National Issues

 

 

 

 

Among Soviet ideological concepts that continue to garner support even today, the metaphor “fraternal peoples” merits closer attention. According to Soviet ideologists, fraternal peoples were nations that were biologically related, as well as countries with identical ideological systems. Actually, Marxist theoreticians were not equally interested in all of these sham families. For example, they paid little attention to “fraternal” relations among the Germanic or Romanic peoples. Of greater interest were the Slavic peoples, particularly when the Red Army began to “liberate” Eastern Europe from the German occupiers. After the war, communism was established on the territory of these “fraternal peoples,” and they became “fraternal states” and members of the new “family” of socialist countries. The Soviet government fashioned an even more closely-knit “fraternal family of socialist nations” out of the enslaved peoples of the former Tsarist “prison of nations,” regardless of their ethnic, religious, and racial differences. But the tightest “bonds of brotherhood” were those that bound the Ukrainians to the Russians, these children “of one mother,” nurtured in “one cradle.” The “inviolable” union of these two Eastern European peoples served as a guarantee of the unity and might of the Soviet “union of fraternal republics.”

 

Stalinist ideologues introduced this essentially political conception of fraternal peoples into Soviet historiography and transformed it into a bizarre reflection of the age-old reciprocal relations among the Eastern Slavs. According to the Soviet thesis, the historical path of the Eastern Slavs could be traced from the original state of unity through forcible separation to renewed reunification. Kyivan Rus’ had united all the East Slavic tribes in a single ancient Rus’ state, conferred on them a common nationality with a single culture and a common language, and inculcated in them an awareness of belonging to one people. Only the feudal system, owing to its tendency to fragment, and the Tatar-Mongol invasion led to the dissolution of Kyivan Rus’. Soviet ideologists maintained that the three new peoples that eventually formed under foreign rule – Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians – never lost sight of their common roots and never stopped yearning for reunification. After coming under the rule of Poland, for centuries Ukrainians and Belarusians struggled against the oppression of the Polish lords and strove mightily to be reunited with the Russian people in the Muscovite state. With this goal in mind, Bohdan Khmelnytsky launched his war of liberation in 1648 and concluded it in 1654 with the signing of the Treaty of Pereiaslav, which forever reunited Ukraine with Russia. External enemies then tried every which way to wrest Ukraine from Russia and consign her to the yoke of her neighbours. For many years large areas of Ukraine remained occupied by her western neighbours, and the ultimate inclusion of the Ukrainian people in a single Ukrainian state and her unification with the Russian “elder brother” would come only in the mid-twentieth century, as a result of Ukraine’s “liberation” by the Red Army, so went the Soviet thesis.

 

Such an eschatological and Russocentric view of the thousand-year-old path of the Ukrainian people had little in common with historical scholarship but much in common with political propaganda. The Soviet scheme of history of the Eastern Slavs was a clever mixture of chauvinistic elements of Tsarist Russian historiography and the spirit of “Lenin’s nationality policy.” Even before the Bolshevik coup of 1917 the leader of the Russian proletariat characterized his understanding of Ukrainian-Russian relations thus: “Through the united action of the Great Russian and Ukrainian proletariats a free Ukraine is possible. Without such unity it is unthinkable.” In other words, Ukraine cannot exist separately from Russia. Nor can the Ukrainian people exist without the guardianship of the Russians. A superb polemicist with the skills of a lawyer, Lenin skillfully formulated a demagogical pronouncement that was subsequently utilized by Bolshevik propagandists. In conformity with Lenin’s principles, the Soviet regime use the noble metaphor of “fraternal peoples” as a smokescreen to implement a mundane program of political integration, national assimilation, and state consolidation of a Russocentric social order.

 

The historical content of the “fraternal peoples” thesis was an amalgam of distorted facts, peculiar statements, and conceptual nonsense. World history does not know of any enslaved nation – including the Ukrainians – that for centuries would have cherished reunification with another nation as its main goal, subordinating the real objective of national liberation to this sham dream. Furthermore, if one recalls the terrible conditions that reigned in Tsarist and Soviet Russia, then the statement about the Ukrainian people’s “age-old aspirations” to join the Russian state is ludicrous. It is an anachronism to ascribe a feeling of unity to the multi-ethnic population of the large medieval state of Kyivan Rus’, for no such national consciousness existed in any European country in this period. Khmelnytsky and the Cossack council accepted the suzerainty of the Muscovite tsar, but the Treaty of Pereiaslav did not mark the reunification of Ukraine with Russia but the beginning of the gradual destruction of the Cossack state, and the social and national enslavement of the Ukrainian people by the Tsarist regime. Khmelnytsky’s failed treaty with Muscovy forced the hetman to seek new allies, even in faraway Sweden. Half a century later hetman Ivan Mazepa would follow the Swedish orientation, his efforts resulting in catastrophic consequences for Ukraine. But to treat Mazepa as a traitor of his people because he wanted to liberate them from the oppressive rule of Peter I is an absurdity. The same must be said of Soviet historiography’s appalling judgment of the promoters of Ukrainian independence, who wished to liberate Ukraine from Leninist rule during the liberation struggles of 1918-1921 and from Stalinist rule during the Second World War.

 

Lenin’s lofty phrase about “fraternal peoples” encapsulates the essence of the 1954 state celebrations of Ukraine’s “reunification” with Russia. In order to glorify this event, two Academies of Science—the USSR’s and the Ukrainian SSR’s—jointly issued a three-volume set of documents entitled Ukraine’s Reunification with Russia. The compilers of this anthology strove to provide evidence of the Ukrainian people’s aspirations for “reunification” with the Russian people, and recounted the Ukrainians’ lengthy struggle under Khmelnytsky’s leadership and with the aid of the Russian people to attain this “age-old dream” and its realization in the Treaty of Pereiaslav. During the jubilee celebrations the CC CPSU published a series of historical theses designed to inculcate patriotic feelings in Soviet citizens, while the Academy of Sciences of the USSR published a separate volume of documents for use in high schools. The introductory article to this work explained the historical continuity between Ancient Rus’, “Reunification,” and the Soviet Union. The glue cementing this construct is the “consciousness of unity of the Rus’ land,” which had already supposedly emerged in “Kyivan Rus’,” and which the “fraternal peoples carried with them throughout their centuries-long history.” Reminding his readers that these three peoples came to be known as the Great Rus’, Little Rus’, and Belarus’, the author of the introduction emphasizes that the “ancient name of ‘Rus’ has been forever retained by all three peoples.” Half a century later, on the eve of the 350th anniversary of the Treaty of Pereiaslav being marked this year, the citizens of Ukraine have encountered echoes of these concepts in the various projections of the “single area” idea and in such titles as Two Rus’, a recent collection of articles published by the newspaper Day [Den].

 

Thus, the so-called “chosen path” – the alliance between Cossack Ukraine and Tsarist Muscovy – led not to a free and independent Ukraine but to the enserfment of the Ukrainian people and the abolition of the Ukrainian Cossack state. What did lead to an independent Ukraine were those sacrifices that the Ukrainian people made over a period of more than three centuries in order to depart from that “chosen path” and to distance themselves as much as possible from the disastrous alliance with Muscovy, the capital, first, of the authoritarian Tsarist empire and later, the totalitarian communist empire.

 

International relations develop on the basis of political principles, not family relations. In establishing relations with other countries, states are motivated by their own interests. A decisive factor is the concrete benefit that accrues to a given country, not genetic relatedness. All normal nations behave this way, including Russia – even in relation to Ukraine. Proof of this is the recent conflict over Tuzla, which demonstrated that Russian politicians and Russian citizens responding to public surveys were prepared to forgo their “fraternal” relations with Ukraine for the sake of benefits that would ensue from the building of a dam, undertaken without Ukraine’s agreement. For a long time now Russia has been contemplating whether to join Europe or not, and this question will be decided on the basis of whether such a move will bring benefits. Russia will not make her decision to join Europe contingent upon Ukraine. Ukrainian politicians who advocate joining Europe only “together with Russia” have not understood that Ukraine’s vital interests must dictate such decisions. Ukraine needs good relations with her largest neighbour, Russia, but not in the spirit of colonial servilism. Ukraine must insist that Russia treat her with respect as a valuable partner – not as a “younger” brother in the service of the elder one. Ukraine will earn respect only by conducting herself with dignity, once she apprehends her own self-esteem and sees herself as a full-fledged and independent partner in the global community.

 

The much-discussed concept of a “single economic area” is not alien to the ideology of “fraternal peoples.” The projected union of three East Slavic countries and semi-Slavicized Kazakhstan provides the framework for a “single area” filled not only with purely economic imperatives but also with entire spheres of life, once shared by the inhabitants of these states. The entrenchment of a “single linguistic area” in these lands was begun long ago, and the Russian Federation and Russian-speaking residents of these four countries take great pains to maintain this process. The Russian Orthodox Church is doing its utmost to gain a monopoly over a “single religious area” with the concomitant Russian language and Russian traditions. A single “Eurasian” language and one Orthodox faith will serve to consolidate a “single cultural area.” Finally, there exists an unrecognized “single psychological area,” which to this day firmly binds part of the Ukrainian population, including a large portion of the intelligentsia, to the Soviet imperial heritage. The layering of all these “single areas” on the territory of Ukraine represents a deadly threat for the existence of the Ukrainian people both as a separate nation and independent state.

 

The Ukrainian Cossacks once cherished a tradition of brotherhood. As a child Taras Shevchenko loved listening to his grandfather’s stories about the glorious days, when his once-free ancestor lived the life of a Cossack alongside his brothers-in-arms. The adult poet Shevchenko was no doubt recalling this noble tradition when he composed his poem entitled “There stood in the village of Subotiv”:

 

 

Shevchenko would never havem condemned the Treaty of Pereiaslav if such fraternal relations had indeed been established between Ukraine and Russia. But, as the poet bitterly admitted, “That’s not how it turned out,” for if the “Muscovites” shared anything, it was not with the Ukrainian Cossacks but the Cossacks themselves. With the Treaty of Andrusovo struck in 1667 Russia betrayed Ukraine and carved it up with Poland, the very same country from which Bohdan Khmelnytsky liberated the Ukrainian people, and whose continued threat to Ukraine lead him to sign the Pereiaslav treaty. Relations between the “Muscovite” and the “Cossack” always evolved according to the traditional model of the pragmatic, self-interested conduct of a stronger power toward a weaker one. And the factors that supposedly would draw the Russians closer to the Ukrainians, particularly commonality of religion, similarity of language, and shared existence within the borders of Kyivan Rus’, were used by the more powerful Russian nation to divest the weaker Ukrainian “brother” of his existence as a separate nation and independent state. The metaphor of “fraternal peoples” has only served as a cover for this destructive policy vis-à-vis the Ukrainian people.