A conversation with Prof. Roman Serbyn, historian (07/09/06)

A conversation with Prof. Roman Serbyn, historian

by Fran Ponomarenko
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

Roman Serbyn was born in 1939 in Vyktoriv, Western Ukraine. In 1948 he and his family settled in Montreal. In 1960 he obtained a B.A. in political science from McGill University. He went to France, where he first studied French and then history at the Sorbonne. In 1967 he obtained a licence en lettres in history from the Université de Montréal. In 1975 he completed his Ph.D. in history at McGill University. He began teaching at the Université de Québec - Montréal (UQAM) in 1969; he retired from this institution in 2002. Prof. Serbyn is the author of many scholarly publications.

I had the opportunity to speak with Prof. Serbyn on June 2. The interview is published in two parts.

PART I

Q: As a historian you're often associated with the work that you've done on the Famines of 1921-1923 and 1932-1933, probably because in 1983 you organized at UQAM the first international conference on the Famine-Genocide. You have since then been very outspoken in your position that Genocide is the appropriate term to describe these calamities. You have, however, other areas of historical interest that you have researched and published about.

A: Yes, my first love was the medieval period. There was something romantic about this era. And that's the area my research began in. By the way, I never called the medieval Ukrainian state Kyivan Rus' but just Rus' because that is the term that was used then, as well as in subsequent periods. We don't, for instance, say Galician Rus' for the 13th-14th centuries. Rus' is sufficient.

My doctoral thesis covered the period from 1140 to 1200. I investigated such concepts as the "common old Rus' nationality" and the "transfer of the center of Rus'" from Kyiv to Suzdal/Moscow. And I showed by using old chronicles, archeological and linguistic studies (mostly Soviet publications) that there was no transfer of the center of the State from Kyiv to Suzdal, no massive movement of population from the Dnipro basin to the Oka region. Pogodin elaborated this myth of a population shift in the 19th century and some Russian historians took it over. In fact, an examination of the archeological documentation does not corroborate this theory whatsoever.

Q: Where did you do your research? In the USSR?

A: No, I used 19th century and Soviet material, which I could access in North America and Europe. I never got around to publishing my thesis, but I did publish a couple of articles on the topic, one ("Some Theories on the Question of Rus' Unity [1140-1200] Re-examined") was published in a volume edited by O.W. Gerus and A. Baran, Millennium of Christianity in Ukraine: 988-1988. (Winnipeg, 1989. p. 105-125).

By the end of my work I realized that there just weren't enough documents, not enough written sources, on the Rus' period, for me to continue in that field. And since I was primarily interested in the national question my attention turned to the 19th century, a crucial period for the understanding all of the 20th century. Also, the 19th century was less sensitive for the Soviets than the 20th century. The Soviets published many interesting documents and some good studies on the period and I also hoped that I might even be able to go on an academic exchange and work in the Soviet archives. I almost did.

My application to work in Soviet archives was accepted by the Soviets, but a couple of months before I was to leave for Moscow, the Soviet Army went into Afghanistan and Canada suspended our academic exchange program.

Q: You were at this time, in the late 1970s, teaching Russian and East European history. What aspect of the 19th century interested you in your research - the national problem in Ukraine, yes, but what aspect specifically?

A: Well, I became interested in how myths were created in Russia about historical events. Let's take for instance, the War of 1812, Napoleon's invasion of Russia. The expression "Patriotic War" first appeared in the Russian literature in the first half of the 19th century, and then it was taken over by Russian and, later, Soviet historians. The notion was applied not only to Russian history but also to Ukrainian: the Franco-Russian conflict became a "Fatherland War" for the Ukrainian people. Nonsense. The fact of the matter is that even for Russians it was far from very patriotic.

There is an interesting document written by a Russian merchant returning to Moscow just as the French were approaching the city. He wrote that he saw people running away from the city. They told him that the authorities had decided to close the city gates so as not to allow people to desert Moscow. Later, when Napoleon was fleeing, the "patriotic" peasants attacked the remnants of the Grande Armée, but it does not take much patriotism to attack a half-frozen and completely demoralized army in flight. The myth of the Fatherland War had a political purpose in the 19th century: to instill pride and loyalty to the empire and promote Russian nationalism.

Q: What other issues attracted you?

A: I became interested in the major transformations in Ukraine during the liberalizing years of Alexander II's reign. Did you know that, on the eve of the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, the Kyiv gubernia had the highest percentage of serfs in the whole Russian Empire? Emancipation meant new opportunities for the peasants, including moving into the urban centers, where they joined the growing ranks of the working population. This raised the issue of fighting illiteracy.

In the early 1860s, idealistic students in the universities and gymnazia (high schools) began organizing Sunday schools for young workers and children of the working class. As there were no Ukrainian textbooks, they had to be written. Some were composed by university students, others by Ukrainian literati. Shevchenko wrote one such book.

I began collecting textbooks used in the Sunday school movement. These Sunday schools were quite different from our North American conception. Their purpose was to teach the three Rs and not religion. Most of the teaching was done by university students and in Ukrainian. The texts these students prepared for the children revealed a great deal about their authors and the spirit in which they imparted knowledge.

What was the message behind the teaching material? For example, what words were used to illustrate particular letters of the alphabet? The patriotic message behind these texts can be striking. For example, the letter "k" can be inserted in the word "koza" (goat) or "Kozak" and illustrated appropriately with a drawing of a goat (a familiar animal for the young pupil) or a Zaporozhian Kozak. The latter word reinforces the young person's national consciousness. When these textbooks are compared with similar textbooks from the Soviet period, one gets a good idea of how primary education can influence future generations of citizens.

Q: Did you do any other research on the period?

A: Yes, I did. At the same time as I was collecting textbooks I became interested in other student activities and came across the so-called Kharkiv-Kyiv Secret Society which appeared in the late 1850s and was broken up by the police in early 1860s. The group was organized by some idealistic students as a study and discussion circle; they read and generated subversive material and became involved in student strikes at the University of Kharkiv. The police eventually discovered it and its members were expelled from Kharkiv University.

I was interested in their attitude to the Ukrainian question. Published excerpts from police reports show that some of them were quite nationally conscious and patriotic. After the disbanding of the Kharkiv group, some of its members were allowed to transfer to the University of Kyiv and eventually became active in the Sunday school movement; others joined Russian radical movements. Besides ethnic Ukrainians, the group had Russian and Jewish students. One of the latter, Veniamin Portugalov, later started the first public discussion on Jewish-Ukrainian relations.

Q: This brings us to the Jewish topics you also worked on. You gave a paper about the Sion-Osnova controversy at the 1983 McMaster conference on Ukrainian-Jewish relations. What brought you to this area?

A: As I said, this 19th century period fascinated me. The more I meditated on the national problem in Ukraine, the more I realized that this dilemma was among other aspects also intrinsically connected with three national groups - Russians, Poles and Jews. I had already written about how Russians had created their "Kyivan succession" and the "Patriotic War" myths. I dealt with Polish-Ukrainian relations in my article on the students at Kyiv University around that period, and the return of Volodymyr Antonovych and a few other young intellectuals from their Polonized milieu to the Ukrainian national movement.

Jewish-Ukrainian relations were even more challenging because they were for the most part taboo in the Soviet Union. And the Sion-Osnova controversy fell into the same time framework as the Kharkiv-Kyiv Society, the Sunday school movement, and the "return" of Antonovych and his group.

The controversy between the Russian-language Jewish weekly journal in Odesa and the bilingual (Ukrainian-Russian) Ukrainian monthly journal published in St.-Petersburg was started by Portugalov, mentioned above, who objected to Osnova's use of the term "zhyd," which he considered offensive to him as a Jew. Osnova published Portugalov's accusation and entrusted the writer Panteleimon Kulish to answer. In Osnova's defense Kulish explained that this was the only existing term in Ukrainian.

Sion rejected Osnova's position and wide public debate was inaugurated. Eventually over a dozen Russian periodicals participated in the discussion. From a confrontation on a linguistic issue, the controversy turned to the question of Jewish integration: Osnova demanded that Jews living in Ukraine integrate into the Ukrainian milieu, Sion retorted that Jewish interests were best served by integration into the Russian milieu. The proceedings of the McMaster conference have been published and my article is in them.

Q: In the academic world your work on Serhii Podolynsky is familiar. Podolynsky is a remarkable thinker and personality. He finished medical school in Paris, he had Ukrainian aristocratic family roots, and, in defiance of his father's pro-Empire positions, he became a socialist and a nationalist. I believe that your work on his bibliography and his biography are the most complete available to date.

A: Podolynsky is one of the bright lights of Ukrainian intellectual history of the 19th century. Unfortunately, born in 1850, he became mentally ill at the age of 32 and died at 41. Currently, in the West he is linked with the ecological movement because of his discussions on conservation and utilization of solar energy. Ukrainians have always treated him primarily as an economist. In fact, by education, he was a medical doctor.

For the Soviets he was an enigmatic figure, because of his connections with Marx and the socialist movements in Europe and the Russian empire. We have Podolynsky's letters to Marx; unfortunately we do not have Marx's replies to Podolynsky. Podolynsky liked Marxist Socialist economic theories but did not like Marx as a politician because Podolynsky was a democrat and he was most disappointed by Marx's dictatorial behavior at the 1872 conference of the International at the Hague, where Podolynsky went to meet the leaders of European socialist movements.

It was as a socialist that Podolynsky became a "nationalist" of sorts. Like Antonovych before him, who left the Polish camp to join the Ukrainian people, among whom he was living, so did Podolynsky leave the Russian revolutionaries to join Drahomanov and the Ukrainian hromada. As a young socialist, while studying medicine in Paris and then Zurich, he helped the Russian socialist P. Lavrov publish the émigré journal Vpered. He personally knew Bakunin and the less familiar, but more important Tkachev.

Podolynsky's position was that socialism in Ukraine would have to be built on Ukrainian roots and culture; this is why he found the use of Russian traditions and Russian slogans irrelevant in Ukraine. That is why he gradually moved away from the Russian socialists and joined Drahomanov, Pavlyk, Shulhyn - the Ukrainian radicals of that day. Podolynsky was an authentic democrat and in the Russian dispute between Lavrov and Tkachev (a Blanquist who believed in coming to power by putschist methods), he took the side of Lavrov against this "Leninist before Lenin" - Tkachev. It was the latter that most influenced Lenin. Speaking of Lenin, do you know what Lenin's training was in?

Q: Law, I believe.

A: Exactly. His was a lawyer's approach. He argued for a position regardless of any kind of moral principle. The Ukrainian socialists, I'm afraid, did not see through him at all. For instance, Lenin gave a speech in Zurich during the Great War. In Western and Ukrainian Social Democratic newspapers (which summarized his talk) his speech seemed to support the nationalities striving for independence. But when the speech was summarized in the party newspaper it came out that Lenin was a Russian centrist. The Ukrainians misunderstood what Lenin was really like.

Q: When did you begin your work on the Famine of 1921-1923? In the book you edited "Holod 1921-1923 i Ukrainska Presa v Kanadi." (Toronto: Ukrayinskyi-Kanadskyi Doslidcho-Domumentatsiinyi Tsentr, 1995, 700 pp.) you published all the materials about the famine that appeared in the Ukrainian newspapers in Canada at that time. You published photographs as well, and you have written several articles on various aspects of this catastrophe.

A: I started to research the Famine of 1921-1923 for a paper to present at the 1983 UQAM conference mentioned above. Later, to expand my knowledge, I worked in archives in Europe, in the U.S., and in the U.K., as well as at the Red Cross in Geneva. There is much material. This famine was not a taboo subject for the Soviets but the way that it was presented was really a perversion of the facts, especially with regard to Ukraine.

In 1921 and 1922 there was drought in Russia, along the Volga, in the Northern Caucasus region and in the southern half of Ukraine. But in the rest of Ukraine the harvest was good, and there were enough reserves to feed the whole Ukrainian population during those two years. Yet food was taken out of Ukraine and sent to Moscow, Leningrad and the Volga region.

Also, in the first year of the famine, when Lenin, Gorky, Patriarch Tikhon, and Chicherin made an appeal for help from the West, all specifically left out any mention of Ukraine. Lenin denied until the end of 1921 that there even was a famine in Ukraine. The U.S. sent relief to Russia in August of 1921. Credit must be given to American Jews for opening up Ukraine to famine relief. Jews in Ukraine were writing to their relations abroad and outlining the conditions of famine and that mobilized the American Jewish community. The Jewish Joint Distribution Commission, which was already involved with the work of the American Relief Administration's work on the Volga, insisted that a finding mission be sent to Ukraine.

Eventually, Moscow agreed to allow Joint-sponsored ARA aid to be sent to Ukraine. The ARA insisted that the food kitchens in Ukraine could not be restricted to Jews. A compromise was reached and the kitchens were opened to all but were set up in heavily Jewish areas. As a result most of the aid did go to Jewish citizens, but others were also fed and this aid alleviated the overall situation.

Upon examination of the circumstances of this Famine we cannot avoid the conclusion that this tragedy could have been avoided. And I have argued that just as with the Famine of 1932-1933, this was a man-made famine, the difference was that while in the '30s this was a direct genocidal undertaking by the government, in the '20s, the Soviet government took advantage of adverse natural conditions and used them to its advantage.

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