The dialogue between Oxana Pachliowska and an outstanding Italian Slavist of global renown, Sante Graciotti, in the previous issues of The Day marked the beginning of a series of interviews with famous Ukrainists from Europe. Graciotti has made a great contribution to freeing Eastern European countries from the ghosts of totalitarianism.
The “Russian idea” and the “Polish idea” meet in a fight against each other as two knights and the result of this duel will to a great extend define Europe’s expansion to the East. Mickiewicz’s prophetic vision had never been so much on the target. Ukraine has wonderful relations with Poland and extremely poor relations with Russia. Is there any hope that modern Russia will become a democratic country? Will the Europe-oriented Russian intelligentsia take the place it deserves in Russian society? What role could Ukrainians and perhaps even Russian-speaking citizens who consider themselves died-in-the-wool champions of European values play in this process?
“The name Mickiewicz gave to one of his Parisian lectures is paradigmatic for the dichotomic vision of Europe prevalent among the 19th-century romanticists. Prior to that, in the 18th century, the Enlightenment continued the old tradition of contrasting Europe as a Greek civilization and Asia as a Persian tyranny. Poland was a persecuted, divided country with its people deprived of independence and dignity. At the same time, it inherited a grand liberation tradition which stood out even against the background of Europe.
“Poland considered itself to be an emblem of Europe and believed that it had to be protected from violence and its freedom, from destruction on the part of such powerful states as Russia, which did not accept either the national rights of other peoples or the civil rights of its own citizens. This rhetorical formula of Mickiewicz is powerful in its expressiveness and capable of conveying the vibration of dramatic reality. Today it does not any longer have the attractive force it once had, but we still need to keep all its categorical value as an ideal and ethic opposition between the two models of civil world: the authoritarian ‘imperial’ world and pluralistic, ‘democratic’ world.
“We are speaking about two models that, from the historical point of view, always have to be applied carefully to peoples. We can see the same kinds of conflicts in every part of the world, and it is not always that one and the same people or nation represents democracy. I am thinking, for example, about the guilt of the colonial and fascist Italy. (It is enough to mention only these two characteristics.) This country proved itself to be a degenerated inheritor of Roman law, Christian primogeniture, humanistic civilization, Renaissance art, and many other things we are proud of.
“I believe that Ukraine also has dark spots in its relations with other peoples, other ethoses, and other denominations. We need to keep alive and inviolable the consciousness of irreconcilable antinomy between these two ideas, which was so dramatically expressed by Mickiewicz. In doing do, we need to put aside any possible ethnic and national characteristics (‘Polish’ vs. ‘Russian’ or any other possible binary oppositions), at least in what concerns the present time or future prospects.
“The example you gave about present relations between Poland and Ukraine – despite all the past events, today they have a full-fledged cooperation and the discovery of mutual proximity – is extremely illustrative of a possibility for positive renewal of positive relations between Russia and Ukraine. The revival of Russian intelligentsia, open for a dialogue with the West, depends mostly on Russians themselves. However, the West can facilitate this process.
“I very much like that you mentioned the possible role of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking citizens in the process of transferring the system of European (I’d rather say Western) values to Russia. On a large scale, for all people and in all the contexts the notion of the conflict of ideas should be replaced with the notion of meeting and honest discussion of ideas. I think that in this respect the interdenominational dialogue of the past years between the Moscow Patriarchate and Rome can serve as an example. It is a dialogue that moves forward in slow and often imperceptible steps because of the more open position of the Moscow Patriarchate to the proposal of an all-embracing, frank discussion extended by Rome a long time ago.”
The denominational difference between Ukraine and Poland has become a uniting factor (under the slogan of the foundational idea of European identity – plures in unum, unity in diversity), while the apparent denominational proximity between Ukraine and Russia has become a separating factor. Russian Orthodoxy acts as an anti-European force, while Ukrainian Orthodoxy is trying to protect its pluralistic code. Do you think that there is again a threat of religious beliefs becoming a political tool?
“I think that both for Ukraine and Poland the denominational difference should not be a cause for a conflict, because both countries are essentially multidenominational as they have been in the course of their history. There existed the strong Orthodox Ruthenian and Lithuanian minorities within Catholic Poland and a less numerous Catholic minority in Ukraine, which was, nevertheless, quite influential in the cultural area.
“Things are different in the European part of Russia (we mean primarily this part of Russia), where the minorities of other Christian denominations are very few and the only recognized Russian Christianity is Orthodox Christianity. Besides, a very close connection that has always existed in Russia between civil and church authorities and between the tsar and the Patriarch of all Rus’ led to the disappearance of any differences between those two forms of power, as well as between two forms of obeying them. It also led to the situation in which that initial symphony that had to regulate their relations was, in fact, replaced by the total absolute power of the tsar over religious institutions, which ensured his status of the supreme and only leader of the entire Christian Orthodox community.
“From this point of view, mixing the denominational factor with the political one is a danger that impossible to avoid, because it is a reality that has to be taken into account and will have to be considered by the Russian Church itself. There is no longer a tsar in Russia, but there exists a cultural system and a social and political structure in which civil and religious aspects are so vitally interlinked that it is impossible to imagine them in separation. It is not accidental that in the Russia-Chechnya conflict the Russian Church supported the state’s war policy, which caused a great confusion in the entire world, not only in the Christian community.
“For this reason, it is not hard for me to understand the attitude of the Russian Orthodox Church to Ukrainian Orthodoxy. It is an attitude in which the realization of rights inherited by the Moscow Patriarchate from the old church jurisdiction (in the West these could be called ‘iura antiqua,’ or ‘ancient rights’) is mixed with memories of the old imperial calling, which expanded from the political sphere into religion, thus creating Russian autocracy.
“On the other hand, the Orthodox historical tradition recognizes the right of every lawful Christian state to have its own ‘national’ Church. However, the already existing Churches have always denied new churches this right, accusing them of phyletism (something like ‘ethnical religion’) and following the accusations with excommunication. I remember, for example, that the Orthodox Bulgarian Church was excommunicated from the maternal Greek Church and was eventually recognized only after 70 years, in 1945, after the excommunication was withdrawn. The Russian Church is now trapped by legal conditions and historical nostalgia, which prevent it from taking an open-minded look at new phenomena and make it an impossible task to conduct negotiations with this church.
“All the negative aspects of its inner religious divisions into various Orthodox churches notwithstanding, Ukraine has a tremendous advantage: the church is separate from the state, which enables both to work independently, avoiding traumatic conflicts or plots in violation of their respective competency and ethical rules. After all, in this respect Ukraine is among the developed countries with their balanced relations between religion and civil law. This approach become universal in the world as democracy spreads to more countries of the world, and it means respect for every person, their self-consciousness, and their choice.
“It is also important for Ukraine and all of us to re-establish the religious dimension, irrespective of the specific form it will assume, setting aside the ethnic-political considerations. This should be the first message Ukraine has to deliver to Russia in proposing to transfer their progress toward agreement from the historic-political plane to the plane of human and religious values.”
One of the greatest challenges of Eastern Europe is the honest way of settling accounts with one’s own memory and history. Sometimes we have to face incredible facts. Russia denies such crimes as the Katyn massacre and the Holodomor and instead brings back myths, symbols, and nostalgia of the Soviet era. Stalin is becoming a national hero. It is understandable that people in the neighboring countries cannot establish balanced and friendly relations with Russia until the dramas from the past have been disclosed fully with logical conclusions made for the present time. What is your attitude to the problem of reconstructing historical memory with all the accompanying ethical and other aspects? In other words, do you think that at some point it will be finally possible to lay to rest the ghost of communism and bury it together with the ghost of Nazism at the cemetery of the past?
“The issue of memory is extremely topical today. That is why we should discuss it, even though I do not think I can say anything new about it. Both in Italy and Ukraine there are memorial days that refer to won and lost wars, heroes and victims. For us, human beings, memory is a natural life condition that determines our way of thinking and is in a certain way identified with our consciousness: without memory a person is not a human being. However, memory usage has to be governed, among other things, by honesty with respect to the past. We should avoid formal accusations or formal defense determined in both cases by our personal interests. Even Shoah can be used to serve personal interests… and be transformed into a one-way accusatory diatribe that can fuel hatred between peoples, causing harm rather than benefiting each side.
“The Holodomor can also be seen only as a dreadful episode of a conflict between peoples and can call to account entire nations, which would fuel the old and still smoldering conflicts. One should move carefully in an attempt to combine search for the truth, the whole truth, even if it is inconvenient, with the political goal of sending the discovered past to the archives and opening a new page in the relations with the neighbors of the former Soviet Union.
“People die, but ghosts never do so; a person can be buried once and for all, but ghosts are capable of haunting [people and places] … This is a warning for everyone to hear, and its success depends on how much it will be heard by all parties to the conflict. Someone has to start it – why can’t we do that?”
