The blood of unlearned lessons
Aphorisms about the benefit of knowing one’s past remain, alas, words on paper, over which bureaucrats write their maxims about history as a secondary science. Why should a programmer study the tragedy of Baturyn? He’d better rummage in Java or FORTRAN… What’s the use of knowing about the Ukrainian National Republic if you are a power plant engineer? Will Ukrainian martyrology be of any use for a technologist, dentist, or geologist? These are the questions the “helmsmen” of Ukrainian education ask themselves, steering their ship onto the reefs which you cannot see through the glasses of utilitarian outlook.
I am not going to repeat banalities about firing a revolver into the past and about a life that can teach even the half-witted. It is better to present practical arguments to our officials, for they pretend to be practitioners. Why should Ukrainian history be taught not only at colleges and universities, but also at all the educational institutions that train national management personnel of any level, including that of garage supervisors?
We do not know the laws of the metamorphoses that turn yesterday’s technicians into the people who allot money for education and science. Today a character like this is scraping through exams at a technological college, and tomorrow he will stand at the helm of this country. Suffice to recall “Professor” Yanukovych. Had he had at least elementary knowledge of the history of Ukraine, his response to the challenges of time would have surely not been so primitive.
If an originally warped foundation of historical knowledge was laid, it will be too late to rectify it, and self-education of superiors will cost a pretty penny to their subordinates. For example, there was an Odesa mayor who turned his fallacies in history and linguistics into a citywide advertising campaign. The remnants of the mayor’s policy are still hanging from local outdoor advert boards, reminding the populace that money was spent to the detriment of the country, the budget, and common sense. Of course, this occurred not only because of knowledge lacunas. But if history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was instilled in one’s brain so firmly that it is the only thing that links one with the past, it is difficult to turn him or her off the slippery path. The case of Putin convincingly proves that officials should be allowed to rule the country in the same way as people are allowed to drive a car – let them first pass a test on elementary humanitarian rules and the country’s setup and only then be free to “reign in glory.”
It is history that imparts universal knowledge of traditions, culture, and life experience. One should not look on it as just an object of study and mix it up with the “spiritual ties” which Moscow devises to glorify the dominating ethnos. It is not a science of dusty archives.
In a broad sense, history is a social contract on the common ideals and values of a nation. Under this contract, we agree to honor the common heroes and mourn over the common victims. In nine cases out of ten, the source of differences between people is perverted and scanty knowledge of our past.
Now that I am writing these lines, my Facebook news feed reflects a polemic of the following nature. A regional administration official wrote that he had wished to see a big monument to Bandera holding a “moskal” in hand. The man was immediately accused of stoking interethnic hostility. The accusation came from ignoramuses who do not know the very meaning and usage context of “moskal” in Ukrainian history. We used to call so not the Russians but soldiers of the empire, guards of a despotic regime. The Ukrainians can also be “moskals,” which Taras Shevchenko also was for some time contrary to his will. Let us recall what he wrote about his boyhood:
…That he won’t know where to go
In this vast and free world.
And he will go on to be hired,
And some day, to keep him
From crying and grieving,
And give him a place to stay in,
They will draft him to moskali.
There are so many semantic discrepancies in our society, where significant events, prominent names and terms of Ukrainian history have either been distorted beyond recognition, or deliberately struck off, or maligned. I knew a retired colonel who had lived all lifetime in Ukraine and considered “vuiko” [“uncle” in Western Ukraine. – Ed.] an abusive word. It is not just insufficient knowledge of phonemes – it is something more than this. The colonel – with the mindset of a lieutenant – lived out of touch with this country. There are lots of people of this kind who are isolated from reality in the shells of their delusions.
Whoever does not consider the Holodomor a national and personal tragedy is hard-hearted and has a dangerous moral defect, for readiness to kill comes from a dulled sympathy. And what prompts us to sympathize? At first, information and then the forms of its emotional implementation. Let us imagine a person who has erased, in some fantastical way, the 2014-15 events from his memory. Now he leaves for Moscow on business in the near future. What awaits him, as long as he is unaware of a radically changed reality? Of course, major troubles.
Our current troubles are also connected with the loss of memory about the past centuries’ events. In 2013 we did not remember the lessons of past defeats and did not know where the threat to Ukraine’s independence had been coming from in the 20th century. We are now repeating the unlearned lessons and paying for this with tears and blood.
“Who could know what mess they will do here?” laments a woman who has lost her house and family near Donetsk. Alas, there is an answer to this rhetorical cry of sorrow. It is the ones who remembered about Baturyn, the raids of General Prozorovsky, Kruty, NKVD atrocities in the countryside, and the Norilsk uprising. Knowledge increases sorrows but saves lives.
No, we should not drop the wide-scale use of history as a subject. It is too late to test, as the Canadians do, the knowledge of all those who acquire citizenship, for this process was a mere formality. But it is time to lay down new rules. It is also just the time to review the criteria of professional worth. We can and must standardize the historical science in a shape that suits the present day. Let school and university students study the past in a chronological sequence. In other institutions, such as the army, police, security service, and the administrative training system, there should be history courses in line with their professional profile. For our past is multifaceted and consist of not only the halos around the personalities of Ivan Mazepa, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Symon Petliura, and Stepan Bandera. There have also been wonderful discoveries, exploits, and achievements. Very few know that Ukrainian gas kept USSR residents warm for 40 years, that our oil prospecting technologies are still being applied in Russia, that Soviet aviation was born in our design bureaus, and that we played a no lesser role in overthrowing the communist system than all the dissidents of Russia. In a word, “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” If, of course, the word “philosophy” is applicable to the people who exclude cement solution from the list of state-building materials.
