Table Of ContentSHAPING IDENTITY
IN EASTERN EUROPE
AND RUSSIA
Soviet-Russian and Polish Accounts
of Ukrainian History, 1914-1991
Stephen Velychenko
SHAPING IDENTITY
IN EASTERN EUROPE
AND RUSSIA
Also by Stephen Velychenko
National History as Cultural Process
SHAPING IDENTITY
IN EASTERN EUROPE
AND RUSSIA
Soviet-Russian and Polish Accounts
of Ukrainian History, 1914-1991
Stephen Velychenko
Palgrave Macmillan
© Stephen Velychenko 1993
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1993 978-0-312-08552-0
All rights reserved. For infonnation, write:
Scholarly & Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, NY 10010
First published in the United States of America 1993
ISBN 978-1-349-60653-5 ISBN 978-1-137-05825-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-05825-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Velychenko, Stephen.
Shaping identity in Eastern Europe and Russia: Soviet-Russian and Polish
accounts of Ukrainian history, 1914-1991/ Stephen Velychenko.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Ukraine-Historiography. 2. Historiography-Poland.
3. Historiography-Soviet Union. 4. Ukraine-History-Errors.
inventions, etc. 5. Ukraine-History-20th century. 6. Ukraine
-History-20th century-Bibliography. I. Title.
DKS08,46.V45 1992
947' .71084--<1c20 92-17764
CIP
CONTENTS
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
PART I: BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT
1. Nations, States, and History. . . . . 11
2. The Institutions and the Ideology . . 27
3. Delineating the Past . . . . . . . . . 47
PART II: POLISH HISTORIOGRAPHY
4. Neoromanticism and Positivism (1914-1944) 69
5. The Imposed Continuity (1944-1982) .... 87
6. Monographs and Articles on Ukrainian Subjects . .101
PART III: SOVIET-RUSSIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY
7. Degrees of Inclusion, Exclusion, and Affinity . .135
8. The History of the Ukrainian SSR (1948-1982) .155
9. Deductivist Discourse and Research .179
Conclusion ............ . .199
Appendix: Perestroika and Interpretation .. .213
Abbreviations to Notes .223
Notes .224
Index. .259
I saw that Solomon had thought of practically everything, and that there was
no escaping his favour. I also saw that I might end, as some writers did, with
my head cut off and my body nailed to the city wall, but that, on the other
hand, I might wax fat and prosperous if I guarded my tongue and used my
stylus wisely. With some luck and the aid of our Lord Yahveh, I might even
insert in the King David Report a word here and a line there by which later
generations would perceive what really came to pass in these years ....
-Ethan ben Boshaiah
Stefan Beym, The King David Report
But it should be understood that for no nation does the obligation and
increasingly burdensome dialogue with the outside world mean an expropri
ation or obliteration of its own history. There may be some intermingling but
there is no fusion.
-Fern and Braudel
-
Introduction
Although in the late 1980s people in the USSR and Poland were shocked
when they learned just how far the Party had systematically distorted the past
for political and ideological reasons, few today would be surprised to read
that "Soviet-type" regimes had sponsored circumscribed and corrupted
versions of national history. Accordingly, this book does not review the
authorized Polish and Soviet-Russian elite accounts of Ukrainian history
merely to illustrate their inadequacy and to condemn the mendacity of the
regime that sponsored them. Rather, Shaping Identity in Eastern Europe and
Russia surveys the origins and evolution of official versions of Ukraine's
past to illustrate how historical writing and interpretative change occurred
in Soviet-type systems. It traces the peregrinations of ideas from Party
resolutions to survey histories and studies how the administrative bureau
cracy kept scholars within predefined interpretive guidelines. The book also
shows that, despite the nominally monolithic ideological structure, historians
in these countries did express different opinions, and that after Stalin's death
those who placed facts above theory were able to influence, if not change,
official interpretations. Although Marxist-Leninist regimes had disinte
grated in Russia, Poland, and Ukraine, by 1991, an examination of the
methods of thought control, conditions of scholarship, language, and
deductivist logic characteristic of Soviet-type systems has relevanct" for the
1990s. Not all in the old "Soviet Bloc" have been able to rid themselves of
Soviet-Marxist ideas and habits of thought, while hardship and confusion
has produced nostalgia among some for the security and certainty of the old
system. In Asia, Marxist-Leninist regimes still control almost one-quarter of
the earth's population.
A study of historical writing in Soviet-type regimes also focuses attention
on differences in historiography and methodology between liberal-pluralist
2 Shaping Identity in Eastern Europe and Russia
and dictatorial societies. In the USSR after 1934 and in communist Poland,
one way historians perpetuated the official image of the past was by omitting
details that confuted generalizations derived from a priori axioms and
principles. But as Herbert Butterfield and Lucien Febvre pointed out, histo
rians in general tend to ignore details that belie broader generalizations. The
former observed:
We cling to a certain organization of historical knowledge which amounts to a
whig interpretation of history, and all our deference to research brings us only
to admit that this needs qualification in detail. But exceptions in detail do not
prevent us from mapping out the large story on the same pattern all the time;
these exceptions are lost indeed in that combined process of organization and
abridgement by which we reach our general survey of general history.!
Febvre later remarked:
We like to talk about the machines which we create and which enslave us ....
Any intellectual category we may forge in the workshops of the mind is able to
impose itself with the same force and the same tyranny-and holds even more
stubbornly to its existence than the machines made in our factories. History is a
strongbox that is too well guarded, too firmly locked and bolted?
If a priori categories influence all historians and veer their writing "over into
whig history," then what was damnable about historiography in Soviet-type
systems? Additionally, it should be remembered that for most of recorded history
man has been a subject rather than a citizen and, as such, was content to accept
interpretations of the past given by authority. An "historiography of citizens,"
concerned with accuracy, is the product of participatory democracy, as suggested
by Moses Finley, and existed for only a short time-in fifth-century Greece and,
in its positivist-critical variety, for a relatively short time in modem Europe and
North America. In this context Soviet-type historiography appears less an
aberration than a norm, and it may be argued that the removal of Party control
over scholarship was a necessary but insufficient condition for the emergence of
dispassionate academic study and pluralist "citizen historiography" in what was
the Soviet bloc. 3 Without democracy, to follow Finley's line of argument, people
will not want nor need to know what really happened in the past. In a society
predisposed to accept myth and seeking to express an earlier repressed nation
alism, accordingly, critical historiography based on accuracy and open debate
could prove a slenderreed. New authorities seeking legitimacy and support might
be tempted to sponsor historians to replace old pseudo-Marxist myths with new
monolithic nationalist myths-and few would oppose.
Introduction 3
The communist regimes in the USSR and Poland assigned historians the
task of creating narrative continuity out of past diversity. In the USSR, this
involved imposing a single pattern of socio-economic development, ideas of
popular "solidarity," and "friendship among nations" onto the past of more
than a dozen major nationalities. Both regimes required that historians
downplay if not eliminate reference to past animosities and plurality in their
writings, and use Marxist rhetoric, concepts, and categories. Nonetheless,
national categories and concepts persisted, and the continuity of official
narratives was tenuous. Postwar and interwar Polish historians, like post-
1934 Soviet historians who wrote survey histories, produced, respectively,
Polonocentric and Russocentric interpretations incorporating selected events
and issues from the pasts of minorities that once had been under Warsaw's
or Moscow/St. Petersburg's authority. In postwar Poland, a country stripped
of almost all its Ukrainian territories and dominated by Moscow, the official
account of the country's past represented a radical break in Polish
historiography insofar as it did not treat Ukraine as an integral part of "Polish
history." The Stalinist "history of the USSR," by contrast, resembled the
pre-1917 tsarist understanding of "Russian history."
Shaping Identity in Eastern Europe and Russia summarizes the official
elite Polish and Soviet-Russian images of Ukraine's past as presented in
survey histories of Poland, the USSR, and the Ukrainian SSR. The narrative
does not classify interpretations according to criteria of truth and validity but
does identify monographs and articles written according to the rules of
academic method as understood in the West, and tries to distinguish the
reprehensible or tendentious from the merely defective.4 As this book studies
how images of a national history emerged and changed, it classifies the
examined material chronologically, by country and by form. Only by review
ing and summarizing separately monographs on selected issues, political
circumstances, official directives on historiography, and in the case of the
USSR, typologies derived from Marxist axioms, can the impact of each be
determined and the pattern of interpretative change reconstructed.
The book assumes some knowledge of Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian
history on the part of the reader, and begins with a review of the past
historiography of the subject and the institutional and ideological context of
scholarship. Because the Soviet-Russian and, to a lesser degree, the postwar
Polish regimes claimed legitimacy on the basis of Marxism and obliged
historians to use an officially defined Marxist method, Part 1 reviews the
evolution of dialectical historical materialism. It highlights differences be
tween Polish and Soviet variants of Marxism-Leninism and the limitations
this method placed on historical investigation and interpretation. Both coun-
