The Unifying Past

Ukrainian patriotic propaganda reached its wartime heights in the autumn of 1943 when the Red Army quickly advanced into the republic’s territory Although the national past remained paramount propaganda material, the Soviet notion of Ukrainian historical memory underwent a significant configuration The creation of the Order ofBohdan Khmelnytsky, the only Soviet military order named after a non-Russian historical personality, best symbolizes this development

Declassified archival documents and recently published memoirs reveal that Ukrainian intellectuals and functionaries initiated the establishment of this order, and that the idea itself can be traced to the prominent film director and writer Oleksandr Dovzhenko Apparently mindful of the creation of the orders of Aleksandr Nevsky, Mikhail Kutuzov, and Aleksandr Suvorov in mid-1942, Dovzhenko talked to Khrushchev on 29 August 1943 about establishing an Order of Bohdan Khmelnytsky According to Dovzhenko’s diary, the Ukrainian Communist Party’s first secretary accepted the idea ‘with delight ’⁷ The archives have preserved Khrushchev’s original telegram to Stalin of 31 August concerning this matter

In connection with the liberation of Ukraine that has now begun, I think it would be expedient to establish a military Order of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, to be awarded to officers and generals of the Red Army [stricken out for services in liberating Ukrainian territory from the German aggressors] The news that such an order has been established will raise the morale of Red Army fighters, especially Ukrainians The Ukrainian people [and] the Ukrainian intelligentsia will greet the news that an Order of Bohdan Khmelnytsky has been created with particular pleasure and enthusi asm Bohdan Khmelnytsky is a statesman and military leader who is very popular and very much loved in Ukraine He fought for Ukraine s liberation, as well as its union [with Russia] and the union of the Ukrainian and Russian peoples In this sense, establishing an order named after him would be desirable politically ⁸

Thus, the republic’s elites evoked the notion of Russian-Ukrainian friendship in order both to promote the national patrimony and to coordinate it with an overarching imperial mythology In the best tradition of colonial narratives, they presented Ukrainian national history as culminating in union with Russia

On 2 September Khrushchev advised one of his deputies of Stalin’s approval ‘I li ive received Comrade Stalin’s consent in principle to establish the military Order of Bohdan Khmelnytsky’⁹ During September two groups of Ukrainian artists in Kharkiv and Moscow worked around the clock to prepare sketches of the order It is interesting that the Ukrainian leadership instructed them to use the Ukrainian, lather than the Russian, spelling of the hetman’s name on this all-Union order I he winning design, by the Moscow-based Ukrainian graphic artist Oleksandr I’.Ishchenko, consisted of a richly ornamented six-point star with Khmelnytsky’s portrait in the centre and the hetman’s name in Ukrainian, with two soft signs instead of one (as in Russian) beneath ¹⁰

Before the order was unveiled, however, Stalin decided to magnify its propa­gandist effect by simultaneously renaming the city of Pereiaslav Pereiaslav- Khmelnytsky¹¹ Aware that this site of the 1654 Russian-Ukrainian treaty was about to be taken by the Red Army, Khrushchev instructed Pravdas editor, Petr Pospelov, to have a group of leading Ukrainian writers then in Moscow prepare the proper propaganda materials on Khmelnytsky in advance Tychyna, Bazhan, Rylsky, and Dovzhenko Although he himself was one of the highest ideological bureaucrats, Pospelov learned of the renaming from a handwritten note that Khrushchev dictated to his aide, Lt-Colonel Pavlo Hapochka, for delivery to Pospelov At the mid-point of the war, Stalin and his Ukrainian viceroy, Khrushchev, decided on Ukrainian issues themselves without involving the apparatus of the VKP(b) Central Committee ¹²

As soon as the Red Army took Pereiaslav, the central and Ukrainian news­papers unveiled a series of decrees and propaganda articles On 11 October Pravda published a decree (dated the previous day) establishing the Order of Bohdan Khmelnytsky Written by or with the participation of Ukrainian writers, the accompanying editorial stressed Khmelnytsky’s role in uniting Ukraine with Russia

The Ukrainian people hold sacred the name of Bohdan Khmelnytsky the Russian people revere his name, and all the peoples of the Soviet Union know his name and pronounce it with the greatest respect and love because his name is linked in separably with the Ukrainian people s struggle for liberation from the foreign yoke, with the history of the reunification of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples and with the fraternal union of the Ukrainian and Russian peoples The greatest statesman of his time, [Khmelnytsky] understood well that the Ukrainian people could sur vive only in union with the fraternal Russian people Uniting two fraternal peoples, the Russians and the Ukrainians, was Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s greatest his toncal service ¹³

Ukrainian newspapers offered a similar interpretation Writing in Radianska Ukraina, Petrovsky exalted Khmelnytsky as a national hero, the ‘great military leader and the liberator of all Ukrainian lands from Poland ’ The historian condemned the previously popular view that Khmelnytsky considered the Pereiaslav Treaty a temporary diplomatic manoeuvre and intended to break with Muscovy in his later years According to Petrovsky, the hetman sought from the very beginning of the war to unite with Russia, and this desire reflected the age-old strivings of the Ukrainian people ¹⁴

The archives reveal that the new official interpretation of Ukraine’s incorpora­tion into Russia as a fraternal union and the ‘only right path,’ instead of a ‘lesser evil,’ was developed in the apparatus of the KP(b)U Central Committee and relied heavily on the writings of Mykola Petrovsky, the court historian of the Khmelnytsky Uprising and the leading ‘rehabihtationist ’ Moreover, the USSR Supreme Soviet Presidium’s draft decrees creating the Order of Khmelnytsky and renaming the city of Pereiaslav, as well as much of the accompanying propaganda materials, were prepared in Kiev, and all these texts featured the only right path’ theme ¹⁵ By confirming that the Ukrainian national mythology was subordinate to its Rus­sian counterpart, the republics ideologues constructed an acceptable version of Ukrainian Soviet historical memory For creative intelligentsia, this meant a licence to continue with their patriotic propaganda On 13 October both the central and the republican press announced the rechnstening of Pereiaslav as Pereiaslav-Khmelnytsky ‘in memory of the great son of the Ukrainian people, statesman and military leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky’ While stressing the hetman’s services in uniting Ukraine and Russia, Radianska Ukratna featured a particularly frenetic sample of patriotic rhetoric, elevating Khmelnytsky to the stature of the father of his nation ‘Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s ardent blood streams through and wells up in our people’s veins ’¹⁶

During the war, the Soviet military command awarded over 9,000 Orders of Bohdan Khmelnytsky¹⁷ The creation of the order confirmed that the rehabilita­tion of Cossack mythology was irreversible At the same time, however, the image of Khmelnytsky in official discourse was evolving the liberator of Ukraine was becoming Ukraine’s unifier with Russia

At the beginning of September 1943, as the Red Army was taking one Ukrain­ian city after another, Radianska Ukratna featured articles on these cities’ historical role Historians and journalists filled their writing with references to the ‘traditions of our freedom-loving ancestors,’ the princes of Kievan Rus' and the Cossack leaders ¹⁸ On 31 October the same authoritative newspaper allotted its entire page 3 to Petrovsky’s long article ‘The Unshakable Spirit of the Great Ukrainian People ’ Also published as a pamphlet, the article scanned the entire history of Ukraine from Kievan Rus' to the Great Patriotic War The work designated princes Sviatoslav, Volodymyr Monomakh, Roman Mstyslavych, and Danylo of Halych as ‘great leaders’ (yozhdt), presented the Zaporozhian Host as the ‘beginning of a new Ukrainian state’ (implying that Kievan Rus' had been the old Ukrainian state), and dropped any mention of the ‘lesser evil’ theory in favour of a more optimistic construct ‘In 1654 Ukraine concluded with Russia an unbreakable fraternal union ’ Finally, in the opening sentence of the article, Petrovsky coined a new crypto-Hegehan definition of Ukrainian Volksgetst, a statement to be reworded often in subsequent Ukrainian scholarship and political pronouncements ‘The history of the Ukrainian people is a history of the long and fierce struggle against various foreign invaders, against social and national oppression, for unification within the Ukrunian state, and for the establishment of an unbreakable union with the fratcrml Russian people ^,|9

After the Red Army took Kiev on 6 November, Khrushchev and other Ukrainian leaders issued a manifesto, ‘To the Ukrainian People,’ celebrating the liberation of the ‘glorious and ancient capital of Ukraine and referring to the ‘glory of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Petro Sahaidachny, Taras Shevchenko, and Mykola Shchors’ - an abbreviated, familiar Soviet Ukrainian canon of great ancestors As Dovzhenkos diary discloses, a group of Ukrainian writers headed by lurn lanovsky prepared the appeal ²⁰ In Moscow a prominent Ukrainian poet, Maksym Rylsky, gave a speech titled ‘Kiev in the History of Ukraine’ at a special convention of the All-Union Academy of Sciences A carry-over from pre 1943 Ukrainian patriotic rhetoric, Rylsky’s speech was nothing less than a comprehensive survey of the development of Ukrainian culture from ancient times to the present Downplaying the Bolshevik Revolution as a turning point, Rylsky spoke of the uninterrupted development of Ukrainian culture’ across the centuries He praised the Cossacks as ‘Ukraine’s sharp sword’ and exalted the ‘brilliant representatives of Ukrainian historical scholarship’ nineteenth-century Ukrainian historians Kostomarov, Kuhsh, Antonovych, Lazarevsky, Levytsky, the collaborators of the Shevchenko Scientific Society, and Hrushevsky, with his ‘monumental’ History of Ukraine-Rus - all of whom had been stigmatized before the war as nationalists Radianska Ukraina dutifully reported the speech in full ²¹

The Ukrainian elites continued to promote this version of national memory for a variety of reasons from a sense of duty (since each Soviet nation had to cherish its ethnic patrimony), in order to justify their positions, and in many cases because of a genuine allegiance to the nation Yet they were well aware of the need to reconcile the propaganda about the Ukrainian heritage with Moscow’s increasingly strident praise of Russian historical greatness In addition, the Ukrainian ideologues and intellectuals felt obliged to stress that their version of national memory differed from the nationalistic variant to which the population in the occupied territories was exposed To map the direction of ideological change, the Ukrainian party apparatus used an otherwise insignificant occasion, the 290th anniversary of the Pereiaslav Treaty in January 1944 In late October 1943 Khrushchev wrote to Stalin ‘18 January 1944 will mark the 290th anniversary of Ukraine’s incorpora non \pnsoed.ineniid\ into Russia according to the terms of the Pereiaslav Treaty that Bohdan Khmelnytsky concluded in the city of Pereiaslav-Khmelnytsky [wc] The KP(b)U Central Committee requests that the celebration of this anniversary be permitted, given the furious anti-historical propaganda against the union of the Russian and Ukrainian people that the German fascists and Ukrainian-German nationalists have conducted in Ukraine This would be the first time the anniversary of this event was commemorated during the entire period that the Soviet power has existed in Ukraine ’²² The plans for this unprecedented celebra­tion of a non-round number of years were quite modest and limited mainly to articles, leaflets, and rallies in major cities Stalin apparently approved the plan, and the Ukrainian authorities celebrated the 290th anniversary of Pereiaslav on 18 January 1944 While the rehabilitation of Khmelnytsky reinstalled in histori­cal memory national liberation and statehood, the renewed cult of Pereiaslav symbolized the dominant presence of the Russian elder brother The media no longer stressed that in 1654 Ukraine had joined tsarist Russia, and editorials with titles like The Sacred Union seemed to revise irrevocably the ‘lesser evil’ theory ²³

On 8 July 1944 the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences held a festive convention and concert to commemorate an even less ‘round’ jubilee than that of the 290th of Pereiaslav the 235th anniversary of the Battle of Poltava Poltava, where in 1709 Peter I and the Ukrainian Cossacks who were loyal to him defeated Charles XII of Sweden and his ally Hetman Mazepa, ideally suited the contemporary ideological requirements Speakers praised the unbreakable union of Russians and Ukrainians and condemned the ‘Ukrainian fascist nationalists ’²⁴ In October 1944 Radianska Ukraina published a landmark editorial, ‘Great Rus,’ elaborating on the first line of the new Soviet anthem and pledging ‘our love’ for Great Rus, a term clearly connoting historical Russia In November the newspaper carried a long article by Moscow historian Anna Pankratova, ‘The Historical Friendship of the Russian and Ukrainian Peoples ’²⁵ By late 1944 most public pronouncements on the Ukrainian past firmly incorporated the idea of Russian guidance In an interesting modification of what Jeffrey Brooks has called the Stalinist moral economy of gift,’²⁶ expressions of gratitude to the great Russian people supplemented the pages of Ukrainian press devoted to the ritualistic thanks to Stalin, the party, and the state