Ukraine Reunited

With the westward advance of the Red Army in late 1943 and 1944 Soviet propaganda again highlighted the theme of a reunited Western Ukraine The initiative in raising this issue belonged to the Ukrainian establishment Soon after the liberation of Kharkiv in February 1943 Radianska Ukratna published Kornuchuk’s long article, ‘The Reunification of the Ukrainian People within Their Own State ’ In an unprecedented move, Pravda reprinted the article in Russian the very next day, and other central newspapers followed suit the follow­ing day Kornuchuk’s aim was ostensibly to rebuff some unnamed Polish emigre newspapers that allegedly laid claim to Ukrainian territories up to the Dnieper and the Black Sea,’ although the article’s real importance was as an indication of I he Soviet position on Eastern Galicia (Western Ukraine), annexed from Poland in I 9 39 Kornuchuk’s statements left no doubt that the Soviet Union would stand by us territorial acquisitions To defend the pre-war annexations, the influential pl lywright referred to the ethnic and historical unity of the Ukrainian lands, khmilnytsky’s campaigns in Western Ukraine, and the nineteenth-century na­non il uvivil in Galicia, personified by Ivan Franko ⁵²

The Ukrainian leadership was also looking forward to annexing from Poland and Czechoslovakia the remaining territories with Ukrainian populations and was preparing historical arguments to support its plans.

Somewhat embarrassed, Ukrainian politicians and intellectuals turned to an­other candidate for ‘reunification’: Transcarpathia. This pocket of East Slavic highlanders, ruled since the eleventh century by Hungary and after the First World War by Czechoslovakia, presented Ukrainian ideologues with a challenge. What historical arguments could they muster to support the designation of contempo­rary Transcarpathians as Ukrainian? Turning to the land’s pre-Hungarian past risked endorsing the nationalist idea that the population of eleventh-century Rus' was ‘Ukrainian.’ (From this it followed that the Russian nationality emerged later and possibly as an offshoot of the great Ukrainian people.)

Nevertheless, as the Red Army approached the Carpathian mountains in the late summer of 1944, Radianska Ukraina published an article by two historians who proclaimed Transcarpathia ‘the westernmost outpost of the Ukrainian people’ and the land of‘our dear blood brothers,’ who for 1000 years had suffered from national oppression and yet preserved their identity.

After the Soviet-Czechoslovak treaty in June 1945 legitimized the transfer of Transcarpathia, Bazhan wrote a more cautious propaganda piece on this event, the article ‘Our Primordial Land.’ Bazhan announced that Transcarpathians, although of‘Ukrainian kin,’ were related to both Ukrainians and Russians. His article wisely stressed the Russian brother’s seniority within the Soviet family into which Eastern Ukrainians were bringing their Transcarpathian brethren: ‘For one thousand years, this small stream of people preserved their faith in reunification with the great Ukrainian sea, with the great ocean of Rus'. For a thousand years — could one imagine, for a millennium - half a million people of Ukrainian kin, taken by history south-west beyond the peaks of the Carpathian mountains, did not lose the sense of unity with the mighty Eastern Slavic peoples, with the Russian and Ukrainian peoples.’⁵⁹ The authorities sponsored a ‘Ukrainization’ of Transcarpa­thian cultural life that included the opening of Uzhhorod State University,⁶⁰ but ‘historical reunification’ presented the Ukrainian bureaucrats with all kinds of problems. On the one hand, those Transcarpathian teachers who welcomed the union were surprised to discover that Ukrainian history was not being taught in the schools of the united Ukrainian state.

In addition, the republic’s authorities had to ensure the ideological re-appro­priation of Western Ukraine, which had been ‘reunited’ in 1939 but soon had been occupied by Germany. Khrushchev arrived in Lviv the day after the Soviet Army took the city on 27 July 1944; in early August and again in October- November the first secretary toured Western Ukraine. In his secret reports to Stalin, Khrushchev focused on the fighting with the nationalist Ukrainian Insur­gent Army, and this struggle, rather than the economic recovery of the region, would occupy the attention of the republic’s authorities for the next two years.⁶²

Replanting the Soviet version of Ukrainian historical memory in the region, however, was high on the Ukrainian ideologues’ agenda Within a few years, 44,000 teachers from Eastern Ukraine arrived to staff the schools in the Western part, and thousands of administrators and propagandists went westwards to oversee the new ideological flock ⁶³ Manuilsky attended a teachers’ conference in Lviv in January 1945 to give a speech, The Ukrainian-German Bourgeois National­ists at the Service of Fascist Germany The text, promptly released as a pamphlet, portrayed the Soviet Union as a vehicle of modernization for the economically backward region According to Manuilsky, some Galicians idealized the Austro- Hungarian past for the empire’s promotion of national autonomy, yet the Habsburgs had discouraged Eastern Galicia’s economic development, whereas the Soviet power would ‘turn Lviv into one of the biggest industrial centres of Soviet Ukraine ’ Geopohtically, Ukraine could not be independent, nor could there be a union with ‘weak’ Poland The nationalists talked of independence but in practice submitted to oppressive Nazi Germany, which did not allow for the free develop­ment of Ukrainian culture Consequently, historically ‘the Soviet Union [was] the only guarantor of Ukraine’s freedom and independence ’⁶⁴

The Soviet authorities worked hard to suppress the alternate, ‘nationalistic’ version of the national memory in Western Ukraine During the first years after reunification, the bureaucrats were obsessed with fighting the cult of Hetman Mazepa in the West Again and again at conferences, ideologues raised the problem of the proper blackening of this ‘traitor’ who had attempted to separate Cossack Ukraine from Russia Another source of the Galicians’ national pride, the Ukrainian Galician Army of 1918—20, was also labelled ‘nationalistic’ in new narratives of the past Finally, when Stalin proceeded to destroy the foundation of Galician national identity, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church, the first public attack on it came in the form of a derogatory historical survey of the Church’s ‘anti-people’ activities The survey was part of laroslav Halan’s infamous article, ‘With a Cross or With a Knife’’ which denounced the late head of the Church, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky The Lviv authorities reported on the public reaction to this ‘bomb of enormous force’ directly to Khrushchev ®

As the Ukrainian ideologues eliminated the residue of nationalist historical narratives from Western Ukrainian public discourse, they also commissioned reliable historians to write model lectures on the region’s past The resourceful Petrovsky promptly composed a pamphlet survey of Western Ukrainian history Sensing the new ideological winds of the last years of the war, he imputed to Galicians the age-old desire to unite not only with Eastern Ukrainians but also with the ‘fraternal [and] blood-related Russian people ’ Petrovsky went even further in undoing wartime patriotic concepts when he criticized the Galician historians Mykhailo Hrushevsky and Stepan Tomashivsky for tracing ‘Ukrainian’ statehood from ancient Kiev to Galicia-Volhyma Until the fourteenth century, wrote Petrovsky, there was no Ukrainian, Russian, or Belarusian nationality, just the common Rus' people Moreover, even before 1917 both Eastern and Western Ukrainians supposedly wanted to unite within a single ‘Ukrainian state, which would be part of Russia ’ According to this scheme, little had changed since 1917, simply, the Soviet Union had replaced the Russian Empire in the process of carrying out the ultimate historical reunification of Eastern Slavs ⁶⁶

While the republic’s ideologues and intellectuals were promoting the myths of Russian-Ukrainian friendship and the elder brother’s guidance, they vigilantly guarded the notion of Ukraine’s historical and ethnic unity Sometime late in the war, Manuilsky reviewed the manuscript of volume 2 of the History of Diplomacy, prepared by the Moscow scholars The Ukrainian foreign minister was outraged to find a reference to the ‘Rutheman part of Galicia ’ Ignoring the Galician Ukraini­ans’ self-identification as ‘Ruthenians’ until the turn of the century, Manuilsky wrote indignantly ‘This is the German and Polish term, especially devised to prove that the Galician population is different from Ukrainians Our Soviet political literature should not repeat this term, since there are no Ruthenians There is, however, a Ukrainian population in Galicia *⁶⁷

In December 1944 the Moscow historian Boris Grekov received an anonymous letter from Lviv The letter, composed in good Russian and signed by a Russian Galician,’ appealed to the renowned scholar to stop the Ukrainization of the ‘primordial Russian’ Galicia and Transcarpathia The author argued that history had given Soviet power a chance to complete the gathering together of Russian lands begun by the Muscovite prince Ivan Kalita In 1946 ‘Ivan the Galician’ (most likely the same person as ‘a Russian Galician’) wrote to the KP(b)U Central Committee’s secretary for propaganda, Ivan Nazarenko,⁶⁸ that Russians, Ukraini­ans, Galicians, and Transcarpathians were all part of the same people, ‘Rus' ’ The author attached his typescript ‘Open Questions to Professor Petrovsky’ in which he accused the leading Ukrainian Soviet historian of falsifying the past, separating the Ukrainians from the Russians, and, by extension, of fuelling the insurgent movement in Western Ukraine ⁶⁹ The anonymous writer was an isolated survivor of Galician Russophiles, a political and cultural movement that the Russian Empire had once supported Stalinist ideologues did not take him seriously, however, because their multinational empire was structured as a hierarchy of ‘fraternal nations,’ and they did not openly advocate assimilation

Few of the established scholars in Lviv denied the Ukrainian ethnic character of t hei r land, but other potential complications existed In December 1944 Petrovsky went to Lviv on a special mission to sound out local historians and literary scholars He reported the results directly to Lytvyn, who passed this apparently important document on to Khrushchev The bulk of the report dealt with the ex­favourite of the Soviet authorities, Professor Krypiakevych, who was now eager to expiate his sins by producing ideologically correct works on Khmelnytsky He allegedly told Petrovsky, ‘In this question, I now see many things much more clearly since exploring Marxism and reading your, Nikolai Neonovich, works on Bohdan Khmelnytsky, especially on his gravitation to the Russian people ’ Five other leading scholars were also most compliant, agreeing to write newspaper articles and read lectures on desirable topics It is surprising that almost all declined the offer to come to Kiev with the lecture tour The insightful Petrovsky surmised that the Galicians must have been afraid of being arrested in Kiev, where their disappearance would not embarrass the authorities, and subse­quently exiled ⁷⁰

To displace the nationalist tradition of revering Mazepa, Hrushevsky, and the Ukrainian Galician Army, the Soviet authorities encouraged the official cult of Ivan Franko in Western Ukraine as the local counterpart to Shevchenko, a forefather in two senses as a proto-sociahst and as the father of the nation Eastern Ukrainian court poets Mykola Bazhan and Andrn Malyshko led the first official pilgrimage to Franko’s tomb in Lviv just ten days after the city’s takeover by the Soviet Army The state Franko museums in Lviv and in the writer’s native village were among the first cultural establishments to open immediately after the war The Eastern Ukrainian writer Leonid Smilainsky promptly composed the play The Peasants’ Deputy, devoted to Franko’s unsuccessful bid for the Austro-Hungarian parliament during the 1890s The Lviv Ukrainian Drama Company premiered the play as early as December 1945 ⁷¹

Significantly, the more reliable creative intelligentsia from the East played a major role in the ‘Sovietization’ of Western Ukrainian commemorative practices Not that Stalinist ideologues were somehow imposing Ukrainian national memory on the East Slavic population of Galicia as they were, to some degree, in Transcarpathia Owing to a long history of Ukrainian political activism in Austria- Hungary and Poland, the level of national consciousness, social organization, and community ties among Galician Ukrainians far surpassed those of their compatri­ots in the East ⁷² The difference, however, was the authorities’ intention to educate the Galicians as citizens of Soviet Ukraine, an inseparable part of the Soviet Union Western Ukrainians had yet to learn the new paradigm of memory defined by the doctrine of Russian guidance that dictated the subordinate position of Ukrainian historical mythology Under Stalin, the Ukrainians could venerate their past as long as it complemented, but did not compete with, the story of Russian imperial pursuits