"Ukraine is very much a country": Prof. James
Mace replies to Nina Khrushcheva
UKRAINE IS VERY MUCH A COUNTRY
Nina Khrushcheva Granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev
History and International Relations Teacher New School
University and Columbia University Daily in "Stalin and
Memory," The Daily Times, Lahore, Pakistan on March 3,
2003 writes:
"It will never be easy to produce a version of Russian
history that all Russians agree on; competing
conceptions of national identity militate against it. But
some other countries sloughing off the skin of
communism are only too ready to adopt a new history
- even one based on fancy and invention - to suit
current needs. Ukraine provides an example of this.
Does Ukraine have a history? Well, the place
certainly does, but is the place a country? Ukraine
means, literally, "on the edge." It is more a frontier
than a region, let alone a country. So it is well suited
to an invented history - and who better to supply it
than a Ukrainian Diaspora eager to boost the land of
their forefathers? It may be no accident that
independent Ukraine's first history textbook was
written in Toronto, not Kiev."
As an American historian of Ukraine who has lived in the
country I have spent virtually all my life studying, I can assure
the reader that Ukraine is very much a country, albeit one
that has spent a large part of that history under foreign rule.
Once upon a time Marx and especially Engels adhered to
the view then popular among Germans that peoples who
had spent a long time without a state were also without
histories.
Engels even went so far as to use this as justification for a
Verstorungskrieg (war of destruction) against the Czechs as
a way to remove them as "a knife in the back of the German
peoples." Well, Communists and Marxists of other
persuasions have long laid that one to rest, and the history of
the twentieth century is, among other things, one of the
national liberation of such peoples who had hitherto lacked
states.
Of course, all nations are, in the words of Benedict
Anderson, imagined communities and creating histories was
part of that process of forming nations. Sometimes states
did it even before thinking in terms of nations, as was the
case with Russia, where Tsar Peter the First (the first official
Soviet historian whose textbooks carried a laudatory letter
from Lenin, wrote of "Peter, whom fawning historians call the
Great") hired one Professor Mueller from Germany to do the
job.
Since the original Muscovite dynasty was descended from
one Riurik, most likely one Hroerich of Jutland (meaning he
was what was then called a Viking in the West, Varangian in
the East, and Dane in more recent times) took Kyiv which
was the main settlement of something called russkaia
zemlia, in the earliest chronicle accounts basically a triangle
enclosing Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Pereyaslav.
The name Rus 'with time covered all the lands that
recognized the supremacy of the Grand Prince of Kyiv,
including a hitherto no-man's-land of Finno-Ugric tribes that
became Slavicized, where one Andrei Bogoliubsky with his
Viking and Slavic followers built a palladium, returned to sack
Kyiv as did his son, one Yury Dolgoruky, and then
commissioned chronicles which gave events in Kyiv no
more attention than to those in other foreign countries.
This area became the Grand Duchy of Moscow and kernel
of what would grow into the Russian Empire, and in a couple
of hundred years one Muscovite prince known in English as
Ivan the Terrible began to claim the lands of the old core of
Kyivan Rus', by then under the Grand Duke of Lithuania, as
his patrimony because some of his ancestors had once
ruled there.
Prof. Mueller and his Russian successors Soloviov,
Tatichev, Pogodin, et. al.) followed this dynastic history
which evolved into a national one sometime in the nineteenth
century.
But then the ancestors of most Frenchmen also became
subjectively French only toward the end of the last century.
Nations in the sense we know them are actually much
younger than their histories, which were of necessity created
by reading later ideas and identities onto people and places
to which they were completely foreign. The same was true
of the Germans, Russians, Ukrainians, and most everyone
else.
Others, like Czechs and Ukrainians, found scholars who
attempted to trace not states but the ancestors (real or
imagined) of the peoples they sought to "awaken."
The greatest Ukrainian historian and later president of the
Ukrainian Central Rada (a national council that evolved into a
government in 1917-18), Mykhailo Hrushevsky, in the early
twentieth century even gave a lecture in the Russian Imperial
Academy of Sciences saying that for the Russians, whose
state evolved from Moscow and thereabouts, to adopt what
had happened in Ukraine as the start of their history was not
very logical because it stripped the Ukrainians and
Belarusians of their early histories while leading the
Russians to ignore how their state really got started by
transplanting and adapting Kyivan institutions to a very
different area. Russian historians Presniakov and Liubavsky
made up for this in 1919 and 1929 but very few Russians
today know about it.
Names and identities change, albeit slowly, as with the
Greeks whose ancestors a couple of centuries ago called
themselves Rum, or Roman, and France could also easily
have become at least two counties had the Albigensian
Crusade of the Middle Ages not crippled forevermore the
culture of a land later historians have called Occitania, with a
language in which the medieval troubadours wrote their
songs.
History is far more subjective than historians often like to
admit, and that is probably why every generation rewrites it
to suit its own needs. The Ukrainians are in the process of
doing this and have made some notable progress after a
Russocentric (not exactly the same as Russian) Soviet
regime killed off their intelligentsia, starved to death a major
segment of their rural majority, and banned the
understanding of history they had been evolving up to that
time.
Ukrainians are now in the process of sifting through the
wreckage left by the Stalinist "friendship of peoples" in an
attempt to put together a national identity that would make it
possible to take their place among the nations of Europe. I
may be biased, but I suspect that this is not a bad thing.
(NOTE: This article by Prof. James Mace can only be used
with full credits to Prof. James Mace and to
www.ArtUkraine.com Information Service)
Prof. James Mace, author of numerous scholarly works and one of
the first serious researchers of the 1933 Holodomor, was born
February 18, 1952, in Muskogee, Oklahoma. In 1973, he graduated
from Oklahoma State University and went on to earn an M.A. and
Ph.D. in history at the University of Michigan, in 1981defending his
dissertation, "Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation:
National Communism in Soviet Ukraine, 1919-33," later published in
book form (Harvard, 1983). Upon completing his graduate studies
Dr. Mace was invited to join the famine project at the Harvard
Ukrainian Research Institute where he collected material for Robert
Conquest's Harvest of Despair.
In 1986-90, James Mace served as executive director of the US
Ukraine Famine Commission, a hybrid body subject to Congress
and the president, supervising its daily work and drafting its findings
for approval by the full commission. After 1990, he held fellowships
at Columbia and Illinois Universities. In 1993, Prof. Mace moved to
Ukraine, working first as a supervisory research fellow at the
Ukrainian Academy of Sciences Institute of Ethnic and Political
Studies, then teaching politics at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy
National University and International Christian University. Since
1998, Prof. Mace has been consultant to the English digest, The
Day.
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