What Is Eastern Europe?

'Fhe term eastern Europe is difficult if not impossible to define with precision. Logically, one might assume that the term refers to the eastern half of the European continent. After World War II, however, it came to have more a political than a geographic meaning: eastern Europe referred to the territory encompassed by the new postwar boundaries of those countries (East Ger­many, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Albania) that had just come under Communist rule and that were at one time or another closely allied, if not subordinate, to the Soviet Union.

Such a definition produced obvious geographic anomalies. Greece and Aus­tria were excluded simply because they were non-Communist, regardless of the fact that both were as far east as or even farther east than some of the other ‘eastern’ European states. Such an illogical conceptualization of eastern Europe is no longer defensible, on what were anyway rather tenuous post­World War II political grounds. This has become the case especially since 1989, as the former ‘eastern’ European countries have abandoned Communist rule and as the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union itself have ceased to exist.

Accordingly, use of the term eastern Europe in this book will be based solely on geographic criteria. Since Europe as a continent stretches from the coasts of Ireland and Portugal in the west to the Ural Mountains in the cast, the west­east geographic divide is roughly along the 25⁰ latitude line, which runs very near the present-day western border of Belarus and Ukraine. It is interesting to note that the exact north-south as well as west-east geographic mid-point of the European continent - one that was carefully calculated in the second half of the nineteenth century - is actually on Ukrainian territory, near the vil­lage of Dilove, in the southeastern corner of the Transcarpathian oblast.

This means that geographic eastern Europe is made up of virtually all of Belarus and Ukraine, Russia west of the Urals, and smaller parts of Finland, the Baltic countries, Romania, and Bulgaria. Hence, if geographic and histori­cal criteria arc combined, eastern Europe can be said to coincide in the main with the homelands of the East Slavs - Russians, Belarusans, and Ukrainians - and it is in this context that the term will be used here.

ruled from Moscow and, later, St Petersburg since the early seventeenth century. Not surprisingly, both the Romanov dynasty and the Russian imperial state it rep­resented encouraged the publication of works presenting a historical scheme that justified their existence. Among these works were the first two histories of Russia, by the eighteenth-century authors S.O. Mankeev (1715, published 1770) and Vasilii Μ. Tatishchev (1739, published in five volumes, 1768-1818). Both were elab­orate tracts justifying the existence of absolute rule under the Romanov dynasty.

The best example of the dynastic approach to Russian history was the monu­mental twelve-volume Istoriia gosudarstva rossiiskago (History of the Russian State, 1818-29), by Nikolai M. Karamzin. Karamzin brought his historical coverage from earliest times to 1613 - that is, to the founding of the Romanov dynasty. He por­trayed the Muscovite tsardom from the fourteenth to the late sixteenth century as coincident with the era of Russia’s greatest well-being, especially because it was a time when autocratic rule was supposedly at its height. ‘Delivered by the princes of Moscow from the disaster of internecine wars as well as from the foreign yoke... and satisfied with the uses of authority, the people did not argue over rights.... In the end, all Russians began to look upon the tsar as a terrestrial god.’¹ The direct implication was that Russia’s nineteenth-century tsars should follow the autocratic example of their Muscovite predecessors.

An indispensable part of glorifying any state or monarchy is proving its proper genealogical lineage and descent.

By the nineteenth century, secular historians had begun to explain Russia’s manifest destiny in eastern Europe not with genealogical or religious criteria, but rather in terms of political and sociodemographic patterns.

Although Karamzin believed that the inhabitants of what he called Great, White, and Little Russia constituted a single Russian people, by the early nine­teenth century, linguistic and ethnographic research, together with the publica­tion of contemporary descriptions and travel accounts, was forcing many scholars to realize that there were, indeed, considerable differences among the various components of the so-called one Russian people, in particular between the Great Russians and the Little Russians, or Ukrainians. The confirmation of such differ­ences not only would undermine the idea of a single Russian people, but also might threaten the link between medieval Kiev and Moscow and thus render pre­carious the whole framework upon which the Russian imperial conception of history was built. Hence, a suitable explanation for this potentially dangerous dis­crepancy had to be found.

The explanation was provided in the writings of Mikhail D. Pogodin, an influ­ential nineteenth-century historian and publicist for the Russian version of Pan­Slavism. In 1856, Pogodin put forth his depopulation theory, according to which the ancestors of the Muscovites had supposedly lived in the central (Dnieper- Ukrainian) lands of Kievan Rus' from the tenth through the twelfth century, but had fled to the north after the Tatar invasion of the mid-thirteenth century. Later, in the thirteenth and, especially, fourteenth centuries, peasants from Polish- and Lithuanian-controlled areas in the west came into barren Ukraine. This new immigrant population represented the ancestors of the present-day Ukrainians. Thus, to Karamzin’s theory of the displacement of political centers was added Pogodin’s theory of shift in population.

This conception of the history of the East Slavs was adopted by perhaps the most influential of all Russian historians, Sergei M. Solov'ev, in his twenty-nine volume Istoriia Rossii s drevnieishikh vremen' (History of Russia from Earliest Times, 1851-79) and by Solov'ev’s student Vasilii Kliuchevskii in his even more widely read five-volume Kurs russkoi istorii (Course of Russian History, 1904-21). Accord­ing to Solov'ev, ‘At the end of the twelfth century [Kiev]... revealed its incapacity to develop any solid foundations for a single state. Following a definite path from the beginning, all the best elements of the land poured out of the southwest toward the northeast. Settlement moved in the same direction and with it the course of history.’⁴ Solov'ev’s deterministic view was complemented by Kliu- chevskii’s stress on supposed psychological change:

As soon as the population of northern Rus' felt that Moscow was capable of becoming the political center around which could unite its forces to struggle against the foreign enemy, that the Moscow prince could be a national leader in this struggle, a drastic change took place in the minds of people and in their relations....

The Russian conception of eastern Europe’s history, as presented most ele­gantly in the works of Solov'ev and Kliuchevskii, continues to dominate most his­tories of Russia. It was the conception put forward by Russian emigre historians, the most influential of whom were George Vernadsky and Michael Florinsky, and it has been repeated in most textbooks of Russian history published in western Europe and North America during the twentieth century. Consequently, in these works the history of Ukraine, if considered at all, is treated as the history of one of Russia’s provinces. Moreover, since the Kievan period is treated as an integral part of Russian history, Ukrainian history per se is considered to have begun in the fourteenth century at best, or in the seventeenth century. For some Russian writ­ers, the very concept of Ukrainian history is illogical, since it is considered simply a political idea born in the nineteenth century - an idea, moreover, which was used by foreign powers like Germany and Austria to undermine the unity of the Russian state.

Finally, there is the view that the very idea of Russia without Little Russia, or Ukraine, is inconceivable. The dean of twentieth-century Russian specialists of Kievan Rus', Dmitrii Likhachev, best summed up this attitude: ‘Over the course of the centuries following their division into two entities, Russia and Ukraine have formed not only a political but also a culturally dualistic unity. Russian culture is meaningless without Ukrainian, as Ukrainian is without Russian.’⁶

The Polish historical viewpoint

Somewhat related to the classic Russian conception of eastern European history, although clearly having other goals, is the traditional approach of Polish writers to the history of Ukraine. During the nineteenth century, Poland did not exist as an independent state. In such circumstances, Polish political commentatorss and writers frequently looked to the historical past in an attempt to explain why they had lost their statehood and perhaps to discover what should or should not be done to regain independence in the future. In their search through Poland’s past, most frequently it was the seventeenth century and the problem of the Cos­sacks in what was then Polish-ruled Ukraine that was considered the crucial turn­ing point and beginning of the decline of Poland.

The Polish perception of Ukrainian history was greatly influenced in the decades before World War I by Aleksander Jablonowski in his seven volumes of historical studies (Pisma, 1910-13) and his Historya Rusi Potudniowej do upadku Rze- czypospolitej Polskiej (History of Southern Rus' until the Fall of the Polish Common­wealth, 1912). Despite his relative sympathy for Ukrainian national strivings in the late nineteenth century, Jablonowski concluded that historically the Ukrainian lands had never constituted a distinct entity nor the population of Ukraine a dis­tinct people. Rather, in the sixteenth century, when Poland annexed Ukraine, Poles discovered an uncivilized frontier, into which they brought culture and state formations. While they recognized there had been a high level of culture during the period of Kievan Rus', they did not consider it specifically Ukrainian. More­over, because Polish and Kievan princely families intermarried, and because Poland controlled parts of the Rus' federation (especially its western border­lands) and even Kiev itself during certain periods, there arose the view, especially after Poland’s incorporation of most of the Ukrainian lands in 1569, that the Poles had a legal and historical right to the Kievan inheritance.

Polish writers also implicitly accepted Pogodin’s theory of the depopulation of Ukraine (southern Rus') after the mid-thirteenth-century Mongol invasion. Into this supposedly barren wilderness of the Ukrainian steppe (Polish: Dzikie Pole ‘Wild Fields’) came settlers from the Polish- and Lithuanian-controlled lands of Galicia and Volhynia. Even if most of these people were East Slavs, they were under the organizational leadership of the Polish state and manorial nobility. Moreover, the cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity of the populations that came under Polish rule was tolerated in what Polish writers were fond of referring to as the democracy of the republic of nobles and commonwealth headed by kings of the Jagiellonian dynasty.

The era of Jagiellonian rule, which lasted from 1385 to 1572, was considered to epitomize the ideal Polish system of government, supposedly characterized by democratic institutions and, in general, by religious and national tolerance. Assuming the existence of such an ideal state, Polish writers quite naturally stressed that the country’s inhabitants, whatever their religious or cultural back­ground, eagerly strove to identify themselves as free citizens of the Polish com­monwealth. Within such a constellation, Ukraine, together with neighboring Belarus and Lithuania, was viewed simply as part of the eastern kresy, or border­lands, which had been fortunate enough to be included within that bastion of western and Catholic civilization, Poland.

To be sure, there were times when these apparently peaceful and productive ‘borderlands of western civilization’ (to quote the popular twentieth-century Polish-American historian Oscar Halecki) were struck by disturbances. Taking their cue from several monographs on the Cossacks and their most famous leader, Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi, by the early twentieth-century historian Fran­ciszek Rawita-Gawronski, Polish authors generally have presented these disturb­ances as little more than barbaric outbreaks caused by destructive elements among the uncivilized Ukrainian masses. Sometimes the outbreaks would result in major upheavals, as during the Khmel'nyts'kyi revolution of the mid­seventeenth century or the haidamak uprisings of the eighteenth century. After they were put down and foreign (Turkish, Tatar, or Muscovite) intervention was repelled, the Ukrainian frontier was rightfully restored to Poland as part of its cultural and political patrimony. This pattern lasted until the late eighteenth cen­tury, when Poland’s Ukrainian lands were forcibly annexed by Russia and Austria, who joined with Prussia eventually to remove all of Poland from the map of Europe.

In essence, Ukrainian lands, especially those west of the Dnieper River (the Right Bank, Volhynia, Galicia), were considered an integral part of Poland. Hence, when the nineteenth-century efforts to restore a Polish state finally came to fruition in 1918, it was expected that its boundaries would ‘quite naturally’ encompass Ukrainian and other eastern borderland territories in a reincarnation of the Jagiellonian state that would stretch from the Baltic to the Black Sea. As it turned out, such territorial designs proved impossible to achieve when Europe’s boundaries were being redrawn after World War I. A quarter century later, how­ever, most Poles did expect that the Ukrainian-inhabited lands (eastern Galicia and western Volhynia) ruled by Poland during the interwar years would be returned to the reconstituted country at the close of World War II. Some Polish circles, especially among political exiles in the West, even revived the idea of a Poland from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

Whereas the peripheral nature of Ukrainian developments was generally accepted in traditional Polish historical and in popular perceptions before World War II, after that time Polish historians, initially under the impact of Soviet politi­cal influence in east-central Europe and the dominance of the Marxist approach to scholarship, considerably reassessed their views. The Cossack period continued to be of primary interest, but in the writings of postwar historians like Leszek Podhorodecki, Wladyslaw Serczyk, and Zbigniew Wojcik, Ukraine is no longer treated simply as an appendage to Poland, but rather as a country with a distinct historical process from earliest times to the present. Nevertheless, old attitudes die hard, and even today it is not uncommon to find in Polish public opinion the conviction that whatever was positive in the Ukrainian past came not from indige­nous forces but solely from the country’s association with the ostensibly civilizing influence of Poland.

The Ukrainian historical viewpoint

The beginnings of a specifically Ukrainian perception of eastern Europe’s histori­cal development can be said to coincide with the appearance of the first general histories of Ukraine in the eighteenth century. Despite their titles, which referred to the works as general histories of Little Russia, they were in fact accounts of the Zaporozhian Cossacks during the sixteenth and, especially, seventennth centu­ries. The Zaporozhians and Ukraine were also the subject of major works by French (Jean-Benoit Scherer, 1788), German (Carl Hammersdorfer, 1789), and Austrian (Johann Christian von Engel, 1796) authors.

The first half of the nineteenth century saw the appearance of the first multi­volume histories of Ukraine, by Dmitrii Bantysh-Kamenskii (1822) and Mykola Markevych (1842-43), both of whom stressed the role of the Zaporozhian Cos­sacks in the Ukrainian historical process. The most influential work of the period, however, was the Istoriia Rusov (History of the Rus' People, 1846), of uncertain authorship, which first appeared in an unpublished form in the late 1820s. The popularity and influence of this work were perhaps due to the fact that it was more a political tract than a history. The Istoriia Rusov was one of the first works to treat Ukraine not as a province of Russia or Poland, but rather as an independent country going back to Kievan times. Accordingly, Ukraine attained its greatest heights during the Cossack era, and it began to decline only in the eighteenth century after coming increasingly under Muscovite, later Russian, rule. The ability of the Istoriia Rusov to provide a clear sense of historical continu­ity for Ukraine was to have an enormous impact on historians as well as on the poets, folklorists, and language enthusiasts active in the slowly emerging Ukrain­ian national revival.

The first half of the nineteenth century was also a time when the Romantic movement reached Ukraine. Both professional and, in particular, amateur histo­rians were receptive to Romanticism’s emphasis on the distinctive genius of indi­vidual peoples as an alternative to the previous and often exclusive emphasis on dynasties and state structures as the driving force of the historical process. Adopt­ing such populist-Romantic attitudes, a new generation of scholars led by Mykhailo Maksymovych, Mykola Kostomarov, and, at least initially, Panteleimon Kulish saw the Cossacks as the quintessential expression of the supposedly demo­cratic and egalitarian ideals of the Ukrainian people. The new tone was set as early as the 1830s in Kostomarov’s political program, published under the title Knyhy bytiia ukrains'koho narodu (Books of Genesis of the Ukrainian People), which presented a personified Ukraine that ‘loved neither the tsar nor the [Polish] lord and established a Cossack Host... in which Cossacks were all equal amongst themselves.’ Moreover, ‘day after day the Cossack Host grew and multi­plied and soon people in Ukraine would all have become Cossacks, that is, all free and equal.’⁷ This idyllic scenario did not work out, according to Kostomarov, because of the intervention of outside forces - Polish landlords, Muscovite tsars, Catholic popes, and Jesuits.

The view that the people were the driving force in history also led populist writ­ers to try to discover the peculiar genius of Ukrainians, and by so doing arrive at both their uniqueness and their difference from Russians and Poles. Again, Kos­tomarov best summed up this approach in an article ‘Dve russkie narodnosti’ (‘Two Russian Nationalities,’ 1861), which subsequently came to be regarded as the gospel of Ukrainian nationalism.

Besides striving to depict the uniqueness of Ukrainians, an effort which under­mined the conceptual unity of the East Slavs, Ukrainian scholars began chipping away at another aspect of the Russian historical conception, the ostensible link between medieval Kievan Rus' and Muscovy. In response to Pogodin’s argument that the population of the Kiev region moved north after the thirteenth-century Tatar invasion, studies begun by Maksymovych (1857) and continued later by Volodymyr Antonovych (1882) and Mikhail Vladimirskii-Budanov (1890 and 1893) seemed to prove convincingly that central Ukraine was not depopulated in the fourteenth century, and that a society continued to function there until the Cossacks created new social and governmental structures in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But despite such seeming flaws in the traditional Russian