Bumping Up Against Ukraine as a Historian of Russia Lewis H. Siegelbaum (bio) By "bumping up against" Ukraine I mean—and this has only occurred to me in the relative tranquility of retirement—that much of the research I have done, not by conscious design, was primarily situated in Ukraine. This realization has led me to ponder what it has been about Ukraine, and perhaps about the nature of the profession to which I dedicated my adult life that made it so difficult for me to recognize my connection to that country. Why did I identify myself neither as a historian of Ukraine, nor the Ukrainian SSR, nor those parts of Europe—Eastern, Southeastern, East Central, etc.—that include Ukraine? Why did I identify as a historian of Russia? There are two reasons I can think of. When I got into this profession back in the 1970s, it was commonplace, at least in the United States, to refer to the Soviet Union as Russia, as if the other 14 Union republics did not exist. Nobody to my satisfaction has ever explained this gross reductionism. My hunch is that it was partly a legacy of American nonrecognition of the USSR that lasted until 1933. For decades thereafter and especially during the Cold War, the notion prevailed that "Russia"—or to take the synecdoche further, "Moscow," or "the Kremlin"—had "captured" other nations and that the political division of the country into 15 Union republics was a mere administrative convenience. To take an example I chose at random, on 5 April 1981 an article appeared in The New York Times by Drew Middleton, its international military affairs correspondent, about the civil unrest in Poland associated with the rise and suppression of the free trade union movement, Solidarność. The headline accompanying Middleton's article read, "Russians in Poland: Signs of Alertness," and its first line read, "The methodical assembly of munitions, equipment and food in Poland by the Soviet Army has created a military structure for any Russian action there" (emphases mine). So, I stand guilty of using "Russian" in this way, not because I was a Cold Warrior, but out of capitulation to the dominant discourse. Secondly, the only language I mastered for research purposes was Russian. As the lingua franca of the Soviet Union, Russian made sense; the vast majority of documents one would be likely to see in Soviet archives were in that language. But still, having acquired Russian, how hard would it have been to pick up another East Slavic language, say, Ukrainian? [End Page 137] But there is yet a third, less self-accusatory, reason. In 1995, Slavic Review published an article by Mark von Hagen provocatively titled "Does Ukraine Have a History?" If, von Hagen suggested, we consider "the intellectual organization of professional history writing," then at least at the time he was writing the answer has to be negative. Like other East and Central European states whose formation occurred after the rise of modern historiography in the 19th century, Ukraine had "existed primarily as 'the borderlands' over which [Germany and Russia] competed in occasional geopolitical struggles. The multi-ethnic chaos of the region, itself one of the direct consequences of imperial policies … typically was offered as a justification for further imperial hegemony." This hegemony extended throughout most of the Soviet period and was reflected in Western historiography. The only exceptions were "a stratum of 'professional ethnics'" in the Soviet Union and what diasporic Ukrainians were able to publish on the margins of Western historiography.1 This situation rapidly changed in the late 1980s with the upsurge of national movements in various Union republics, each stimulating demand for its own historiography. Writing in the mid-90s, von Hagen asked, "what sorts of history stand reasonably good chances of emerging triumphant in the near future?" and envisioned "a not inconsiderable danger of the pendulum … swinging in the opposite direction, by which I mean an overemphasis on nationalism and ethnicity to compensate for previous underemphasis." This possibility, he warned, would involve "the enshrinement of a new integral nationalist dogma … that charts the prehistory of the independent Ukrainian state as the teleological triumph of an essentialist, primordial Ukrainian nation."2...
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Dec 23, 2024
Luiza Ossowska + 3
Open Access