'Rethinking Ukrainian History' is topic of annual Petryshyn lecture at Harvard (07/23/00)

'Rethinking Ukrainian History' is topic of annual Petryshyn lecture at Harvard

by Robert De Lossa
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Hiroaki Kuromiya, professor of history at Indiana University delivered the seventh annual Vasyl and Maria Petryshyn Memorial Lecture in Ukrainian Studies, a lecture series sponsored by the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. Speaking on the topic "Rethinking Ukrainian History," Prof. Kuromiya addressed an audience that included not only scholars from Cambridge and the Boston area, but also from Bergen, Norway, and Donetsk, Ukraine, indicating the increased internationalization of Ukrainian studies.

"It is time that general European historians start listening to scholars of Ukrainian history and not just the other way around," said Prof. Kuromiya, a noted specialist on Donbas Ukraine and the USSR. "It strikes me that one of the great lessons that the study of Ukrainian history in the 20th century can give to the world is an in-depth understanding of how totalitarian regimes utilize terror to subject a people - and how that people resists or changes under that terror."

At Indiana University Prof. Kuromiya's lectures on topics such as "Modern Ukraine: From Cossacks (Kozaks) to Independence" and "Stalinism." His research interests include contemporary Ukrainian and Russian history, Stalinism and the Stalinist terror, and the Soviet secret police.

As a student at Tokyo University in Japan, he came to the United States in order to pursue studies on Soviet nationalities policies and foreign affairs at Princeton University, where he completed his doctorate. After Princeton he spent a year at Harvard's Russian Research Institute, where he was influenced by associates of the Ukrainian Research Institute and became convinced of the importance of Ukraine in his work.

After his tenure at Harvard, Prof. Kuromiya was a research fellow at Cambridge University King's College for four years. He has taught at Indiana since 1989. His publications include two books "Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s-1990s" and "Stalin's Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928-1932," as well as numerous articles and reviews in English, Ukrainian, Russian and Japanese.

During his April 27 lecture, Prof. Kuromiya spoke broadly on the new agenda facing scholars of 20th and 21st century Ukraine. His research has focused on the secret police files that have been opened in Ukraine and Russia since the break-up of the USSR. He has concentrated on the personal files of defendants, as well as on procedural reports generated by the KGB and its predecessors. He has combed through handwritten reports to gain a sense of the people behind those procedural reports - ordinary citizens who were caught up in the terror. The Harvard audience was treated to the stunning results of that research.

By searching through entire personal files, Prof. Kuromiya has been able to show the contradictory nature of the official reports made to secret police authorities - official reports that provide full so-called "confessions," while at the same time, attached to these official reports, are handwritten material of victims' replies to interrogators that include vehement denials of the charges. Reports of an official rehabilitation board in the Khrushchev era or reports that later vindicate the accused and show that there was no evidence to support the original charges are also often found in the files.

Prof. Kuromiya feels that the files show that most of the secret police political cases were trumped up. He notes that, though resistance in the Soviet Union certainly was widespread, researchers should not fall into the trap of claiming that the resistance occurred in the manner portrayed by Stalin and his henchmen it at the time.

In fact, Prof. Kuromiya states unequivocally that the records he has viewed lead to one inescapable conclusion: that the security police themselves were creating most of the political cases out of thin air, making up the "language" of "anti-Soviet resistance" in order to justify their own existence and privileged position in Soviet society. Ironically, he has documented cases of individual security policemen being executed for refusing to participate in this culture - simply for refusing to fabricate lies against others.

The famous SVU (Union for the Liberation of Ukraine) trial in 1930 is an excellent example of this process of fabrication. The archival evidence shows that the case was a fiction - concocted by the Communist authorities in order to attack the Ukrainian cultural establishment.

However, the existence of the SVU as a dangerous "bourgeois-nationalist" tendency among Ukrainians was unquestioned in Soviet historiography, accepted as total fact. Accepting the Soviet fabrication at face value, Westerners believed it to be true. In turn, anti-Communists promoted the Bolshevik charges as true because they have wanted to see in them a concerted opposition to Soviet rule. In this way some anti-Communists have actually promulgated Communist lies. Although the problematic nature of these sources has been recognized and debated in Ukrainian diaspora circles for decades, mainstream Western scholarship is just now coming to grips with it.

Ultimately, the truth about resistance to Soviet rule seems closer to what Prof. Kuromiya has found in the diaries of such intellectual luminaries as Serhii Iefremov and Vladimir Vernadsky - resistance was strongest in people's personal lives as evidenced by apathy and, whenever possible, non-involvement with the state in the public sphere.

Prof. Kuromiya notes that this last point is one that historians should ponder. A concern of any government is how to secure the participation of the population that it rules. In a democracy legitimization arises from the power of the citizenry to effect change through freedom of speech and elections. But participation is critical for the appearance of legitimacy in repressive states as well.

One of Prof. Kuromiya's insights has been that Stalin turned to terror precisely because he could not gain the participation of the people he was oppressing. He had to use the security police to force the "participation" of the masses. This largely meant that the security police gave Stalin what he wanted - weaving tales of treachery and deceit in order to convince the Communist leadership that it knew who supported the regime and who did not. The "participation" of the people was based on a monstrous edifice of lies.

Prof. Kuromiya's research is showing that without an understanding of systemic Communist terror we will not be able to understand Ukraine under Soviet rule. In turn, insights into Ukrainian history can help researchers who are studying other 20th century terror-based regimes.

Despite the overwhelming presence of terror, Prof. Kuromiya has found gems in the material. The archives are filled with material for ethnographers, art historians and anthropologists, with reams of anti-Bolshevik songs and sayings. (He brought a selection to his lecture.) He has found that Ukrainian became a lingua franca in some parts of the Soviet gulag system, since guards did not understand the language and Ukrainians often took leadership roles among the inmates in the camps - a point that Alexander Solzhenitsyn also has made.

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The Vasyl and Maria Petryshyn Memorial Lecture in Ukrainian Studies was funded in 1994 by the Petryshyn family in order to recognize the long dedication of the late Vasyl and Maria Petryshyn to the cause of Ukraine. The lecture is administered by the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University and occurs annually during the spring. Past speakers have included Yuri Scherbak, Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak, John A. Armstrong and John-Paul Himka. The lecture is open to the public. An audiotape of the lecture is available to researchers for use on site at the HURI.

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