Mark von Hagen: History is dividing Ukraine
[Mr. von Hagen is Boris Bakhmeteff professor of Russian and East European studies and chair of the history department at Columbia University.]
Fifteen years after Ukraine's surprise birth, the struggle continues over its place in the world. The Orange Revolution of 2004 didn't settle it. Nor did this spring's parliamentary elections. Last week, following four months of political paralysis, brought the surprise return, as prime minister, of pro-Russian politician Viktor Yanukovych, whose attempt to steal the 2004 presidential elections sparked the Orange uprising....
A major battleground is history. The "reintegrationists" think that Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusans are fated again to live in a single Slavic Christian Orthodox state. This view of the past has its origins in imperial Russia, and insists that the medieval state of Kievan Rus in the 10th through 13th centuries was the birthplace of Russian civilization and Moscow its rightful heir. During the last century, communist ideologues in Moscow and Kiev recast this argument as "the great friendship of peoples"; Russians were "elder brothers" to all the other non-Russian peoples, above all the Ukrainians and Belarusans.
Much as the the current-day Slavophiles lay claim to history for political purposes, so do those in Ukraine -- and the few Westernizers in Belarus -- who want to build democratic, sovereign nation-states and get close to modern Europe. Here the common past shared with Poland and Lithuania, now in the elite European clubs, is emphasized while the Russians are portrayed as invaders and illegitimate occupiers. For this project to succeed, the histories of Ukraine and Russia have to be disentangled in order to claim a separate existence for the Ukrainian nation even under Moscow's rule.
This "nationalization" of the past was well under way at the dawn of the 20th century. Myhailo Hrushevsky, the father of modern Ukrainian history, became the father of the modern Ukrainian state when he was elected head of the Central Rada, or parliament, in 1917. The Bolsheviks soon ended this brief experiment in self-rule. During an early wave of Stalin-era repressions, Hrushevsky was arrested and exiled to Moscow and died, in 1934, in mysterious circumstances. There was no place for such an advocate of Ukraine's independence or even autonomy. Stalin drove the "renationalization" project underground and into the Ukrainian diaspora. That's where it stayed until the second breakup of the Russian empire in 1991, the year an independent Ukrainian state resumed life with full force.
Today one of Kiev's central boulevards, on which sit the Ukrainian parliament and main government building, is named after Hrushevsky. A monument to him stands in front of the Pedagogical Museum that housed the 1917 Rada government and across the street from the Ukrainian National Academy of Science. Other figures from the Ukrainian past -- the Kievan Princes Volodymyr and Yaroslav, Cossack Hetmans Bohdan Khmelnytsky and Ivan Mazepa, the poet bard of the Ukrainian nation Taras Shevchenko and 20th-century hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky -- are similarly honored in a not-so-subtle effort to retell the story of Ukraine's past.
Many Ukrainians dealing with their messy history today are tempted to claim that the nation was always so -- characterized by primordial and unchanging traits. This idea, implied in Hrushevsky's work, originated with another 19th-century Ukrainian intellectual, Mykola Kostomarov. It tries to explain how "Ukraine" withstood world wars, occupations, terror, deportations, famine, nuclear contamination and other plagues and stayed purely Ukrainian....
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Fifteen years after Ukraine's surprise birth, the struggle continues over its place in the world. The Orange Revolution of 2004 didn't settle it. Nor did this spring's parliamentary elections. Last week, following four months of political paralysis, brought the surprise return, as prime minister, of pro-Russian politician Viktor Yanukovych, whose attempt to steal the 2004 presidential elections sparked the Orange uprising....
A major battleground is history. The "reintegrationists" think that Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusans are fated again to live in a single Slavic Christian Orthodox state. This view of the past has its origins in imperial Russia, and insists that the medieval state of Kievan Rus in the 10th through 13th centuries was the birthplace of Russian civilization and Moscow its rightful heir. During the last century, communist ideologues in Moscow and Kiev recast this argument as "the great friendship of peoples"; Russians were "elder brothers" to all the other non-Russian peoples, above all the Ukrainians and Belarusans.
Much as the the current-day Slavophiles lay claim to history for political purposes, so do those in Ukraine -- and the few Westernizers in Belarus -- who want to build democratic, sovereign nation-states and get close to modern Europe. Here the common past shared with Poland and Lithuania, now in the elite European clubs, is emphasized while the Russians are portrayed as invaders and illegitimate occupiers. For this project to succeed, the histories of Ukraine and Russia have to be disentangled in order to claim a separate existence for the Ukrainian nation even under Moscow's rule.
This "nationalization" of the past was well under way at the dawn of the 20th century. Myhailo Hrushevsky, the father of modern Ukrainian history, became the father of the modern Ukrainian state when he was elected head of the Central Rada, or parliament, in 1917. The Bolsheviks soon ended this brief experiment in self-rule. During an early wave of Stalin-era repressions, Hrushevsky was arrested and exiled to Moscow and died, in 1934, in mysterious circumstances. There was no place for such an advocate of Ukraine's independence or even autonomy. Stalin drove the "renationalization" project underground and into the Ukrainian diaspora. That's where it stayed until the second breakup of the Russian empire in 1991, the year an independent Ukrainian state resumed life with full force.
Today one of Kiev's central boulevards, on which sit the Ukrainian parliament and main government building, is named after Hrushevsky. A monument to him stands in front of the Pedagogical Museum that housed the 1917 Rada government and across the street from the Ukrainian National Academy of Science. Other figures from the Ukrainian past -- the Kievan Princes Volodymyr and Yaroslav, Cossack Hetmans Bohdan Khmelnytsky and Ivan Mazepa, the poet bard of the Ukrainian nation Taras Shevchenko and 20th-century hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky -- are similarly honored in a not-so-subtle effort to retell the story of Ukraine's past.
Many Ukrainians dealing with their messy history today are tempted to claim that the nation was always so -- characterized by primordial and unchanging traits. This idea, implied in Hrushevsky's work, originated with another 19th-century Ukrainian intellectual, Mykola Kostomarov. It tries to explain how "Ukraine" withstood world wars, occupations, terror, deportations, famine, nuclear contamination and other plagues and stayed purely Ukrainian....