“A LEGEND IS SOMETHING THAT NEVER WAS BUT ALWAYS IS”
Yuri SHAPOVAL:
“I’ve been dealing with the Soviet period for a long time. It was a hard job because I wrote about repression. A no less important and pivotal topic of those times was the total provincialization of Ukraine. Ukraine’s intellectual field was completely mowed down. Serious repression began in the early thirties. And emigration to Moscow? Plus there is the unique facility of our people for mimicry and adjusting to things. The historical prospect is unbreakably linked with the political culture of our nation. History is most closely tied up with what we call ethnic culture. Whether this is good or bad is a another question.”
Serhiy KRYMSKY:
“It’s a way to live through history.”
Yuri SHAPOVAL:
“These collisions give birth to what Professor Kulchytsky called selective memory. Human memory has a propensity to remembering not only the best. We have to slow down over the past, we forget some things, but our current selective memory has also been caused by a political culture that has shaped the already nearly a decade of Ukraine’s history.”
Larysa IVSHYNA, editor-in- chief, Den/The Day:
“When I recall the history of my own life, I want to say that each of us could give examples of interpreting the history of our country. We would like history to be also written through the prism of personal life stories. What did our close and remote ancestors do, what was in those roots? Then we would see the history and chronicles of Ukraine through completely different eyes. These life stories are only beginning to surface, because people have remained silent for so long. Do you remember what your relatives told you when you asked them about their past?”
Serhiy KRYMSKY:
“This is the most important point. History contains things that in fact never were but are accepted as reality. And there was never a war-time phrase that the journalist Kryvytsky thought up, ‘Moscow’s behind us; there’s nowhere to retreat.’ This phrase had real power. Or, for example, the second translation of Marx and Engels showed they never used the expression dog knights. It was a mistake, but it is so very apt with Marx’s ideas in the context. Sallust said, ‘A legend is something that never was but always is.’ In history, we come across such a thing as the sacred. There should be, undoubtedly, a critical historical analysis of some figures or others, but one must also reckon with the sacred that has emerged around them in national mythology and consciousness. History can be both factual and sacral because people interpret it from the perspective of value judgments. One has find a proper place for the saints, but we must also say that many of their alleged actions do not correspond with the fact.”
“If only each of us wrote our biography as a biography of lost opportunities. Wouldn’t it be of higher quality than description of the real facts!”
Yuri SHAPOVAL:
“You surely remember Aleksandr Pushkin’s phrase, ‘And I read my life story with disgust’.”
Serhiy KRYMSKY:
“You know that the biography of Lev Tolstoi was written by his secretary. And Tolstoi cried, ‘Is this really my life? Our life is all those fantasies, dreams, and the play of opportunities that we have in our heads.’ Our brain is a theater: look at the spectacles staged there!”
HISTORICAL MEMORY TRANSFORMS A PEOPLE INTO A NATION
Stanislav KULCHYTSKY:
“What is history? Of course, it is scholarship. Every branch of scholarship has a corresponding subject taught. But history also has something special. There is a quality of history within every individual, and this is actually what turns a population into a nation. This is historical memory. Of course, it’s selective. Prof. Krymsky touched on this with the phrase, ‘We don’t remember everything that happened, we commit to memory only what interests us.’ And we often change the magnitude of real events. The mythologization of history is leading to fantastic things. For instance, we know who Trypillia people were. No, they were the first Ukrainians! And Pylyp Orlyk’s was the first democratic constitution in Europe and the world! This kind of approach only humiliates us. Why is it happening this way? We are so much, perhaps a hundred years, behind the rest of the world, because Hrushevsky and his History of Ukraine-Rus’ (the first volume was published in Lviv in 1898) is something we have just learned. Hrushevsky slaved over it deep inside libraries; now we study him and this is fine. But 100 years is a whole century!”
“Is there anything in our national history we can be proud of?”
Stanislav KULCHYTSKY:
“I do not know any other nation which has managed to double its ethnic territory, as the Ukrainians did, in a thousand years almost entirely without its own a state. The Ukrainian people, who settled over the boundless expanses of the Far East, Siberia, Southern Russia, Canada, the US, Brazil, and Argentina, thus revealed their huge life energy, in spite of the most difficult historical confrontations.”
Wilfried JILGE:
“We are now witnessing a renewed interest in history throughout Europe. Problems are being discussed not only here. This turn change occurred after the collapse of the USSR. But was there no history earlier? When I leaf through textbooks, I see that they only casually mention that if history and a certain epoch are described inadequately, this wipes out memory. I think this is very important for us today. If we only become prisoners of a national paradigm, I don’t think we’ll be able to build something new.”
“Those who stood on opposite sides of barricades in the thirties to the fifties should not be treated as enemies, especially after so much time has passed. If we dwell upon this specific moment of history, we will lose the prospect we want to draw for ourselves. Are we or are we not going toward a decision whereby Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s role will be presented on a new level? Rethinking has to open up new value-related goals for us. Or is our soil so exhausted? Still, historians should not be mere archivists, they must play a more synthesizing role.”
SOVIET HISTORY AS A BLANK PAGE
Stanislav KULCHYTSKY:
“Textbooks are very important. Accumulating new historical knowledge is the business of scholars, but monographs are published with press run of one or two thousand copies. Textbooks come out in far larger quantities. Throughout these years, we’ve been trying to find the image of Ukraine and its heroes. But it is difficult to discard the stereotypes imposed on us earlier. Some of my colleagues frantically oppose all changes, saying we must adhere to the viewpoint once taken. I would like to look at a today’s individual who has been given a 1980 Pravda and asked to read it line by line. What a distorted world it was! Yet, it was harmonious in its own way, for we lived on an island out of touch with anyone else. World War II veterans (about ten years my senior) do not understand the things of today. It is clear why: those who do are no longer among them; they are somewhere higher. Veterans still remain in the past and want their children and grandchildren to think like they do. But this is the deepest egoism: one should not be ashamed that we are writing today differently. You begin to deal with one blank spot and then see that all of Soviet history is a complete blank spot. Not that we lacked courage at first: we had no knowledge and were unable to write a history textbook. So we have published, in fact four printings, of Orest Subtelny’s History. Now Subtelny is in everybody’s heads, as was the Stalinist Short Course of the VKP(b) in earlier generations. But what Subtelny was trying to write was not a textbook, and he did not understand many things. His is not a textbook in the contemporary sense of the word.”
“It must, of course, be a question of a new approach rather than replacement of signs. Let the people read and compare the VKP(b) course and Subtelny’s.”
UKRAINE AS A CONTEST OF CIVILIZATIONS
Serhiy KRYMSKY:
“I am not a historian, but I can say that the history of Ukraine has unfolded within the context of European history. When the Reformation began, Germany looked on Ukraine as a natural ally. There was correspondence between a Halle poetic center on the one hand and Feofan Prokopovych and Stepan Yavorsky on the other. It is not accidental that Skovoroda called himself Meinhard, a Protestant preacher. As we see, we had very close ties with Germany, especially during the Reformation. I said the Cossacks were Europe’s main military force. I have a French-language book, Cossacks at Louis XIV’s Court, by Voltaire. They took part in European wars: the Thirty Years War, the seizure of Dunkirk and La Rochelle. And the defense of Europe from Turkish expansion: the role of Hetman Sahaidachny in the battle near Khotyn in 1621? Why did we manage to find a consensus with the Germans? Thanks to the old firm ties dating back to Kyivan Rus’, plus the German settlers who were warmly received in Ukraine. Latin was taught in village schools! So we can say there was linguistic unity with the European theater. But, in terms of civilization, Ukraine is not monolithic. There was the western part belonging to Austria- Hungary, Europe by a classic definition. Even Friedrich Engels measured Europe by Poland, Hungary, and Austria-Hungary. There was central Ukraine, largely following a way of its own. And there was a part subordinated to an oriental despotism, the Russian Empire. But now, Western ideals are not the last word for us, for Europe does not accept Ukraine. Yet, Ukraine remains the only link between Eurasia and Europe. And Europe will, sooner or later, understand this.”
“Do you think there are serious defects in the development of historical scholarship in the West? We say Ukraine has always been within the context of European history. Of course, they can view things differently. Maybe there are things that will link Europe and Ukraine in contemporary understanding?”
Serhiy KRYMSKY:
“This also raises very serious, purely political, problems. The North Atlantic alliance is imposing a Protestant paradigm on Europe, while France, Italy and a part of Germany are Catholic enclaves. And this harbors very serious conflicts. Europe will never bow to the West.”
“There must be processes which neither politicians nor historians can influence.”
THE WEST IS INTERESTED IN EUROPEAN UKRAINE
Wilfried JILGE: “In Germany Ukraine has often been presented as a country deeply divided into East and West. I want to give two examples. At the moment I’m making a study about German-Ukrainian cultural relations. In connection with this I interviewed representatives of German cultural and scientific foundations and other cultural organizations, which support projects in Eastern Europe. I asked them why Russia, Slovakia, and Romania but not Ukraine are part of their Eastern European programs. Some of them told me that Ukraine will be interesting for them when it becomes part of the European Union. From their point of view Ukraine has to decide for Europe or for Russia. Another example is linked with the definition of a nation. In Germany the perception of nation as primarily a linguistic and ethnic cultural community is still popular for many people. From this point of view a great part of the ethnic Ukrainians are seen as Russians or pro-Russian because they speak Russian. The fact that a part of this Russian-speaking Ukrainians can think about themselves as Ukrainians or at least are ready to accept a concept of a state nation (and thus to support Ukrainian independence) is unknown. Those problematic stereotypes of Ukraine are sometimes also a result of the Moscow centered view of Eastern Europe, which has long been dominant in Germany.
Although the image of Ukraine in the circles of Eastern European scholars in Germany has become more differentiated and complex in recent years, many political advisors, politicians, and managers of culture still look at Ukraine against the background of a scheme of historical and national stereotypes of East and West or Russia and Europe. This is not only a clichО about Russia, which has always been a particular but integral part of European history, but it’s also a clichО about Ukraine. In this stereotypical scheme Ukraine has been seen as a country, which is deeply divided into a pro-Russian, Soviet nostalgic East and a good Ukrainian, national-democratic West. Of course, the problem of regional historical and political diversity exists and cannot be underestimated. But in the one-sided picture of East and West the fluid and changeable character of linguistic and ethnic borders as well as some important hints of a rapprochement between the political identities of the Western and Eastern regions in today’s Ukraine have not been realized. An additional problem is that in some nationally minded Ukrainian textbooks or historical handbooks these stereotypes are affirmed (for example by ranking lists of regional types; of Ukrainians where the eastern Ukrainians take the last place). Thus it is not surprising, that in a time of the debate about the aims of the enlargement of the European Union those cultural arguments could be utilized politically in order to define Ukraine as a state, which cannot be seen as a fully European country. Thus historians have to deconstruct these historical and national stereotypes and myths, not to affirm them.”
“Perhaps we should have an export version of our history?”
Stanislav KULCHYTSKY:
“There are projects of this kind. There was a five year project with the European Union on studying the national history of many countries. This experience is useful for us.”
Yuri SHAPOVAL:
“We have published the book Ukrainian Historical Didacticism: An International Dialog in Braunschweig. This book, a detailed analysis of Ukrainian textbooks in history and social studies, is the first experience of the international assessment of our textbooks. Yet, we so far observe a weak interest in Ukraine in Germany and the USA.”
“Well, we have armed ourselves with adequate historical knowledge. We must take now a short pause in order to look back and calmly analyze in our brains not only the relatively distant past but also the developments of the last ten years. So that phrases like ‘This was in the distant 1990’ do not plague us.”
