discredit­ing of the Cossack tradition on the grounds that it had been widely invoked by Ukrainian opponents of the Bolshevik regime during the revolution. In Ukraine, the revival of research on Cossackdom in the 1960s was followed by the anti-Cossack campaign of the 1970s, waged under the slogans of proletarian internationalism and the struggle against Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism, which hindered scholarly activity in that area until the last years of the USSR. In Russia, Cossack support for the tsarist regime during the Revolution of 1917 and oppo­sition to collectivization in the late 1920s and early 1930s only aggra­vated the traditional marginalization of Cossack history.

It was only outside the USSR that research on Cossackdom could develop without interference from the Soviet authorities. Not surpris­ingly, then, during the 1980s more research was published on the his­tory of the Ukrainian Cossacks in Poland and the United States than in Ukraine.⁵ In the West, research on the subject continued for most of the twentieth century. It was spearheaded by Ukrainian emigre authors and Western-educated historians of Ukrainian background, who con­tinued to regard the Cossack past as one of the most glorious eras of their history - one that had contributed significantly to the making of the Ukrainian nation.⁶ Russian historians, writers, and publicists associated with the postrevolutionary and post-Second World War Cossack emigrations to the West continued to write about Russian (Don, Terek, etc.) Cossackdom, contributing mostly to the recent (late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century) annals of that social group. One of the most influential books of the era on the history of the Cossacks was written by a non-Russian scholar, Gunther Stokl, and published in West Germany in 1953.7

In the United States, the image of Cossackdom was tarnished, espe­cially in the last decades of the twentieth century, by the close associa­tion of their history with that of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe - an association reinforced by their participation in the pogroms that fol­lowed the Revolution of 1917.

This was true even of the more intelligent and thoroughly researched works on Cossack history that appeared at the time, including Philip Longworth's The Cossacks (1970). Assessing the work in the Slavic Review, the Ukrainian emigre scholar Ivan L. Rudnytsky, while indicat­ing its merits, also lamented the author's failure to identify the specific features of Ukrainian Cossackdom and its differences from the Russian variety. As an example of Longworth's lack of attention to the national specificities of the Ukrainian Cossacks and his tendency to observe Ukrainian history through the prism of the Russian historical para­digm, Rudnytsky quoted from Longworth's description of Ukrainian Cossack festivities after one of their victories over the Poles, where the former were portrayed as playing Russian balalaikas. Rudnytsky also challenged Longworth's refusal to treat the Hetmanate - a polity that emerged from the victories of 1648 - as a Cossack state, as well as his assertion that the Ukrainian Cossacks had little in the way of national identity.⁹ In the exchange of letters that followed, Longworth accused Rudnytsky of denying the importance of the comparative approach to the history of Cossackdom. Rudnytsky, for his part, expressed support for comparative studies, while further developing his ideas about the leading role of the Cossacks in early modern Ukraine and their contri­bution to the growth of national identity in the Hetmanate.¹⁰ Thus, not unlike Hrushevsky forty years earlier, Rudnytsky affirmed the commit­ment of Ukrainian historians to comparative research but insisted on the uniqueness of the Ukrainian Cossacks, stressing their distinct national identity and nation-building role.