SHAPING 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-