(Re)discovering Ukrainianness: Hutsul folk culture and Ukrainian identity in Soviet film, 1939–1941

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the Soviet encounter with the Hutsul highlanders of the Eastern Carpathian mountains following the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland in 1939. It demonstrates that the period from September 1939 to June 1941 saw a wave of interest in Hutsul traditional practices across the Soviet cultural sphere that influenced expressions of Ukrainian identity in the USSR. Hutsul folk customs, clothing and handicrafts are displayed in detail in the two most prominent documentaries propagating the Soviet takeover of the Ukrainian west, Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s The Liberation and Iuliia Solntseva’s Bukovyna is a Ukrainian Land (both 1940). Through close analysis of the Carpathian sequences of these films and an examination of the attention given to the highlanders elsewhere in Soviet media, the article reveals how Soviet cultural practitioners view the Hutsuls through an ethnographic gaze that emphasises both their exoticism and their fundamental Ukrainianness. Drawing off a variety of precedents (both Soviet and non-Soviet), the films and other sources depicting Hutsul life contribute to a vision of Ukrainian identity defined by pre-modern culture and an absence of modernity, simultaneously furthering Ukrainian patriotism within the USSR and perpetuating imperialist perceptions of a civilisational gap between Ukraine and the Soviet centre.