UNMAKING IMPERIAL RUSSIA. Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the writing of Ukrainian history. By Serhii Plokhy. 614pp. University of Toronto Press. $95; distributed in the UK by NBN International. Pounds 60. 0 8020 3937 5
Few people have a better claim to be the founding father of a nation than the Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky (1866-1934), who wrote the national story, served as head of state, and died as a martyr. Hrushevsky's framework for Ukrainian history, as Serhii Plokhy recalls, leads the Ukrainian people through prehistorical settlement, medieval statehood, and early modern Cossack rebellions against Poland. A subject of the Russian Empire, Hrushevsky was at pains to distinguish Ukrainian from Russian history, claiming events for Ukraine that others had treated as Russian. From the traditional imperial Russian narrative, Hrushevsky took the ancient heritage of the Slavs and the Slavic character of medieval Kyiv. Then he portrayed the local Slavs as Ukrainians rather than Russians. He agreed with the imperial Russian version that Cossacks rebelled against Polish oppressors, but argued that they had no wish to join Russia. So Russia's incorporation of most of Ukraine was a contingent political development, not a natural reunification of peoples. When Russian historians of his own epoch concentrated on northerly Muscovy and marginalized southerly Ukrainian lands, Hrushevsky saw an opportunity.
In a bold move, Hrushevsky claimed the territory known in the late nineteenth century as "southern Russia" for Ukraine by treating the people, rather than the state, as the main actor in history. This approach followed European trends in the social sciences, which allowed generalizations about ancient or distant peoples and authorized distinctions between ethnic groups. Like his doctoral supervisor Volodomyr Antonovych, Hrushevsky was an adherent of the "documentary school", accepting the positivist demand for explicit presentation of evidence.
His transhistorical claim about the existence of a Ukrainian people was rendered credible by the impressive scholarly apparatus. The research legitimized a certain romantic implication. The Ukrainian people were ennobled by their suffering at the hands of Polish landlords and Russian officials. Such populism made Ukrainian history an unbroken whole: temporally, even when there was no state; geographically, across the territories where Ukrainians were believed to live; and ethically, in the suggestion that Ukrainians deserved autonomy.
Yet winsomeness is not the same thing as victory: political appeal does not guarantee political success. Suspicious of elites and lacking a theory of political change, populists were drawn to revolution. But in 1917, when revolution actually came to the Russian Empire and thus to Ukraine, it brought foreign occupation (by Russian Bolsheviks, Russian Whites, Germans, Austrians and Poles), pogroms and banditry. Hrushevsky was head of the Central Council, briefly the government of an independent Ukraine. At the time, he had only begun to think about the state, and had never confronted the problems of building institutions. Yet in other ways Hrushevsky was politically savvy. His decision in 1924 to return from emigration to what had become Soviet Ukraine, for instance, proved very shrewd, if ultimately self-sacrificing. He exploited the liberal cultural policies of the 1920s, mining the archives with amazing industry.
He practised a kind of anti-politics, shying away from interpretation in his books, but completing the architecture of the national story. In a case of publish then perish, Hrushevsky made the most of the years left to him. He fell from grace in 1930, and died in mysterious circumstances in 1934. The later Soviet attempt to create a postnational discourse, uniting the Soviet peoples, was hindered by Hrushevsky's achievement. His books are bestsellers in independent Ukraine. In some measure, the sense of national distinctiveness that they display accounts for the confidence of last winter's Orange revolutionaries.
Plokhy masterfully synthesizes the bountiful material, incorporating new archival sources. It is unlikely that any treatment will ever rival this one in detail and understanding. He stays close to Hrushevsky's perspective, rendering what he saw and how he thought. By the same token, Plokhy sometimes neglects what Hrushevsky ignored. The productive tension Plokhy reveals is the one that Hrushevsky himself noticed, with Russia. Other European countries, even Ukraine's neighbour Poland, fade into the background. Yet Hrushevsky's mother's family was (as Plokhy says) of a "Polish cultural bent". His mentor Antonovych and his intellectual rival Vyacheslav Lypynsky were (as Plokhy does not say) Poles who chose Ukrainian identity. Hrushevsky made his name at an Austrian university among Polish colleagues. Plokhy captures the variety of Russian identity proposals that Hrushevsky exploited, but follows Hrushevsky in imagining a "clear religious, cultural, and political boundary between Poles and Ukrainians". In fact, Hrushevsky, like other national activists of the day, operated within a spectrum of Ukrainian, Polish and Russian languages, milieux and ideas, where the changing of boundaries, cultural and otherwise, was precisely the point.
