Toward a New Narrative?
As in the late 1970s, when scholars of Ukrainian history in the United States and Canada gathered for their first conference to assess the state of the field, so today a new generation of historians is seeking to define the field in relation to dominant historiographic trends in Ukraine, where most research and writing on the subject is done, and to the historical profession outside Ukraine.
Today, as in the 1970s, most of the “Westerners” reject the historiographic trend dominant in Ukraine. In the 1970s that trend was a variety of Soviet Marxist historiography; today it is the national narrative of the Ukrainian past. The task also remains largely the same as it was then—the integration of Ukrainian historical research and writing into world historiography, taking advantage of new trends emerging in the field.Today, unlike in 1995, no one asks whether Ukraine has a history. As scholars of various backgrounds began contributing to the field, bringing in themes and approaches from other fields of historiography, the legitimacy of studying Ukrainian history ceased to be an issue. As noted above, the achievement of Ukrainian independence also served to legitimize the field. Recent research on Ukrainian history conducted outside the country has been profoundly influenced by the transnational and regional turns in historical studies. The same is true of the continuing interest in empires, borderlands, minorities, and national and cultural identities, as well as the growing interest in spatial elements of historical research. All these approaches help expand the boundaries of Ukrainian history and enhance its heuristic potential not only at home but also, as Andrea Graziosi has shown, with regard to European history as a whole.
Thus, Ukraine now has a history abroad. But does it have one at home in the sense defined by von Hagen—an accepted written record of past experience? The national narrative, now dominant in Ukrainian historiography at home, has encountered major problems in the last few years when it comes to its reception on the elite and popular levels.
As Marta Dyczok and Volodymyr Kravchenko show in the above volume, the ethnonational narrative has exhausted its potential not only in purely scholarly and heuristic terms but also as an instrument for organizing the historical memory of Ukrainian society in such a way as to promote consensus. Should its practitioners be given another chance?After all, Ukraine is still struggling with the process of nation-building, which most European countries completed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the help of the ethnonational historical narratives that most contributors to the above volume reject as not only outdated but also detrimental to a better understanding of the Ukrainian past and its significance. Is it fair to “impose” on Ukrainian society a historical understanding informed by the transnational processes currently taking place in the countries of the European Union at a time when Ukraine is surrounded by and obliged to compete, sometimes militarily, with states that have placed the national paradigm at the core of their historical identity?13
The events of the last few years—the Revolution of Dignity, the loss of the Crimea, and the insurgency and Russo-Ukrainian conflict in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine—have helped mobilize Ukrainian society in defense of the country’s integrity and sovereignty across ethnic, linguistic, religious, and regional lines. The tragic experience of war, resettlement, and lost territory has mobilized the Ukrainian civic nation. If one of the main tasks of historical writing is to explain a given society’s origins to its citizens, there is no better way to do so than by writing a history of the land and its people, taking account of the country’s regional and ethnic diversity while integrating its past into the history of the part of the world to which it belongs.
With historians of empires discussing ways of writing a “new imperial history,” the time has come to put on the academic agenda the need for a “new national history,” a genre of research and writing that would go beyond the ethnonational paradigm of the past and take advantage of opportunities presented by the global, transnational, multiethnic, and regional approaches to meet the growing demand of modern states, nations, and societies for common narratives and historical identities.
Few countries are more in need of that kind of history than is Ukraine. The transformation of the Ukrainian historical narrative along the lines suggested by the new trends of historical research would make that narrative more inclusive and much more acceptable to various elements of Ukrainian society, which remains divided less by issues of language and culture than by the different historical experiences of Ukraine’s diverse regions. That transformation would also make Ukraine more understandable to its European Union partners, whose history has often been the product of the same transnational processes.