Writing History: People or Territory?
about a hundred years ago, a new political entity appeared on the map of Europe. For most of the twentieth century, it was neither independent nor sovereign, but it existed. That entity was the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which had its roots in the revolutions and wars of 1917-1921 in what had once been the southern European provinces of the Russian Empire and, to some degree as well, in territories a little to the west, in the Habsburgs' Austrian Empire, which had disappeared from the map in 1918.
The Ukrainian ssr was a constituent or “union” republic of the USSR that had arisen as a compromise measure between the shortlived Ukrainian People's Republic, which had embodied the independentist national strivings of the Ukrainian people in 1917, and Moscow's enduring centralist tendencies, which increased in years following. In 1991, however, that compromise republic, the Ukrainian SSR, declared its independence from the Soviet Union and became an independent state called “Ukraine.” These developments came as a surprise to many both in the West and in the former USSR itself, but had antecedents stretching far back into the history of eastern Europe and worthy of explanation. Historians in the “new” country reverted to the theories of predecessors largely ignored or repressed throughout most of that stormy century (when Communist dictatorships ruled about half of the world), but now, quite suddenly, very important.1In the decades around 1900, in a number of ways, those pre-Revolution Ukrainian scholars had begun to define a new field of “Ukrainian history,” or rather “the history of Ukraine,” as they put it. Two principal streams emerged - “national” and “territorial.” Mykhailo Hrushevsky (1866-1934) was writing the history of a people or a nation. He began with pre-history and the ancient Scythia of Herodotus and carried through the Sarmatians, Goths, Huns, Antes, early Slavs, and others to Kyivan “Rus'” (the Slavonic name); he continued it across the Middle Ages, when first Lithuania, and then Poland, ruled most of what is today Ukraine; and he then passed into modern times, when first Muscovy, and then the Russian and Austrian Empires, were ascendant.
However, the great historian stressed the role, throughout all of this, of “the popular masses” in history, concentrating on those whom he considered ancestors of the modern Ukrainian people, and he emphasized their continuity through the many social and political changes on their lands through the centuries. For the nineteenth century, he focused on the national movement and largely ignored national and religious minorities. In general, his approach, which elevated the heretofore-ignored majority of “southern Russia” and stressed its continuity through many centuries and many political disruptions, is called the “national” or “ethnic” approach to Ukrainian history.2A contemporary of his saw things quite differently - a Polish nobleman from Volhynia province in “right-bank Ukraine” (west of the Dnieper River), whose nascent local patriotism embraced “Ukraine” in another, territorial context. WacIaw Lipinski/Viacheslav Lypynsky (Polish/Ukrainian spellings) (1882-1931) argued that all of the country's inhabitants, not just ethnic Ukrainians, and all social classes, and not just the “masses,” had played a role, that the upper or ruling classes had contributed much, and that the focus should be on a definite territory rather than simply on one nationality or social group.3
During the Cold War, when almost all of Ukrainian ethnic territory was controlled by the Soviet Union and made up one of its “Union Republics,” these two views were underplayed or banned in favour of the Soviet class-based view of history, which stressed Russian primacy and connections throughout. But Ukrainian emigre circles discussed them, and a new generation of historians debated them. The national approach was defended in particular by leading members of the Ukrainian Historical Association, centred in the United States and Canada, but with many European members. Its long-time president, Lubomyr Wynar (1932-2017), argued that the Soviets had repressed most aspects of Ukrainian national history and that Hrushevskys ideas and work had to be kept alive by Ukrainian historians living in “the Free World.” Moreover, he clearly distinguished between “nationalistic” history, as represented by the Ukrainian “integral” nationalists of the 1930s and 1940s (who did not much like Hrushevskys alleged pacifism, respect for democracy, socialism, and revolutionary bent), and “national” history, which preserved the general direction of that scholar's work, but played down his revolutionary credentials, and also added his ostensible “state-building” experience during the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917-21.4
Wynar's view was shared by most emigre Ukrainian historians of the late Cold War era, but not all.
In particular, Omeljan Pritsak (1919-2006) of Harvard University resurrected Lypynsky's ideas and preached a nonethnic, territorial approach that appealed to a handful of influential Ukrainian scholars in the West. Pritsak was initially not a Ukrainian historian per se, but an “Orientalist,” who specialized in the Turkic peoples of central Asia and the Steppe (grassland plains), or Eurasian Steppe, which stretches from the Carpathian Mountains east to Manchuria, with Ukraine in the Pontic Steppe, and he knew something about Ottoman Turkish history. But he thought that those peoples and regions had helped shape Ukrainian history and belonged in the national narrative, which explained much of his affinity for non-ethnic, “territorial” Ukrainian history, although he also accepted Lypynsky's emphasis on the role of the national elites across the ages. For most of his career, Pritsak was very critical of Hrushevsky, despite helping to create and then holding (1975-89) the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Chair in Ukrainian History at Harvard University, even though that disappointed many younger, American-trained scholars who hoped to teach high-level Ukrainian history.5Western debates about Ukrainian history took place mostly in little-known Ukrainian-language emigre journals, despite the appearance of two great, translated “narratives” or surveys, by Hrushevsky (published in 1940), and by Lypynsky's most notable follower, Dmytro Doroshenko (1939). But those pioneering surveys seemed very much out-of-date by the 1960s and 1970s, after all that had happened in the interim,6 and new narratives were required.
The first came out in 1988: Orest Subtelny's Ukraine: A History clearly took Hrushevsky's national or “ethnic” approach, even sharpening that focus by stressing “statelessness” through the centuries and hence “modernization” mostly by the foreign rulers. Subtelny (1941-2016) seemed to believe that this reality sidestepped Ukrainian culture, which remained very traditional.
(So Ukrainian national culture even today is sometimes disparaged by Russians and others as being largely “peasant based.”) His book had a pessimistic tone: he apparently remarked that it was a real miracle that Ukraine had survived. For the general public, Subtelny was one of the first historians to survey the country's misfortunes and disasters - an approach forbidden in the ussr. Translated into Ukrainian and Russian, his book had an enormous effect on both the public and young historians, then beginning their work in newly independent Ukraine.7In 1996 Paul Robert Magocsi's History of Ukraine, with many attractive maps, exposed the general public in the English-speaking world to the territorial approach. Magocsi (b. 1945) devoted substantial sections to Ukraine's national and religious minorities and, unlike Pritsak, carried their story beyond the early Turkic peoples of the Steppe and concentrated on Jews, Poles, Germans, and several other groups. Many of these minorities had considered themselves “Russian,” but Magocsi's work gave them clear recognition and thus a conceptual framework and an incentive to re-orient themselves to the new Ukrainian reality.
Moreover, unlike Subtelny's book, which read well and had a clear narrative, Magocsi had a more neutral, encyclopaedic tone, and a more positive spirit; Ukrainian history was not a complete disaster, but more “normal” than was previously thought, with its own share of victories and progress, as well as difficulties; and he seemed quite impatient with the theme of “victimization.” The very existence of the Ukrainian ssr seemed to him real progress - a quasi-national state that partially fulfilled the nineteenth-century national awakening and the nationalist activism of the early twentieth.8
Of course, many new ideas and debates have taken place since Subtel- ny and Magocsi's tomes appeared. For example, today, some historians, in particular Volodymyr Kravchenko, see the Ukrainian ssr not as a kind of quasi-national Ukrainian state but as a miniature ussr with its own national regions, its many enclaves with Pan- or “All-Union” status, its “Hero Cities” by Pan-Union designation, its Crimea (a “Pan-Union resort”), its Donbas (“the Union's Stokehold”), and so forth.
Sebastopol, Kyiv, and Odessa were all such “Hero Cities.” Of course, perceptive observers who knew the relevant languages could notice that Ukrainians were second in rank after Russians in the ussr, but Kravchenko detected echoes more of the old Russian Empire, with its triune nation of Great, Little, and “Belorussian” branches, than anything of a national Ukrainian character. Such an interpretation, which definitely raised national expectations with regard to history, clearly revealed how far Ukrainian national consciousness had advanced since Subtelny and Magocsi started writing their general histories.9And so, Ukrainian national consciousness, especially based on ethnic distinctiveness, was a variable thing. But so too is the very concept of a Ukrainian national territory, which has changed greatly over time and has gradually shifted westward. So in the nineteenth century, Ukraine was still very much a vague concept that stretched eastward well into Kursk and Voronezh provinces of old “Russia” and southward into the Kuban, where the descendants of the Zaporozhian Cossacks were then settled. Thus the Ukrainian national poet, Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861), was invited by his friend the Cossack commander Otaman Yakiv Kukharenko to visit the Kuban, “our Cossack Ukraine.” And major Ukrainian figures such as the historian Mykola Kostomarov and the painter Ivan Kramskoi were both born and raised in those intriguing but neglected provinces that today lie in Russia.10