Independence is certainly the main result of the past millennium for Ukraine, but why did History need it?
For us Ukrainians, everything is perfectly clear: independence is the way to self-assertion, an opportunity to go down in History. Hegel wrote in his Philosophy of History that the main goal in the life of every people is to exist as a state and thus to preserve itself. A people not organized in a state is simply a people denied its own history.
This is a very important thesis. It has been studied at length. Yet it is rather subjective to discern the dynamic of History. If the issue is only self-preservation, one finds enough of it even in those 30,000 Iroquois that locked themselves up in a reservation, but they fell out of historical circulation.
One should take a bird’s eye view of one’s national history, rather than see it at the height of a frog-leap, Oswald Spengler said at the beginning of this century. Only this perspective allows one to see that every nation has its destiny (or karma) in a superior social formation where every ethnic group is merely a component. Modern historians regard them as civilizations; in a broader mass consciousness, they are known as Worlds.
Three venues of human culture emerged at the dawn of History: China, India, and the Near East. It was as though Providence tested three models of human organization. The latter proved more dynamic. Several millennia of evolution have carried three Worlds — or three civilizations — to this day: Western, based on Catholicism and Protestantism; Slavic [Eastern] Orthodox, stretching from the small Serbian island in the Balkans, over one-sixth, the least accessible part of the globe, and Moslem, intruding even into the age-old territories of the Hindu world.
At the turn of the third millennium AD, Ukraine found itself somewhere in between these worlds. Was this a choice made by the people or by History? And was it only for the sake of banal self- preservation?
Vasyl Stus wrote in his prison camp notebook that Ukraine is the easternmost point of the West and referred to the adoption of the Eastern Christian — or Byzantine — rite by Prince Saint Volodymyr as our greatest tragedy. The great poet was European by spirit and visualized Ukraine in the European cultural space. Yet it had been up to Prince Volodymyr to choose between the Worlds.
At the turn of the second millennium, the ruler of Kyiv Rus’ preferred the Byzantine model of religious-secular organization. Toward the end of the millennium, it had become essentially distinct from the Western-Roman model. In the West, religious life was independent of all things mundane and knew no boundaries dividing European society in the secular plane. In the East, they had succeeded in reviving a New — or Second — Rome with all its might along with its diversified and highly effective bureaucratic machine. Yet they paid a very dear price: cultural life was now raised to the state level. In other words, it was a totalitarian process successfully accomplished.
In the West, the individual became the key element of society. In the East, society was dominated by communities, with the individual left practically without rights — and without a sense of responsibility for his actions. Here, the individual was spared freedom described by Nikolai Berdiaev as man’s heaviest burden.
In transferring the Byzantine social ideal to Slavic terrain, Kyiv Rus’, became a turning point in averting the Slavs from Western civilization. Slavonic translations of The Bible and Slavonic liturgy proved a very effective iron curtain. Unlike the Roman Catholic clergy, their Slavic counterparts knew no classical Latin or Greek, so they were denied first-hand knowledge.
Originally undivided, the Eastern Orthodox realm of Kyiv Rus’ split in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries under heavy pressure from the Roman Catholic world. It was then the land of today’s Ukraine marked the boundary-line between two Worlds: Eastern Orthodox, centered in Moscow (the latter inherited the idea of setting up a universal state, a Third Rome, after the fall of Constantinople in 1453) and Roman Catholic which, with the aid of Lithuanian forces, incorporated Rus’ territories reaching beyond the Dnipro.
On the crest of Westernization, the Ukrainian spiritual elite in 1596 made an attempt to unite the Churches, which at the time meant turning back to the Western World. The Zaporizhzhian Cossacks rose in arms to defend their forefathers’ creed — not those living in cities, being the prototype of the third estate, but the lower-strata Cossacks living on a clearly defined communal basis, who had no idea whatever of Western social values.
The Cossack Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century marked the beginning of transformation of the Baltic-Black Sea geopolitical space. Ukraine provided a crucial impact on this process. Moscow had ambitious far-reaching plans. It is anyone’s guess whether they would ever be carried out without the Ukrainian Cossacks who, under Hetman Sahaidachny, were suddenly passionately protective of Orthodoxy and later, led by Ukraine’s greatest military leader, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, toppled the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth and helped unite the entire Eastern Orthodox people under the Muscovite tsar. The strained idea of the Third Rome had become a reality. The Cossacks took away from Poland something Moscow needed so badly to become a Great Empire: Kyiv with its thousand- year history, ancient grandeur, and the figures of Volodymyr the Great, baptizer of Rus’, and Yaroslav the Wise, enlightener of Rus’.
In the twentieth century, the supremacy of the state over spirituality, a prevalent feature of the Orthodox World, caused a purely communitarian — or Communist — mentality to set in. British historian Arnold Toynbee wrote in his article “Russia’s Byzantine Heritage” that Communism is a variant of Byzantine Orthodoxy.
Western Ukraine remained in the Western orbit. For over 150 years the Ukrainian ethnos, after briefly perceiving themselves as a nation under Bohdan Khmelnytsky, immediately found themselves divided and actually formed in two principally distinct social systems. The more than 80% Ukrainians that joined the Muscovite Tsardom unequivocally perceived themselves as part of the Unified Orthodox World, albeit as a province. The rest, figuratively speaking, were an easternmost outpost of the West. This resulted in an almost polarized mentality.
In the late twentieth century, the third Rome fell apart, with independent Ukraine among the fragments. Yes, a fragment rather than a healthy social system with a single collective mentality resulting from a long struggle for national independence. Here perhaps lies one of the key reasons of Ukraine having stopped at the crossroads. Two worlds different in principal, coexist in Ukraine and, accordingly, two concepts of the evolution of Ukrainian society. No one is sure which will reign supreme: the Westernizing one or communitarian-communal tradition.
This is a tremendous problem. At the household level, the choice between the West and East is rather banal: working hard, wasting no time, never arriving late for work, making good products, never drinking during working hours — or expecting the state to bring everything on the proverbial silver platter. Without a self-regulating economy, the state can give citizens something only at the expense of the natural wealth. This is still possible in Russia, but not in Ukraine or Belarus, not in principle.
What happened after the fall of the USSR and several years of search for our own evolutionary models is best described by the Latin tamen usque recurret, meaning that all things repeat themselves. The Baltic states returned to their native Western model and those in Central Asia to the Moslem World.
The Russian Federation has also made its final choice. Even those making a big thing of their Rightist stand preferred to get votes by recognizing the legitimacy of the Chechnya War (which is now very popular in Russia). Also, the elections to the Russian Duma showed that the people do not want to assume responsibility for their future: let the Communists or Caudillo Putin do it! Indeed, tamen usque recurret.
In Ukraine, the 1999 presidential campaign showed that, but for Western Ukraine, we would have followed the Belarusian option. Suffice it to analyze the second round’s turnout in the regions. No reform appeals would have helped, for such issues are resolved at the collective subconscious level — i.e., mentality.
History, therefore, has allocated Ukraine a role somewhat different than just another Slavic fragment of the USSR. What is it?
The end of the twentieth century, with its revolutionary breakthroughs in communications and information technologies, has laid the basis for mankind’s transfer to a new level of collectivization, this time worldwide. The celebrated French scientist Teilhard de Chardin, to whom we owe the notion of noosphere, considered the collectivization of consciousness — or collective intellect — the spearhead of evolution, in other words the goal and peak of the development of mankind.
The human race, in its history numbering several millennia, has repeatedly attempted to universalize its living space, using the traditional method of military conquest. Over the past two and a half millennia this method has been tried by Alexander the Great, Roman emperors, Moslem emirs, Genghiz Khan, Tamerlane, Napoleon, Hitler, et. al. Today, this method appears too risky, as another war could end all life on earth.
Due to the creation of a single information space, alternative ways of collectivization become out increasingly attractive. Perhaps the formation of a common, universally human mentality will be the determining feature of the third millennium. Slowly but surely, humanity is moving toward an open society. Its first tentative, far from perfect model is found in the Western World. The other Worlds profess a closed society. Toynbee’s and his current follower Huntington’s forecasts of a collision, nay confrontation between Western and all the other civilizations appear to be coming true. Is this good or bad? One should not make hasty decisions, saying that such confrontation will destroy priceless attainments in some of the Worlds. This is just a new Challenge of History; mankind must move to a new level of its Evolution.
Without doubt, the first confrontation or mutual penetration of civilizations is taking place in Europe. The first to answer this Challenge must be the Slavic Orthodox World, because it rests on the same Christian basis as Western civilization; Russia, after brief hesitation, is back on the road leading to a closed society. Ukraine has an opportunity to prevent the Eastern Slavs from restoring the dead-end East European social model. The responsibly for answering this Challenge of History rests with the Ukrainian people.
The point is not that we must borrow Western experience, abide by it, and so on. The problem should be stated differently. Each of the Worlds must realize that at the start of the third millennium people’s world views are changing; the horizons of society have broadened incredibly. We must learn to live in this new worldwide society. Our history is ceasing to be local, becoming an inalienable component of universal human history.
Ukraine ended the twentieth century and the second millennium at this crucial stage. Once again, as three and a half centuries ago, Ukraine is assigned a key role in reforming civilized geopolitical spaces.
There is a new saying that has become popular. The way you meet the new millennium is the way you will spend it. Without doubt, this saying best addresses the current situation in Ukraine.
