Historical causes of Ukraine’s disunity

Vouchsafe to all of us who dwell on earth
That we may live in harmony together:
Send us the gracious boon of brotherhood!

It is justly believed that Ukraine is divided by politicos for whom parliament’s feeding trough and the pursuit of their uncontrollable ambitions are far more important than truth and social accord. However, the problem of our discord is rooted deeper. Otherwise our citizens would not cast their ballots, fired with enthusiasm that would be best applied elsewhere, for the same political forces and figures, regardless of their moral and ethical tumbles, as though trying to outdo each other in refuting Stanislaw Lem’s maxim that a moral somersault is more dangerous than a physical somersault.

We are witness to the birth and maturation of an immoral rule that reads, “We agree that he is a scoundrel, yet he is one of our people.” For over a decade new courses in Ukrainian history have been taught in schools, colleges, and universities, yet one is stunned to see polarized attitudes to the most significant historical events on the part of members of the highest political leadership. Regional priorities are also quite noticeable in their activities. In fact, our political leaders spend their leisure on the opposite sides of Ukraine.

THE DRAMA OF DOUBLE-FACED JANUS

Ukraine is not the only country afflicted with a disease: the lack of united will and concerted action in decisive historical moments. In fact, Ukrainians do not have the acutest form of this malady, yet it has become chronic here. Hence its treatment will take quite some time. To correctly diagnose it and prescribe the right course of treatment, it is necessary to ascertain the correlation of the objective and subjective factors that cause this disunity. Only then will this discord transform, dialectically, from a weak point into one of the sources of progressive inspiration; it may even become a foundation of unity.

The historian Ivan Krypiakevych compared Ukraine with double-faced Janus, with one face looking westward and the other, eastward. Ukraine’s location at the crossroads of varying influences is an objective reality that exists independently of the Ukrainian community at large.

Suppose we tag the objective reasons behind Ukraine’s disunity as “Janus-facedness.” Another Polish-Ukrainian politician, Viacheslav Lypynsky, painfully reflected on the reasons behind the fiasco of the Ukrainian state-building campaign in the late 1920s. He wrote referring to the everlasting symbolism of the Holy Bible, “Unbridled boorishness has once again caused the Ukrainian State to fall to pieces” because “Ukraine lacked the force of Japheth.” In other words, the Ham-Japheth complex points to the subjective reasons behind Ukraine’s disunity or, in other words, something that depends on Ukrainians themselves, rather than any external or internal forces of other peoples.

Yurii Barabash says Taras Shevchenko’s poem The Great Mound presents Ukrainian history in the format of a mystery play, so these factors could be referred to as a twin-Ivans complex: one punishes those torturing his people, while the other helps them. In his novel with the telling title Blyzniuky (Twins), Barabash imbues this metaphor with moral and cultural significance, as though admonishing that without him the national aspects will be meaningless.

We will commence our analysis with Ukrainian ethnic genesis. Ethnographers believe that hardly any territories had been completely repopulated, despite the historical cataclysms (including large-scale migrations). People originating from the Trypillia culture are considered to be the cultural-historical ancestors rather than progenitors of Ukrainians. Scholars further believe that the Ukrainian people as such originated some time in the 7th or 8th century A.D. and is, no doubt, the autochthonous populace of most territories of modern Ukraine.

Regardless of the period to which we may attribute the beginning of this ethnos, one thing remains indisputable: Ukrainians came to be as a result of extremely variegated and differing influences and most of them were geographical in nature. After all, historically, Ukraine was a frontier territory. According to some scholars, this territory is a limited space of changeable values where different cultures confront otherness for the first time and then accept, adjust, or “domesticate” it.

Yaroslav Dashkevych believes that the territory of Ukraine could be referred to the so-called Big Frontier as it drew the cultural boundary line between groups of civilizations and marked several anthropogenic borders: the biological one, between the steppe and the forest (with the intermediate forest steppe boundary line); the hydrographic one, between the Black and the Baltic Sea basins; the socioeconomic one, between the nomads and settled farmers; the ethnic and religious one, between the Christian Slavs and the Turkic heathens (later Muslims); the cultural one, between the civilizations of the West, or Europe in the broad sense of the word, and of the East, or Asia in the similarly broad the sense of the word.

In conjunction with this, the historian Natalia Yakovenko emphasizes that “Old Ukrainian culture was saturated with this striking mix of Western (European) and Eastern (Asian) civilizations, so much … sometimes it is difficult, if at all possible, to tell between what is autochthonous and what is a borrowing from abroad.”

Communities that emerged in such conditions were inherently indeterminate in terms of orientation and worldview. Not coincidentally, Byzantine Emperor Maurice wrote in his Strategikon about the tribes of Sklavinians and Antes (Mykhailo Hrushevsky regarded the latter as the forefathers of Ukrainians) that they lived free and would never become slaves or succumb to anyone else’s rule, least of all in their land; there were many of them and they were tough. However, since their opinions varied, they remained divided on an issue; even when they would reach agreement, some of them would promptly break it, because they all held different views and none would give in.

Not surprisingly, ethnologists say that the Ukrainian mentality is labile, which means that it is susceptible to external influences. Also, owing to its geographical position, Ukraine has been the target of an almost continuous process of successful imperial encroachments on its territory, including in the 20th century, accompanied by propaganda and brainwashing. This process has involved official historiography that produced pseudoscholarly theories and ideas: “one history in common,” “single Old Rus’ people,” Mikhail Pogodin’s theory, “minorities from the Polish territory,” “Romanians who forgot their mother tongue,” “the single Soviet people,” and so on.

Slavic topics have been among the favorites, not without the help of denationalized Ukrainians. Meanwhile, a number of scholars believe that the Slavs may have never existed as a single ethnic or cultural community, that, instead, various tribes and ethnic communities may have been Slavicized, and that the only reality is the Slavic language group as part of the Indo-European language family. In this group the Ukrainian language stands closest in terms of lexicon to Belarusian and Polish (84 percent and 81 percent common vocabulary, respectively), rather than Russian, followed by Slovak and Czech.

This, however, is no obstacle in the way of instilling in mass consciousness the notion of Slavianstvo [Slavic community at large, or the Slavic world] as a special entity, while reducing it to only three Eastern Slavic nations.

There have been other sham scholarly means of suppressing Ukrainians and obliterating their identity. “Reunification” has been a compulsory term used with regard to relationships between the Russian and the Ukrainian people, first in official tsarist Russia and then in Soviet historiography, after the pompous festivities commemorating the 300th anniversary of the Treaty of Pereiaslav, when Khmelnytsky agreed to the Romanov dynasty’s protectorate. In fact, this was the main component of the Pereiaslav myth.

Mykhailo Braichevsky noted that the replacement of “annexation” with “reunification” was sheer nonsense from the philological point of view, considering that only parts of a single whole can “reunite.” Braichevsky refers to dictionaries, which say that reunification (vozziednannia) means bringing back together parts of a single whole that has fallen apart; returning to the original unity. He sums up: “It is impossible to reunite Ukraine with Russia if one recognizes the existence of the Ukrainian people and the Russian people as separate ethnic components of the Eastern Slavic community…”

In other words, people’s thinking was forcefully deformed. In accordance with the laws of dialectics, the actual result of this philological twist was the existence — within this enforced unity and in the course of the natural struggle of two opposing qualities — Ukrainians as a certain single entity, on the one hand, and an initially imaginary symbiosis of two peoples. In this symbiosis one quality was completely or partly rejected and a new quality was emerging — a new kind of community identified by Soviet propaganda as the “Soviet people,” although it was actually dominated by Russians.

The use of the term “reunification” with regard to separate peoples led to the destruction of Ukrainian unity also from the psychological point of view, because under the circumstances enforced by the Kremlin, people sensed subconsciously that there should be only one ethnic entity, not two. Naturally, with time the propaganda-enforced concept supplanted the other one in people’s consciousness. In fact, by using the term “reunification,” Soviet propaganda cleverly filled the space that was empty after the past tsarist Russia’s tenet of a “single Russian people” had been lost. The problem of unity within Ukraine was thus relegated to the background, while internal discord was on the rise.

UKRAINIAN SOUL

It appears hard to find historical analogs for the chauvinistic language provocations with regard to Ukrainians and Belarusians. Can the words Romanians or Germans compete with Slavs? As it was, refuting the existence of Ukrainians as a separate self-sufficient ethnos, substantiating it with fake scholarly evidence, propagandists paved the way for accusations of treachery, thus setting up an almost impenetrable psychological barrier to natural self-identification, without which any kind of unity is unthinkable.

Ukrainians found themselves exposed to something like a split personality complex. For example, Nikolai Gogol (Mykola Hohol) wrote to O. Smirnova that he wasn’t sure what kind of soul he had, Ukrainian or Russian. In our information-based world this “split personality” phenomenon takes a different shape. There is Russia’s TV serial entitled Cadets that appeared on several Ukrainian channels. In one of the episodes there is a scene specially included in the script, when some advanced cadet tells the literature instructor that there is a factual mistake in Gogol’s Taras Bulba: the main character could not have possibly lost his pipe because tobacco was brought to Russia by Peter I later.

As another example, take a Ukrainian newspaper’s ad of Russian action movie Spy Games II that repeats this stupidly translated line, “our illegal agents.” Also, we are reminded every year that the Tatianin den (Tatiana’s Day), a Russian holiday linked to the opening of Moscow University, is also the holiday of Ukrainian students — and this considering that Ukrainians have their Kyiv Mohyla Academy, which is much older, and their own university traditions.

This is again Russia’s “reunification” policy, and it is being aided by the Ukrainian side. For some reason, we thoughtlessly use “Ukrainization” — a notion imposed from outside — in trying to return the Ukrainians in eastern and southern Ukraine to the culture of our forefathers. Why not use “de-Russification”? This term actually reflects the essence of this process. I don’t think that all those who oppose Ukrainian revival would be willing to use an expression like “forceful de-Russification”.

It is also necessary to bear in mind that Ukrainians found themselves within one polity only after the Second World War. The objective factors of disunity were still very much at play, even when the Ukrainian people entered the nation-state-building phase. Take the Cossack revolution in the 17th century. No mater how often we refer to it as a national liberation struggle, we must remember that the consciousness of Ukrainians and other peoples was made up of the estate and religious, rather than national, components, because the “Spring of Nations” came to Europe later.

The current categorization of those civic-political associations (often essentially virtual), known as Cossack communities, with their polarized trends, is another way to convey those remote realities, when there were the Zaporozhian Cossacks, registered Cossacks, city Cossacks, along with the vypyschyky (those struck out from the register), vyborni (elected) Cossacks, and pidpomichnyky Cossacks, who were denied all the registered Cossacks’ privileges but had to carry out all their duties. The relationships between them were anything but idyllic. In other words, what we have now is a historical, not civilizational, conformity of sorts.

After all, it is hardly possible to believe that the Cossacks possessed full-fledged national consciousness since the Khmelnytsky period, considering that later, these Cossacks contributed “willy-nilly” (to quote Ivan Dziuba) to the [Russian] empire’s victory over the so-called Knights of the Dnipro and freedom-loving people who inhabited the mountains?

The dual political power within the Cossack State (Zaporozhian Host) stemmed primarily from the fact that Ukraine started being divided — first in the course of negotiations and then de facto — between the Ottoman Empire, Rzeczpospolita, and Muscovy, with the latter quickly transforming into an empire. For certain periods this dual power was neutralized, owing to the efforts of Hetman Petro Doroshenko and Ivan Samiilovych, but these were followed by the loss of rights and a part of territory. By the start of the national-liberation-war epoch in Europe, most of the Ukrainian lands had been annexed by the Russian empire. The latter was constantly at war to seize or assert possession of foreign territories. You will agree that this was not the best time to enhance a given people’s national unity potential.

There is an increasing number of researchers, in and outside Ukraine, who agree that Ukrainians failed to set up a sovereign state of their own after the First World War, unlike a number of other peoples in Europe, and that the reason was not so much disunity as most unfavorable external conditions. Ukrainian history reminds one of Stanislaw Lem’s other catch-phrase, “Some national tragedies do not have any intermissions.” But aren’t Ukrainians to blame, as well? There are friends and foes, and there is this Ukrainian saying: “It’s hard to make fire and water agree.”

NATIONAL ALTERNATIVES: REALITIES AND ILLUSIONS

Indeed, it is not the unique geographical position, the special way in which the Ukrainian ethnos has been shaped, the harsh periods in its history, and not even the powerful external influences that can clearly explain the reasons behind Ukraine’s fatal disunity. Yaroslav Hrytsak notes that the Russian Bolsheviks also found themselves in an unfavorable international situation, yet they managed to reign supreme. Therefore, one ought to pay more attention to the subjective component of this rift in Ukraine, because it has everything to do with the alternative nature of the historical process.

I will first refer to Ukraine’s early postmodernist history. Apart from the inadequately formulated relations between Ukraine and Muscovy as its protector since Khmelnytsky’s time, modern historians single out two more aspects. Serhii Plokhii points to one of them. After the Cossacks raised the banner of Orthodoxy in the course of their struggle for self-determination, “from the point of view of modern nations in Eastern Europe, the Cossack impact on the relationships between Kyiv and Moscow Orthodoxy added to the barrier between the Orthodox and Uniate [parts of] Ukraine, and, conversely, facilitated contacts between Orthodox Ukraine and Muscovy.” And when “the Ukrainian national identity started taking shape, the religious factor that set the Ukrainians apart from the Poles, Turks, and Tatars, could no longer be used to assert the distinction between Ukraine and Russia.”

Furthermore, “the Hetman State, a politically and socially distinct polity, was weakened by the lack of its own church.” The alternative to religious discord must have been hiding in its [Hetman State’s] efforts to set up this church.

Natalia Yakovenko notes the other aspect. After a relative balance of social standings and explicit functionality achieved in the early years of the Hetman State, the Cossack elite developed a taste for “noble birth” and private ownership. Shevchenko makes this point even more explicit in his poem Chihirin, O Chihirin!: “My true friend! / While you slept / You’ve lost your steppes and forests broad / And the whole land inept!”

In 1918–20 political boorishness was manifested in that (a) a number of political forces ignored the need to properly substantiate the historical and legal reasons behind the Ukrainian state-building process, and to start working together in order to develop the most appropriate kind of nation-state; (b) there were endless squabbles between the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries and Socialist Democrats, resulting in the formation of party-interethnic rather than national-party blocs; (c) political power often changed hands due to coups; (d) otamanshchyna was spreading [the sprouting of various petty leaders who acted independently of each other — Ed.].

It is easy to notice that, throughout Ukraine’s history, including our days, the subjective cause of disunity has primarily manifested itself in the desire to place one’s class (clannish, oligarchic, family and other) interests above those of the nation. Therefore, this discord has moral-ethical, rather than political or worldview, nature. Here all things subjective keep drifting apart from any such objective circumstances that might substantiate them. In other words, the interrelationship between the objective and subjective causes of our current disunity shows that the subjective ones are topping the list.

This disunity is increasingly often caused by egocentric politicos, rather than by mistakes made by our incumbent politicians. In conditions of globalization and the absence of serious external threats these politicos manipulate mass consciousness, form political alliances that are named after them, stage disuniting, unwarranted, sham regional forums, etc. with the aid of mass media.

To quote from the Russian political scientist Stanislav Belkovsky, they “call their own any ideologies and word combinations, emerging before their people’s bleary eyes as Liberals, Nationalists, or Socialists.” Come to think of it, there is nothing but a desire to keep one’s electorate under control — and important government posts, in the long run — behind the persisting anti-NATO propaganda campaign, as well as the one aimed at making the Russian language Ukraine’s second official language.

Strange as it may seem, in our age of technological wonders and unlimited possibilities of meeting consumer requirements, there is a steady trend where the extent of egocentrism and the degree of moral degradation are in direct proportion to that “sum total,” which is at stake. This sum and the stake are increasingly rarely determined by forces outside Ukraine or by external circumstances.

Thus, disunity in Ukraine today is of an even greater social importance than previously: the kind of boorishness inherent in our political leadership (so very accurately tagged by Ivan Dziuba as pornocracy) often reveals the absence of Ukrainian self-identity, whereas “the force of Japheth” keeps being worthily and unobtrusively demonstrated (e.g., Orange revolution) by the common folk, not by the political elite. This makes one ponder the relative nature of Ukraine’s disunity and its artificial orientation (in the political realm, anyway) and hope that this problem will be resolved with changes that will take place in our so-called elites and that this incredibly large social gap between the poor and the rich, which these elites have created in independent Ukraine within an incredibly short period, will be bridged.

I am reminded of Shevchenko’s foreword to an unpublished edition of his Kobzar: “Woe to us! This filthy aristocracy that acts contrary to the will of God has planted madness in our minds.” I think that a remedy for this madness — so that “the cursed nightmare of this misfortune vanishes, never to return,” to quote from Ivan Franko — should be not only palliatives (like the effective hosting of Euro 2012) or awarding state decorations to politicians who are playing their own separatist games (Lem said, “The third side of a medal? It’s the chest to which it is pinned.”). This remedy is found in the following strategic things.

UKRAINE’S DESTINATION: CONSTANT QUEST

Above all, it is necessary to clearly determine and promulgate the thesis that Double-Faced Janus, rather than the Ham–Japheth complex, tops the list of objective causes of disunity in Ukraine. As for the latter complex, it may have manifested itself in Ukraine more frequently than elsewhere, and done so at the most inconvenient times in this country. Yet here, too, one can find objective substantiation — for example, by explaining that our nouveaux riches could indulge their insatiable thirst for wealth using unlawful means and fearing no legal punishment, only when Ukraine has its ambiguous geopolitical status and the two-faced approach is enhanced.

An emphasis on the objective causes of this disunity would protect us against our inferiority complex — a complex we somehow constantly fail to overcome. However, external influences — those beyond the borders of Ukraine — as a component of the objective disuniting factor, should not be construed as conspiracies against Ukraine, on the part of Masons, Zionists, Russia’s counterintelligence, etc. Such pink-elephant stories serve to aggravate the complexes that Ukrainians have.

Double-Faced Janus is a metaphor rooted in history. It is convincing enough. After all, by analogy with the laws of physics, one can formulate this rule: “The external pressure force on a mass is directly proportional to the extent of inner erosion in this mass.” This rule has been repeatedly confirmed in Ukrainian history.

Therefore, it’s best to focus on Ukraine’s cultural and geopolitical destination that stems from its geographical position, historical evolution, as well as its unique experience of absorbing varying influences. Regrettably, while our political leaders unanimously spoke about Ukraine’s European choice, with a great many Ukrainians trying to get out of Ukraine, heading West or East to make good money, Pope John Paul II reminded us of our mission, as soon as he set foot on Ukrainian soil, saying that the word Ukraine is a call for the grandeur of your Fatherland, and that its history is proof of your special mission, serving as “the frontier and gate between East and West.” For centuries on end this country has been the privileged crossroads for varying cultures, a meeting place for the cultural wealth of the East and West.

It should be understood that there was no alternative to this mission, and that it was incompatible with the notion of disunity. Ukraine could either adequately act along the lines of its implementation, using every opportunity, even the smallest one, or find itself in the position of a buffer state if international relations aggravated (which is, actually, the case today, if only partially) and face the negative consequences.

There is, however, another aspect to this subject. A lot has been said about the Ukrainian national idea as the condition for forming a modern Ukrainian nation. People are best united by working for the common good. However, if this work turns out to be in only one dimension — in other words aimed at bringing closer together only one people — in our age of information and globalization it will end up being an egotistical, insignificant, and even utopian project.

Today even religion appears to be acquiring new meaning: we now have to save the world rather than save ourselves from the world. At present, a nation can be effectively united using the new Christian principle of a nation serving the world community. The main question is, “How can this people benefit humankind?” The formation of modern nations is a good answer to this question. Pope John Paul II actually formulated the Ukrainian idea, but the Ukrainians don’t seem to have heard and understood it.

Considering the predominant contribution to disunity in Ukraine made by an objective factor — the fact that Ukraine is a geographical crossroads — we must determine the model of our nation and national identity. Will it be the Western civic model that, according to Anthony Smith, includes such common components as historical territory, ideology, civic culture, and political and legal equality? Or will it be the Eastern (“ethnic”) one with its genealogy and what seems to be common origin, mobilization of the people, mother tongue, native rites, and tradition?

Perhaps it is worthwhile to aim at a convergence model that combines the ethnic and cultural-civilizational components. In Ukraine, however, this concept has not been discussed since Lypynsky’s time. We are using ambiguous formulations regarding the above-mentioned need to form a modern political nation. There are some scattered publications, but a state-building approach is lacking. Instead, we have three nearly equally influential decision-making centers: the Cabinet of Ministers, the Presidential Secretariat (of all institutions), and the National Security and Defense Council.

Such Ukrainian intellectual giants as Ivan Franko and Oleksandr Dovzhenko referred to disunity as the worst trait in Ukrainian national character. Franko noted the lack of aptitude for political life and an abundance of turncoats of various kinds. Dovzhenko pointed to the lack of respect for each other, the absence of solidarity, mutual support, and the devil-may-care attitude to one’s own destiny and that of national culture.

The best course of treatment for this chronic disease is fair and healthy national self-assessment and self-criticism. Academician Ivan Dziuba calls this treatment self-purification, self-rejuvenation, and self-mobilization. He says that, “National self-criticism has always been and will remain the other side of national progress, also, and most importantly, its only solid foundation, the sole guarantee of moral health and the authenticity of this progress. This comes from love and responsibility, while cynicism and arrogance produce something different.”

Ivan Franko wrote, “I do not love it overmuch” (Sidohlavy). Disunity is essentially a manifestation of pride, the greatest sin in the Christian religion, which is in direct contrast to love. Hryhorii Skovoroda wrote that love “unites, builds, and creates everything, while enmity destroys.” There is a Ukrainian saying, “Even woes dance where accord reigns.” It holds true only if this accord is based on true love for your native land, your nenighbor, truth, and justice.

Vasyl Yaremenko holds a Ph.D. in history and is an Associate Professor at Khmelnytsky National University.