The tenth anniversary of Ukrainian independence marked on August 24 is no reason for complacency. Although we continue to refer to our state as young — by force of habit perhaps — the time might well have come to discard such condescending, exculpatory epithets. Instead, we should analyze the real, rather than imaginary, attainments and fiascoes in the course our state building. Time we all grew up and faced the reality, however repulsive the experience might turn out. This reality can be grasped only by taking a panoramic view from a historical vantage point. We know about the two desperate attempts in our history to resume the tradition of Ukrainian statehood (after the Halych-Volyn Principality disappeared from the historical arena): Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s revolution and the foundations of the Cossack state laid by him (1648-59) along with the Hetmanate and Central Rada in the twentieth century.
Hence the main truly fundamental question is why the first two Ukrainian national revolutions (as the above events are now referred to by most historians) failed to fill the framework of Ukrainian statehood with positive substance? Without answering this crucial question developing the modern Ukrainian political and economic system is unthinkable. However incomplete and by no means indisputable, it is intended as a humble contribution in the quest for truth.
Several general observations come first. The process of state construction and building a nation, as well as the interrelationships involved, have long attracted the attention of Ukraine’s leading historians. The early twentieth century saw a lively debate between Vyacheslav Lypynsky and Stepan Tomashivsky. The former claimed that any polity (and Ukraine in particular) could emerge only with the state-making nation being at a certain evolutionary level, never earlier. Tomashivsky insisted on the opposite. Almost a century later we must realize one thing. The processes of creating the Ukrainian nation and building a Ukrainian state are complementary, synchronous, and reciprocal to feedback laws.
There is, however, a third nonetheless important process (perhaps even the most important one). Democratization of society, invariably implying a non-totalitarian option of social justice. In other words, the independence of a given state is the independence of the individuals constituting it (a slightly paraphrased idea voiced by the British philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill who actually referred to the value of the state and the individual, but this wording does not seem to alter the concept). What kind of independence can one expect from an oligarchic society with antagonized strata and economic barriers (and repressive ones in the seventeenth century) placed in the way of the free development of the individual?
In fact, this was a major if not the main reason for the abortive Khmelnytsky and Central Rada revolutions. The elite on both occasions could not find the correct harmonious correlation between the notions of ethnic and social freedom and this failure turned out the fatal destructive factor. Mykhailo Hrushevsky at one time pointed out dozens of objective and subjective causes of the defeat of Khmelnytsky’s protostate (e.g., the people’s being mentally unprepared for independence, poor state concepts, Ukraine’s unfavorable geographical position, along with Warsaw and Moscow maneuvers, the excessive aloofness of the peasantry and townsfolk from the process of state construction, the Hetmanate’s confusing political system, and so on). Finally, he arrived at the unambiguous conclusion concerning the main reason for the fiasco of the liberation struggle in Ukraine: “the new order was too class-oriented, too strongly connected with the army; this created problems when filling it with a new nationwide and regional meaning” (in other words, when a single social group becomes the basis of a new society, showing egotism toward all the other such groups, the resultant polity actually turned out built upon sand...). Vyacheslav Lypynsky referred to the epoch as follows: “The Cossack elite, reinforced by Ukrainian aristocrats, was becoming in practice a privileged stratum; it not only played a major military and political role, but was becoming increasingly influential in the economic domain.”
Naturally, under the circumstances the poor Cossacks, peasants and townsfolk could not regard such a state as one meant for themselves; they did not want to build it and responded to the construction effort with devastating uprisings and anarchy; it was a reaction to the quick revival of class society (beginning with the Compact of Zboriv on August 18, 1649).
Bohdan Khmelnytsky, as hetman supporting the idea of a Ukrainian nation state, was also influenced by that policy. Mykhailo Hrushevsky believes there were too many discrepancies in the celebrated hetman’s political endeavors: “one finds different sentiments and orientations there, conflicting and reciprocally neutralizing ones.” He further maintained (perhaps overstating it somewhat) that in the sphere of state construction Khmelnytsky only succeeded in “mechanically repeating obsolete slogans; there was nothing new, no construction in the truest sense of the word.”
As for most of Khmelnytsky’s associates, they proved far less effective. Instead of building a viable state, a great many of the military and political elite were prepared to sell Ukraine to Warsaw or Moscow in return for personal benefit. Such characters constituted the fatal majority (e.g., in March 1654, Judge Advocate Samiylo Zarudny and Colonel Pavlo Teteria of Pereyaslav visited Moscow to negotiate what would become known as the Pereyaslav Agreement. They began by asking Tsar Alexis to please let them keep their estates. In 1665, Hetman Ivan Briukhovetsky, demagogue and self-styled “defender of the poor,” signed a scandalous agreement in Moscow, in return for being allowed to marry a boyar daughter and after receiving generous gifts. The instrument considerably limited Ukraine’s rights).
Why did all that happen? Why was the Central Rada, headed by the outstanding historian Hrushevsky, unable to solve problems in Ukraine, primarily social ones that would be among the reasons for its downfall? Obviously, the destiny of any national revolution is decided in the state-people-external-factors triangle, producing a single (sic) conclusive vector having a crucial impact on all further events. If most people see that, despite all talk about freedom, this vector is aimed backward, rather forward, toward progress (and the bulk of the Cossacks and peasants knew what progress was all about in the seventeenth century, even if not using the term), they will turn their attention elsewhere. At the time, they found an ideal guiding line, albeit outside Ukraine: the Russian tsar, a ruler who professed the same religion. In the twentieth century, it was Bolshevik Petrograd [later known as Leningrad, currently St. Petersburg]. At present, it is the old “inviolable Union of free Soviet republics...”
Ukrainian historian Mykola Kostomarov wrote about the so-called Ruin: “The Ukrainian cause was obviously dying. Fiasco after fiasco were destroying all hope, denying people belief in their cause and goal. They now believed that the goal could never be reached. This cut short their will and patience, weakening their love for the native land and commonweal. Acts of patriotism and sacrifice turned out to be of no avail. Personal, private interests were prevailing over all honest patriotic aspirations. One’s household problems were becoming unbearably burdensome. Each was now concerned only about himself. Human souls were becoming shallow and sordid, intellect dulled, pressed by the tiresome quest for a way out. Things once held near and dear were now for sale, while the prices were falling. Now the hero of the time was one capable of retaining one’s ego amidst the general chaos, breaking surface and staying afloat in the swamp of anarchy, after drowning someone else. This happened where and whenever a given community failed to aim at a common goal and move there unanimously, where the ethos was overshadowed by the ideal of personal gain and ambition.”
I apologize for the long quote; I meant it solely to attract the attention of the greatest possible number of the modern Ukrainian elite to its horrifying implications and prompt these people to come to the right conclusion, so they could avoid making the same mistake the third time. If they do as I hope they will, Kostomarov’s words will not become so-called memories of the future for Ukraine.
