In June 1931 a still young man was slowly dying of an insidious lung disease in Austria’s Winnerwald sanitarium. His name, Vyacheslav Lypynsky, was then forbidden to be mentioned in Ukraine, the land which he, a Pole by origin, considered his fatherland. It was only mentioned with the stigma of “bourgeois nationalist,” “enemy of the people,” “counterrevolutionary” attached to it. Now it is obvious that Lypynsky is an outstanding Ukrainian historian, sociologist, and political theorist of the twentieth century.
His personality is unusally contradictory. His passionate love for Ukraine drove him to tell and write the bitter truth about his people, but still not all of his statements can be agreed with. Lypynsky’s work is no Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book, a collection of instant recipes for Ukraine’s development. They strike you with something else, the prophetic gift of an author who as early as 1925 managed to envisage the deepest roots of our political and cultural problems and tried to outline the ways to solve them. This can be and should be disputed, but in the first place one should publish Lypynsky’s works and read them. For lack of space we will not touch upon the historian’s turbulent life. Now we will attempt instead a contemporary look on the single problem which would bother him all his life, whether the Ukrainian people is capable of building a state and on what conditions this ability can be fully realized.
His major work is perhaps his Letters to Brother Farmers (1919- 1926),which is the quintessence of his political, historical and philosophical views. This book is dedicated to the issues of building of a future independent state in Ukraine from the vantage point of the organization of Ukrainian society. Lypynsky viewed the state as an absolute value which makes civilized social development possible ( I will add that when we, with one foot in the twenty-first century, listen to Lypynsky and, despite calls from the Left that the state is all and person nothing or from the Right to leave the state out of the economy; the less state the better, we will comprehend that a democratic state is a great achievement of civilization, an immortal discovery like that of the wheel, fire, or money, although there are some differences in principle: the state grew historically often subconsciously). But let us peruse one of the keys, in my opinion, chapters of his letters, “Oppressed and stateless nations.”
Outwardly the difference between the oppressed and the stateless nations, Lypynsky pointed out, may seem negligible, reduced to trifle nuances, but in fact the difference is essential. Oppressed nations, according to Lypynsky, are constantly under the pressure of an external ruthless force which buckles them to its will, but (what is important) the inner spirit of the nation craves for freedom and takes the foreign yoke as something unnatural and offensive.
On the contrary, he pointed out, the foreign power entering the territory of a stateless nation is always welcomed by a part of that nation (but, let us emphasize, not all the people. Does this not remind you the main trait of Ukraine’s history?). That is why the author of The Letters considered Ukrainians to be a stateless, not enslaved, nation, which sees their condition as normal, for they believe the external force ruling them to be their own (since some Ukrainians feel themselves a part of a certain greater unity, whether Russians or Slavs, but not a separate nation).
What are Ukrainians to do, according to Lypynsky? First, he writes, “...everything that enhances the development of the feeling of unity among all inhabitants of Ukrainians, builds Ukraine and destroys all that separates them.” This is why, in his opinion, both Ukrainian nationalism (for it undermines the unity of a multiethnic society) and any form of internationalism (for the nation-state has to be build not on the basis of an ethnic but political nation) are absolutely unacceptable. The statelessness of the nation, Lypynsky believes, is simply slavery and thus has to be eradicated (it leaves me thinking whether there is a relationship between statelessness and that national narcissism of a part of Ukrainians which Hrushevsky wrote about: “It is highly unnecessary for our country to bring up a generation of national narcissi, boastful and self-enamored, thus eliminating all objectivity.” For self-love has a reverse side to it: passivity, inner conflict, lack of understanding of the values of freedom).
The positive development way for Ukraine was seen by Lypynsky in “classocracy,” that is, the constructive cooperation of all classes, especially the aristocracy and the middle class as Ukrainian farmers. He negatively viewed ochlocracy (i.e. the anarchic rule of the enraged crowd). From the political point of view he was a conservative monarchist, a supporter of Skoropadsky’s hetmanate (however, in the last two years of his life Lypynsky broke with him). But, in our opinion, not his actual political utterances, often debatable, but his future vision of Ukraine are of the greatest interest.
The disease of statelessness, Lypynsky thought, can be cured by an “organic unification of people” according to class, not party features, for parties are a self-serving evil. The author writes, “Setting examples for Ukraine to follow the political methods of oppressed nations, still not stateless, as, for extample, the Poles, Czechs, and Italians, means increasing our political ignorance, slowing down the process of our self-examination, thus making us incapable of curing our disease... For instance, those who say that we, like Czechs and Poles, will be saved by some Entente (i.e., in present day understanding, the West — Author), are paving the way for the ruin of Ukraine.” This thought, to put it mildly, might not be very popular today, but let us think: perhaps there is a grain of truth in it.
Lypynsky resented self-satisfaction, he was a shrewd and conscientious person. He always asked himself how one can be a Ukrainian patriot and simultaneously dream of “drawing together the majority of compatriots in the Dnipro.” He dreaded the possibility that after “the collapse of Bolshevik or Polish rule in Ukraine we will not have mass jubilation, as usually happens with freed enslaved nations, but, what is characteristic of all the stateless nations, anarchy and carnage among Ukrainians.”
Those contemporaries who understood the scale of Lypynsky’s personality dubbed him the Ukrainian Max Weber. Weber’s compatriots, the Germans, finally lent an ear to his ideas; as we know they made their country if not ideal, then at least a place where one can live. Should not the systemic crisis in our country be ascribed to our not having listened to our own Max Weber?
