BOOK REVIEW: Ukraine and Russia, and the break-up of the USSR (10/08/00)

BOOK REVIEW: Ukraine and Russia, and the break-up of the USSR

"Russia, Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union" by Roman Szporluk, Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 2000.

by Prof. Mark von Hagen

Roman Szporluk, Mykhailo Hrushevskyi Professor of History and director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, is the author of several important books devoted to 20th century Eastern and Central European intellectual history. In the volume under review, a selection of Prof. Szporluk's essays spanning the 25 years between 1972 and 1997, he turns to the histories of Ukraine and Russia, including post-Soviet developments.

The histories of both states, after a half-century of Cold War divisions and struggles, and with archives opened wide, are ripe for reconceptualization. Perhaps because Prof. Szporluk's work has been so focused on ideas, particularly geopolitical and historiographical ones, his reflections are very suggestive of such new avenues of conceptualization.

Russia, Ukraine, empire, nation

Prof. Szporluk's overarching concern has been with the state- and nation-building history of Eastern and East-Central Europe. The contemporary states he highlights in this collection are Ukraine and Russia.

In a sobering reversal of the traditional focus on non-Russians, Prof. Szporluk reminds us that the central nationality question for Eastern Europe is the Russian question, by which he means the urgent imperative for Russian elites to transform their state's self-identity from an imperial to a national one as a crucial component of Russia's political modernization.

What Prof. Szporluk describes as the Soviet Union's own version of imperialism has its roots in Stalin's Russification policies; the consequence has been a confused and dialectical relationship between Russian-ness and Soviet communism. He insists that while de-Sovietization and shedding the imperial legacy are two distinct processes, they are also intertwined in complicated ways because the Soviet Union and Soviet identity, such as it existed, became perceived by non-Russians as Russian, even if the ethnic Russian population, or at least some of its leading intellectuals, felt denied national self-expression in the Soviet Union.

The new national identity that Prof. Szporluk clearly prefers for Russia is one we would call civic or territorial, not ethnic. In other words, citizens of Russia must come to see themselves primarily not as ethnic Russians allied with other Russians outside the borders of today's Russian Federation, but as accepting the sovereignty of those borders and the multi-ethnic population that lives within them.

Much of the same is true for post-Soviet Ukraine, which paradoxically inherited a civic-territorial version of a Ukrainian nation from Soviet institutions and practice. That achievement, however, is threatened today by extremists both within Ukraine and without (especially in Russia) who seek to ethnicize politics and identity in ways that Prof. Szporluk fears would lead to violence.

Instead of the ethnic nationalism (or nationalizing states) that most scholars look for (and find), Prof. Szporluk devotes several chapters to better defining what we understand by civic-territorial identities and loyalties, and how Ukrainians have been able to think about themselves and their state without emphasizing ethnicity and even language.

Among other approaches to identity, Prof. Szporluk traces how Kyiv came to be perceived and accepted by most Ukrainians, east, west or south, as their historically legitimate capital and major city. The status of Kyiv in the rank-order of major Ukrainian cities became an important factor in Ukrainian citizens' capacity to imagine a Ukrainian territorial state. Here Prof. Szporluk demonstrates how important the post-war period of Soviet and Ukrainian history is proving to be in better understanding contemporary politics in the region.

The Soviet West and Eastern Europe

Of course, the Ukrainian-Russian relationship does not exist nor did it evolve in a geopolitical and intellectual vacuum. Another major theme of Prof. Szporluk's essays is the enduring importance of both Eastern and East-Central Europe and the region he calls Far Eastern Europe, or the Soviet West, for the Ukrainian-Russian relationship and for the fate of Empire, whether Russian or Soviet. This region includes the historic "kresy" of Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Moldova and other contiguous territories contested by Romania, Russia and the Ottoman Empire at various points in the past.

Prof. Szporluk contends that the western region of the Russian Empire, and later the Soviet Union, proved to be a constant threat to the imperial order by undermining its legitimacy; the populations of this region were more "European" than the Russians themselves and fit poorly into the Moscow-centered state. What Prof. Szporluk means by the region's "European" or "Europeanizing" character is that it was a conduit for and translator of modern ideas and institutions, especially national ones, from Western Europe into the Russian Empire and Soviet Union.

After the disintegration of the Russian Empire in the wake of the first world war, the Bolsheviks lost those western territories until the start of World War II, when, in its moment of greatest triumph in war, the Soviet Union annexed the western territories and then consolidated its empire in post-war Eastern Europe. That annexation, however, brought with it alien political cultures that could not be entirely Sovietized out of existence.

Prof. Szporluk's very original contribution here is to focus on the period 1939-1947 as a transformative moment, a historical turning point, whose contradictory outcome eventually undermined the Soviet solution to the "national question" that had been hammered out in the inter-war years.

In a set of writings that are so wide-ranging and, in many cases, speculative or provocative, two historians are bound to disagree on matters of emphasis and omission. One set of questions revolves around the concept of the (Soviet) West and that region's crucial contribution to the destabilization of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. How coherent is the concept of a historical Soviet West to begin with, when the differences and similarities are difficult to balance in the end? Estonia and Latvia differ in important ways from Lithuania even among the Baltic countries; all three played a different role from Poland and Finland (though Estonia has close ties to Finland and Lithuania to Poland). And Belarus seems to be an outlyer for most of the important similarities, as suggested by Prof. Szporluk's own diminished treatment of Belarus in comparison to the other cases. Ukraine, of course, both fits and doesn't fit the Soviet West, reflecting the historic divisions between western Ukraine and the more Russian (or Russified) eastern and southern Ukraine.

Once we agree that there is something that holds together the Soviet West, we need to think about its geopolitical importance as a region or sub-region. One might argue that in key moments of modern history, whether in the recent dismantling of the Soviet Union or the revolutionary end to the Russian Empire in 1917, the Caucasus has played an equally important role in transforming relations of power in the region.

Certainly the Georgians and the Armenians claimed ancient kingdoms and "rediscovered" their national identity in the 19th century; Armenia shared Ukraine's fate in being divided between empires, but also in being an imperial diaspora population. The Armenians, Azeris, and Georgians all had short-lived civil war-era states, similar to the Ukrainian (and to some degree the Belarusian) experiences; and particularly the Georgians and Armenians were able to preserve not only their language and literature, but distinctive alphabets (much as the Baltic republics fought to maintain their languages and Latin alphabets as distinct from the Cyrillicized written languages elsewhere in the USSR). Finally, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict proved fatal for the Soviet elite's efforts to hold the multinational state together and became the first case of inter-ethnic violence on Soviet territory that could not be effectively contained.

Admittedly, Prof. Szporluk does not attempt to raise the Soviet West to the prime cause of Soviet collapse, but he suggests that region posed the most intractable dilemmas for the Moscow leadership. And he attributes much of the credit for the relatively peaceful dismantling of the Soviet Union to the actions of Russians themselves, particularly those led by Boris Yeltsin.

On the other hand, Prof. Szporluk's focus on the Soviet West offers a far more powerful explanation for the political crises that led to the dismantling of the Soviet Union than much of the analysis that expected the end to come from the forces of resurgent Islam in Central Asia. Still, Prof. Szporluk's intriguing theses await a more comprehensive and synthetic treatment of the role played by the "national question" (and individual "national questions") in the end of the Soviet state and political economy.

Russia, Eastern Europe and Europe

Another important theme is Prof. Szporluk's insistence on returning the history of Eastern Europe and even Russia to a European history that has been distorted and misleadingly divided by the geopolitical struggle of the Cold War. The redrawn boundaries of post-1945 Europe were reproduced in the redrawing of intellectuals' boundaries that excised Russian history from that of Europe after 1917 and Eastern Europe's history after 1945.

Although communism was one spatial and temporal boundary that served to separate Eastern Europe from the "real" Europe, so too was East European nationalism used to segregate specialists in the region from their counterparts who studied "normal" states and civil societies with healthy patriotism, rather than the versions that are described in often racialist terms as tribal or atavistic in the East.

In contrast, Prof. Szporluk insists on the European normality of much of East European national history. He insists particularly that Ukraine's history is not all that different from the rest of Eastern Europe's. For one, the nationalisms of Eastern Europe are not qualitatively different from analogous movements in Europe more generally, but share important commonalities in ideas of popular sovereignty, language and culture.

True, the three dynastic empires that ruled over today's successor states posed different challenges to nation-making elites in the East, and the sequence of state- and nation-building was different from that of the classic West European models. But Eastern Europe has shared in many of the fundamental processes of modern European history and deserves broader sympathy and more genuine understanding from those scholars who call themselves Europeanists than has been the case certainly for the past half century.

Though Prof. Szporluk appeals for Europeanists to relocate their conceptual boundaries farther to the east, he hesitantly draws the line somewhere west of Russia's current borders.

The relationship of Russia to Europe, however defined, has today once again been raised on the policy and intellectual agenda. Martin Malia, at one end of the divide, asserts that Russia has returned to its European path of development after having been derailed first by World War I and then 70 years of alien, Soviet rule. Prof. Szporluk's view of Russia, by contrast, stresses greater continuity from the imperial institutions and ideologies to their Soviet, particularly Stalinist, successors.

Such a view aligns him more closely with an important antagonist of Dr. Malia's, Richard Pipes, who also emphasizes Russia's unfortunate history of failed nation-building in the pursuit of empire and autocracy. In other words, European means post-imperial for Prof. Szporluk, though the histories of at least a couple of important European powers, France and Britain (and with some qualifications Germany), remind us that decolonization and deimperialization were also reluctantly undertaken only in the postwar years, and with often tragic consequences (the French-Algerian war, for example).

Still Prof. Szporluk reminds us, in the final analysis, that Ukraine's contemporary state- and nation-building projects, and possibly Ukraine's basic survival, hinge on the successful transformation of Russia to a democratic, civic, territorial nation. Many friends of independent Ukraine often appear to be wishing for the worst in Russia because they rue the historic domination of Ukraine by Russia. But a Russia excluded from Europe - from European institutions, norms and values - would be a threat to Ukraine's own integration into Europe. Those who hope for the survival and growth of an independent Ukraine should also hope for a truly democratic Russian neighbor. The survival of an independent Ukraine in itself will be an important indicator of Russia's successful deimperialization, or, in Prof. Szporluk's understanding, its Europeanization. After all, a starkly contrasting model of post-Soviet state relations is that of Belarus and Russia in their solemnly proclaimed union. The leadership in Belarus appears to be willing to cede considerable sovereignty to the union and to restrict the processes of democratization inside Belarus, and such concessions encourage neo-imperialist thinking inside Russia (and among certain circles in Ukraine) as well.

Prof. Szporluk's essays touch on many other issues, but on the grand questions of relations between Russia and Ukraine, the futures of Europe and empire, he challenges much conventional wisdom on issues that will remain firmly on the geopolitical agendas of today's policy-makers.

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