Russia, Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union by Roman Szporluk (review)

Abstract

664 Рецензии/Reviews Emilian KAVALSKI Roman Szporluk, Russia, Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2000). xlix+438 pp. ISBN: 0-8179-9542-0. The seeds of the Soviet Union’s decline were planted… at the moment of [its] greatest triumph – in 1945. This was not so clear during the post-war decade, but matters changed in the post-Stalin years. The Soviet Union’s new geopolitical environment began to exercise subversive long-term effect on the country’s domestic ethnopolitcs. (P. xxiv) In the context of current inquiries on the prospective developments in the post-Soviet space, it is a potentially riveting experience to take stock of the processes underscoring their direction. This is what Roman Szporluk has attempted in his book Russia, Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union. The epigraph above seems to encapsulate the gist of his argument. The volume represents a collection of essays published between 1972 and 1997; thereby, it makes a reflection of the last two decades of the USSR and subsequently its breakup, with a particular emphasis on the Russian Federation and Ukraine. Szporluk’s volume, therefore, focuses on the nationalities issues and relationships between Russia and Ukraine during both the Soviet and postSoviet periods. The author himself admits that this book needs to be read as “a record of one scholar’s efforts over a period of years to understand the development of the Soviet Union which, as time went by, began to appear as its decline and then fall” (P. xx). The reader, unfortunately, is more often than not left with mixed feelings. On the one hand, there is the pleasure of engaging ideas and evaluating the significance of corollaries made three decades earlier. On the other hand, it is not apparent how this is relevant for current discourse. Perhaps the prescience and insights of the volu-me would have been made more pertinent as well as poignant if the individual essays were reconsidered in light of developments going on at the time of publication. Instead, they are presented in the form in which they were written (some of them a good thirty years ago). Thereby, the trajectories of the decline of the USSR and the construction of post-Soviet independent states would have been stressed in a more relevant context for current analysis. In effect, this is one of the main shortcomings of the volume: it is not apparent what it is about: is it about Russia, Ukraine, the breakup of the USSR, or all of these, or something else? 665 Ab Imperio, 4/2004 The book includes sixteen of Szporluk’s essays arranged chronologically . However, they seem to follow not only temporal, but also a thematic logic. Chapters 1 and 2 outline the problematic nexus between Soviet modernity and the concept of ethnicity; chapters 3, 4, and 5 center on the issues stirred by the Ukrainian idiosyncrasies of this relationship, whereas chapters 6, 7, and 8 emphasise the Russian perspectives; chapters 9, 10, and 11 focus on a number of Soviet points of view, and the remaining chapters discuss different aspects of post-Soviet existence. In spite of this organizing logic and the merit of the individual chapters, the volume as a whole fails to make a convincing impression. Szporluk’s interpretation of the relationship between modernity and ethnicity in the USSR elicits the impact of Stalin for maintaining and perpetuating the Soviet model. This model is interpreted as an attempt to set a pattern for relations in the larger socialist community at the time. However, especially after World War II, it became very difficult to sustain the viability and centrality of the Soviet Union in such symbolic framework of interactions . As Szporluk argues, this is not simply the result of a departure from 1920s internationalism, but also the outcome of a deeper ideational and material crisis within the USSR in the context of the dominant position of Russian ethnicity and language. These patterns are discussed within the context of a Ukrainian identity challenged both by Poland and Russia. The former has treated Ukraine as “Little Poland” and the latter as “Little Russia”. The noteworthy implications deriving from this problematique are that again...