Ivan L. Rudnytsky, "Pereiaslav: History and Myth," Introduction to J. Basarab, Pereiaslav 1654: A Historiographical Study (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1982), xi-xxiii.Reprinted in Ivan L. Rudnytsky, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History, 1987.
Pereiaslav: History and Myth When Pieter Geyl, the eminent Dutch historian, was prevented from pursuing archival research during the Second World War, he embarked on a project on the basis of secondary sources. This was the origin of Napoleon, For and Against, a brilliant study of the emperor's changing image in French historical literature.
Western students of Ukrainian history face a situation similar to that of Geyl, namely a lack of access to primary sources. Foreign scholars rarely have the opportunity to work in the archives and libraries of the Ukrainian SSR. Thus, when Dr. John Basarab, author of the present work, resolved to re-examine the Khmelnytsky era in seventeenth-century Ukraine, and its crucial episode, the Pereiaslav agreement of 1654, he chose the historiographical approach as the most practicable.
Historiographical studies may offer a double scholarly benefit. First, they provide a better insight into and understanding of the subject by looking at it from the various standpoints taken by previous researchers. Second, they serve as contributions to intellectual history, inasmuch as they illustrate the evolution of historical thought and social ideologies.
The Khmelnytsky era, including the Pereiaslav agreement, lends itself well to a historiographical treatment. It gave rise not only to lively, often passionate, scholarly controversies, but also to certain ideological constructs which have played, and continue to play, a significant role in the life of Ukraine and Russia. Therefore, in approaching the subject, a historian will have to differentiate between problems on two distinct, though connected, levels: on the one hand, the seventeenth-century events themselves, which, obviously, must be studied within the context of their own time, and, on the other hand, the latter-day ideological out-croppings, which reflect contemporaneous social conditions and political interests. To elucidate this essential distinction one can refer to the example of the Magna Carta, which also presents itself under a double aspect, as an episode in the early thirteenth-century struggle between King John and the barons, and as an issue in English constitutional conflicts of a later age.
The Khmelnytsky era and the Pereiaslav agreement have preoccupied a number of Ukrainian, Russian and, to a lesser extent, also Polish historians, but so far they have hardly attracted the attention of Western specialists. It is hoped that Dr. Basarab's critical discussion of the relevant literature will bring this important topic within the purview of Western scholarship. The purpose of the following remarks is to provide an introduction to the two levels of the Pereiaslav problem, considered as history and as myth.
The year 1648 is memorable in European history. It marked the Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years' War in Germany and gave international recognition to the independence of Switzerland and the United Netherlands; it was also the year of the Second Civil War in England and the Fronde in France. In the eastern half of the continent, it saw the beginning of the Ukrainian Cossack uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, under the leadership of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky. A protracted Polish-Ukrainian conflict ensued, and six years later, by the so-called Pereiaslav agreement (named after a town east of the Dnieper river), Ukraine accepted the overlordship of the Muscovite tsar.
There exists a consensus among historians that the Khmelnychchyna (Khmelnytsky era) gave a new shape to Eastern Europe and constituted a turning point in the history of three nations: Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. This crisis inflicted irreparable damage to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, deprived it permanently of the position of a great power, and began the irreversible decline which culminated, more than a century later, in the Partitions. And Poland's loss was Russia's gain. Before the Cossack revolution, Poland-Lithuania had the upper hand militarily over Muscovy. The breakthrough to the Baltic Sea attempted by Tsar Ivan IV in the Livonian War (1557-82) was repulsed by the Commonwealth. In the early years of the seventeenth century, during Russia's Time of Troubles, Moscow even found itself temporarily under Polish occupation, with a Polish prince about to ascend the tsar's throne. Russia suffered another setback in the Smolensk War of 1632-4. Ukrainian Cossack forces played a prominent role in these Commonwealth victories. A radical shift in the balance of power occurred when Hetman Khmelnytsky placed Ukraine "under the high hand" of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, the second ruler of the Romanov dynasty. Moscow's control of Ukraine, it is true, remained tenuous for decades, and it was effective in the eastern half of the country only, the so-called Left Bank. Still, this provided the tsarist state with a base for future expansion into the Black Sea, Balkan, and Central European areas. Thus, Pereiaslav was the crucial step in the rise of the landlocked Tsardom of Muscovy to the position of a European great power. This applies also to the internal transformation of semi-Asiatic Muscovy into the modern Russian Empire. Ukraine became Russia's first "window on the West": Ukrainian cultural influences helped prepare the ground for Peter I's modernizing reforms.
But what place does the Khmelnychchyna occupy in the history of the nation most directly affected, Ukraine? One major consequence of the mid-seventeenth-century upheaval is obvious: it transferred Ukraine from the Polish to the Russian orbit. Pereiaslav was the beginning of the Ukrainian-Russian association which, for better or worse, still endures today. This, however, does not exhaust the significance of the Cossack revolution in Ukrainian history. In the course of the struggle against Poland, the Zaporozhian Army was transformed into a body politic which exercised control over a considerable territory, established a system of administration, and created a government. Thus there emerged a Ukrainian Cossack state which for some years enjoyed de facto independence. Pereiaslav did not terminate the existence of that state: the agreement contained assurances of Ukraine's extensive autonomy. In practice, Hetman Khmelnytsky continued to act as an independent ruler after 1654.
There is room for legitimate disagreement concerning the juridical nature of the link established between Ukraine and Muscovy in 1654. This question has been much debated, and John Basarab's monograph provides a lucid survey of the spectrum of scholarly opinions. One thing, however, may be considered reasonably certain: Pereiaslav did not amount to a "reunification" of Ukraine with Russia, a submersion of Ukraine into the Russian state. The point needs to be stressed, because this highly implausible interpretation has been elevated in the Soviet Union to the level of an official dogma. This, however, belongs to the domain of the Pereiaslav myth, about which more will be said below.
To comprehend what Pereiaslav actually meant in the setting of its time, one has to compare it with the Zaporozhian Army's similar treaties with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire, both before and after 1654. The Pereiaslav agreement did not differ from them in substance. Like them, it was a response to a specific situation, and motivated not by the Ukrainian people's imaginary yearning for union with their Russian brethren, but by the Cossack elite's understanding of their country's current political self-interest. It was only natural that Ukraine's partners, in this case Moscow, also pursued their own objectives and tried to secure for themselves the maximum advantages, usually at Ukraine's expense.
This is not the place to enter into a detailed discussion of Hetman Khmelnytsky's complex policies. It may suffice to say that he had an acute sense of Ukraine's vulnerable geopolitical position and that, like Bismarck, he was haunted by le cauchemar des coalitions. Khmelnytsky's chief concern seems to have been to prevent a situation in which Ukraine would have to fight a war on two fronts simultaneously. In order o achieve this objective, Khmelnytsky was willing to pay a high price. For instance, he clung for a number of years to the Crimean alliance, despite the Tatars' depredations and notorious unreliability, and the unpopularity of this policy with the Ukrainian people. But as long as the contest with Poland was still undecided, Khmelnytsky preferred to keep the Tatars as fickle allies, lest he have to deal with them as overt enemies in the rear. Similar considerations induced Khmelnytsky to align his country with Moscow in 1654. He wished to check the imminent danger of Ukraine's encirclement, resulting from a rapprochement between Poland and the Crimean Khanate. Furthermore, he hoped to break with Russian aid the military deadlock in the war against Poland and to bring under the Zaporozhian Army's control the western Ukrainian and southern Belorussian territories, still held by the Commonwealth. The price or this was the acceptance of the tsar's suzerainty or protectorate. There is plenty of evidence to show that Khmelnytsky did not think that the Pereiaslav agreement limited his freedom of political movement in any essential way.
Soon after Pereiaslav, frictions and frustrations erupted in the relations between the Zaporozhian Army and its nominal overlord in Moscow. In response to this, Khmelnytsky embarked on a new course of foreign policy. While avoiding a premature break with the tsar, his plan was now to ally Ukraine with the bloc of Protestant powers, consisting of Sweden, Brandenburg-Prussia, Transylvania, and the Calvinist, anti-Commonwealth party in Lithuania. Simultaneously, he renewed his former ties with the Porte and its vassals, Moldavia and Wallachia. The international system envisaged by Khmelnytsky was directed primarily against Poland, but potentially also against Russian ambitions. The great hetman's early death, in 1657, prevented the realization of his bold design. Still, Khmelnytsky's alliance with Charles X Gustavus of Sweden served as a precedent for that of Hetman Ivan Mazepa with Charles XII against Peter I in 1708.
Bohdan Khmelnytsky has been both praised and blamed as the reputed architect of Ukraine's union with Russia. Thus, the tsarist government, during the most reactionary reign of Alexander III, erected a monument to Khmelnytsky in Kiev, and, for the same reason, he is now being highly honoured in the Soviet Union. On the other hand, the bard of the nineteenth-century Ukrainian national renascence, Taras Shevchenko, cursed Khmelnytsky as the man responsible for his people's enslavement by Russian despotism. In fact, however, both praise and blame are unfounded. They do not express the historical reality of the Khmelnychchyna, but reflect rather the Pereiaslav myth. The latter arose in a later era out of the shipwreck of Ukrainian Cossack statehood. This imparted ex post facto a new meaning to the 1654 agreement, a meaning not intended and not foreseen by Khmelnytsky and his contemporaries.
After the turmoil of the second half of the seventeenth century, the so-called Ruina (Time of Ruin), and especially after the defeat of Charles XII and Mazepa at Poltava in 1709, Ukraine found itself permanently incorporated into the Russian imperial system. The bid for independence had failed, and the pro-Russian orientation had prevailed over the pro-Polish and pro-Turkish alternatives. The Ukrainian Cossack body politic, officially named Little Russia and popularly known as the Hetmanate (Hetmanshchyna), was now territorially reduced to the regions east of the Dnieper, the Left Bank, and lowered in status to the position of a subordinate entity within the framework of the Russian Empire. Still, Little Russia remained for several decades administratively distinct from Russia proper, retained its own laws and customs, and local government was in the hands of the Cossack officers' stratum, the starshyna. The makeshift, ad hoc Pereiaslav agreement assumed retrospectively the character of a constitutional charter defining Left-Bank Ukraine's position in the Russian Empire. Although periodically revised in an ever more restrictive manner, it was considered legally binding in principle. This constellation gave birth to the Pereiaslav myth, which served the political needs of both the imperial government and of those segments of Ukrainian society which, making a virtue of necessity, wished to co-operate with the imperial system.
From St. Petersburg's point of view, the Pereiaslav myth legitimized the annexation of Ukraine by the Russian Empire. This was the obvious and most important reason why "The Articles of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky" were later included in the Complete Collection of Laws of the Russian Empire and remained on the statute books until the 1917 Revolution.
But the Pereiaslav myth was also adaptable to the needs of the Hetmanate's starshyna, who were searching for a political concept capable of combining loyalty to the Russian monarchy with the defence of the autonomy of their country and their own social privileges. To reconcile these two goals entailed rejecting, as inconsequential instances of individual "treason," the compromising memories of those hetmans -- Vyhovsky, Doroshenko, and Mazepa -- who had overtly risen against Moscow. The positive counterpart of this renunciation of separatism was the transformation of the Pereiaslav event into a juridical and political concept legitimizing Cossack Ukraine's traditional "rights and liberties." This elevation into mythology is easily traceable in the eighteenth-century Cossack chronicles. But perhaps its clearest formulation can be found in the versified historical-political tract, "A Conversation between Great Russia and Little Russia," written in 1762 by Semen Divovych, a clerk in the Hetmanate's military chancery. Little Russia addresses Great Russia, both personified as ladies:
Khmelnytsky took cognizance of [the wishes of] his Army and, feeling encouraged, approached the Russian monarch (gosudar) and submitted to him the [Zaporozhian] Army together with all Ukraine. To that effect, he took at Pereiaslav an oath of eternal allegiance in the presence of the Russian boyar Buturlin. Aleksei Mikhailovich, the ruling autocrat (samoderzhets), seeing this manifest sign of my [Little Russia's] voluntary submission, granted a royal charter of liberties, wherein he confirmed and restored all former articles.... I have subjected myself not to you [Great Russia], but only to your monarch . . . Do not think that you yourself are my mistress; the monarch is our common ruler.'Divovych stresses the parity of Little Russia with Great Russia, united in loyal service to the common monarch; at the same time, Little Russia enjoys self-government, as guaranteed by the "royal charter of liberties," i.e., the terms of the Pereislav agreement. It is to be noted that at this stage of the myth's evolution, about one century after the event, what in fact had been a bilateral, negotiated settlement, a treaty, had assumed the character of a unilateral, and therefore revocable, act of tsarist munificence.The myth did not lose its relevance after the suppression of Left-Bank Ukraine's autonomy, which occurred in several stages from the 1760s to the 1780s. It allowed the descendants of the Cossack starshyna, transformed into Russian dvoriane, to regard themselves not as a subjugated people, but as a part of the imperial elite. The fiction of the ancestors' "voluntary oath of allegiance" enabled Little Russian nobles to serve the monarch and the empire honourably, without loss of self-respect. Such conformism did not preclude the survival of a sense of Ukrainian ethnic identity and regional patriotism. The latter inspired, during the first half of the nineteenth century, historical and folkloristic research and literary works, some of which were written in Russian, but some in the Ukrainian vernacular. In this manner the beginnings of the Ukrainian cultural revival were rooted in the tradition of the Cossack era.
Dreams about the restoration of an autonomous Hetmanate lingered on until approximately the middle of the century, and the thinking of Left-Bank aristocratic circles still focused on the Pereiaslav concept. A well-informed contemporary observer recorded that during the post-Crimean War "thaw" rumours were abroad in Ukraine that mentioned specific personalities as candidates to the hetmancy and other traditional Cossack offices.2 This situation was not to last, however. The tsarist government showed no inclination toward making concessions to Ukrainian autonomism, even of a conservative and loyalist type, but rather persisted in its policy of centralization and Russification. Left-Bank nobles became increasingly assimilated to the imperial establishment, with a concomitant weakening of their Ukrainian attachments. As for the Ukrainian national movement, it assumed a decidedly populist character from the 1860s on. Ukrainian populism stressed service to the peasantry and the idea of ethnic nationality; it had no interest in historical legitimism and state rights, which appeared archaic and tainted with aristocratic privilege. These developments undermined the Pereiaslav myth as a relevant political concept.
One might have assumed that the Pereiaslav myth would have been finally laid to rest by the 1917 Revolution. The myth was strongly tinged with traditional monarchism, an idea for which, obviously, neither the new Bolshevik rulers of Russia nor the leftist founding fathers of the Ukrainian People's Republic had any use. We know of only two instances in the First World War and the revolutionary era when Ukrainian leaders referred to Pereiaslav in official pronouncements. The manifesto issued upon the outbreak of war, on 3 August 1914, by the Supreme Ukrainian Council, the political representation of the Galician Ukrainians, proclaimed that "the Russian tsars violated the Treaty of Pereiaslav by which they undertook the obligation to respect the independence of Ukraine"; the manifesto called for support of the Central Powers' war effort and expressed the hope that the coming defeat of Russia would bring liberation to Ukraine.3 The second reference is in a speech of Herman Pavlo Skoropadsky delivered on 21 June 1918 to a delegation of school teachers. Skoropadsky stated that Ukraine united with Muscovy at Pereiaslav "as an equal with an equal" (a formulation reminiscent of Divovych), but that the union resulted in a "250-year-long heavy national bondage for the Ukrainian people."4 These two mentioned cases were exceptional. Neither the Galician leaders, raised in the atmosphere of Austrian constitutionalism, nor Skoropadsky, the conservative scion of the Left-Bank aristocracy, were typical of the populist and socialist mainstream of the Ukrainian Revolution. It is noteworthy that the Ukrainian People's Republic's declaration of independence on 22 January 1918 contained no reference to historical rights and the breach of the Pereiaslav agreement by Russia; the act was based exclusively on the democratic principle of national self-determination. After the Soviet regime became firmly established in Ukraine in 1920-21, any reasonable observer would have predicted that Pereiaslav had forever lost all practical significance and that henceforth it would preoccupy solely professional historians.
The above prognosis was belied by post-Second World War developments. The tercentenary of the Pereiaslav agreement in 1954 was celebrated throughout the Soviet Union with unprecedented pomp. On that occasion, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union issued a lengthy doctrinal statement outlining the official interpretation of the 1654 event and of Russian-Ukrainian relations, past and present. The 1954 "Theses" retain their binding force in the USSR to this day. The anniversary of Pereiaslav was again solemnly commemorated in 1979, though on a more modest scale than twenty-five years earlier.
What is the meaning of this surprising resurrection of an old-regime myth under communist auspices? Soviet Russia, like its tsarist predecessor, is faced with the problem of legitimizing Russian domination of Ukraine. The decisive factor in the establishment of Soviet rule in Ukraine was the armed intervention of the Russian Red Army; local communists, the overwhelming majority of whom were ethnically non-Ukrainian, played only an auxiliary role. The fact of military conquest, however, was politically camouflaged as the fraternal aid of Russian workers and peasants to their Ukrainian brethren. The ideology of revolutionary Marxism and proletarian internationalism provided the legitimizing function. The facade of a technically independent Ukrainian republic was maintained for some years after the Soviet victory. When the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was formed in 1923, this step was rationalized by the necessity of a closer alliance of free and independent socialist states threatened by capitalist encirclement. The Union was deliberately given a supranational name in order to avoid the impression that it was a continuation of the tsarist empire. It was even assumed at the time that in the event of successful communist revolutions in other countries, outside former Russian imperial boundaries, they, too, would join the USSR. The constituent republics retained, on paper, the right of secession from the federation, and hence nominal sovereignty. Furthermore, genuine concessions were made to the non-Russian nationalities in the linguistic and cultural sphere.
Lenin's brilliant nationality policy, which combined centralized political control with flexibility in matters of administrative structure and language, was a key factor in the restoration of a unified Russian imperial state in a new form. It permitted Ukrainian and other non-Russian communists to serve the regime in good faith, without the sense of being traitors to their own nations. (Ukrainian Bolsheviks were few in number, but they were politically important if Soviet rule in Ukraine was to be given a local colour.) This policy also had a confusing and divisive effect on the forces of the Ukrainian national resistance. Lenin's apparent broadmindedness compared favourably with the rigid chauvinism of the Russian "Whites" and the non-recognition of Ukraine by the Western powers. In such circumstances, many sincere patriots who had originally supported the independent Ukrainian People's Republic were inclined to accept the "Soviet platform," if not as an ideal, at least as a tolerable solution. The essential point in the context of the present discussion is the fact that in all these political dealings of the post-1917 revolutionary era there cannot be found the slightest hint of reference to the Pereiaslav tradition. Why, then, we may ask, was this obsolete concept revived with great fanfare in 1954?
The answer to the question is that, after the Second World War, the old Leninist ideological devices no longer sufficed to legitimize the subordinate status of Ukraine within the Russian-dominated Soviet Union. The argument of the so-called capitalist encirclement lost its plausibility. Owing to the extension of Soviet control over East Central Europe, the Ukrainian SSR no longer bordered on any capitalist country. Its western neighbours -- Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania -- had all become members of the socialist bloc. There was nothing in the theoretical tenets of Marxism-Leninism that could justify the inferior position of Ukraine in comparison with the socialist countries outside the USSR. Two solutions would have been logical on Marxist-Leninist premises: either the incorporation of the states of East Central Europe into the Soviet federation or the dissolution of the Soviet Union in its present form and the creation of a new alliance system of technically independent socialist nations. For obvious reasons, neither alternative appealed to the Kremlin.
Furthermore, a gradual and unacknowledged but undeniable erosion of Marxist-Leninist ideology had taken place in the Soviet Union. The Utopian faith in an imminent world revolution, international solidarity of the proletariat, and the future socialist paradise on earth, which during the early post-1917 years had exercised a genuine fascination, and which, by a quasi-religious fervour, had bound together Russian and non-Russian communists, lost much of its actual motivating power. The decline of revolutionary Marxism-Leninism was paralleled by a resurgence of Russian nationalism. Beginning in the 1930s, and particularly during the war years, Stalin made a deliberate appeal to Russian national emotions and state traditions. The Russification of the Soviet system entailed an undesirable and dangerous side effect: it was bound to provoke a nationalist reaction among the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union. In the case of the smaller nationalities, their disaffection could be held in check by the sheer physical preponderance of the Russian massif. Because of the size of its population, its economic resources, and its strategic geographical location, Ukraine presented a special and most sensitive problem. The resuscitation of the Pereiaslav myth is to be understood as an attempt to find a solution to this predicament.
The official revival of the Pereiaslav concept in the Soviet Union occurred in the 1950s. There exists, however, a pre-Second World War precedent that is worthy of attention, inasmuch as it provides a link between the tsarist and Soviet versions of the myth. In 1938 there appeared in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, a pamphlet by Vasilii Vitalievich Shulgin entitled Anshlus i my (We and the Anschluss).5 Before discussing its content, a few words should be said about the author. Shulgin played a fairly prominent political role during the last decade of imperial Russia as editor of the Kiev daily, Kievlianin, as a gifted and prolific publicist, and as a leading spokesman of the right-wing Nationalist party in the Duma. A native of Ukraine, Shulgin was a dedicated advocate of "one-and-indivisible" Russia, and he specialized in combating the Ukrainian movement. (A second cousin of Vasilii Vitalievich, Oleksander Mykolaiovych Shulhyn -- the Ukrainian form of the name -- was to serve as minister of foreign affairs in the government of the Ukrainian People's Republic, and later became a noted emigre Ukrainian scholar. Such divisions within one family were not uncommon.) In his 1938 pamphlet, Shulgin compared Hitler's recent Anschluss of Austria to Germany with the Pereiaslav event as examples of the voluntary unification of two previously separated branches of one people in a single state. What matters is neither Shulgin's misinterpretation of the historical Pereiaslav agreement nor his questionable reading of the Anschluss, but the underlying political thesis. He argued that the decisive factor in the relations between North and South Russia (i.e., Russia and Ukraine) was national consciousness. Provided that the South or Little Russians possessed a pan-Russian awareness, they would be drawn irresistibly toward a merger with the North, as the Austrian Germans were drawn toward a union with the Reich. In that case, a temporary political separation of the Russian South from the North -- resulting, for instance, from a foreign occupation -- would have no lasting effect. If, on the other hand, "the southern Russians were to become Ukrainians, the cause of Oleksander Shulhyn would win,... the wheel of history would be turned back, and northern Russia would become again what it was before Bohdan Khmelnytsky, that is, Russia would be reduced to the level of Muscovy."
Shulgin's subsequent personal fate is of symptomatic interest. Apprehended by Soviet security organs in Yugoslavia at the end of the war, he was taken to Moscow and tried for counter-revolutionary activities. Upon his release in 1956, Shulgin addressed several open letters to the Russian emigres, advising them to accept the regime which had brought greatness to the Motherland. Thus the former admirer of Stolypin and ideologue of Denikin's Volunteer Army ended his long career as an apologist for Soviet communism. One can only wonder to what extent this conversion was facilitated by Shulgin's lifelong commitment to Russian nationalism and virulent anti-Ukrainianism.
There is no telling whether Shulgin's ideas actually influenced the shaping of Soviet policy regarding Ukraine, but the similarity is unmistakable. The gist of the 1954 "Theses" is the concept of a preordained unity of fate of the Ukrainian and Russian peoples, rooted in the common tradition of Kievan Rus' and extending through all historical epochs, with the Pereiaslav agreement as the pivotal, symbolic event. The Ukrainian people are to be educated in the spirit of complete, unconditional solidarity with the Russians, sharing with the latter a common political consciousness and "high" culture. Assuming the existence of a total Russian-Ukrainian solidarity, the question of specific Ukrainian values and interests, which perchance might not coincide with the Russian, is prevented from arising: the Ukrainians are not to be concerned with the status of their nation, but rather are to glory in Russia's achievements as their own. It is true that the Soviet regime recognizes in principle a distinct Ukrainian nationality, which tsarist Russia denied, and a Ukrainian SSR continues to exist as an administrative entity which even retains some ornamental trappings of statehood. But the difference is perhaps more apparent than real, inasmuch as the Soviet regime is careful to drain Ukrainian national identity of all independent, vital substance and denies the Ukrainian republic any sphere of meaningful self-government. A Ukrainian nation whose entire destiny is to play forever the role of younger brother and accomplice of Russia differs little from pre-revolutionary Little Russia -- a tribal branch of a single Russian nation.
The effectiveness of the Pereiaslav myth requires eradication of the incompatible features of the Ukrainian historical tradition, those contradicting the dogma of perennial Russian-Ukrainian harmony. The historical memory of the Ukrainian people is to be pressed into a prefabricated mould: a large part of the record is to be expunged, while other parts undergo various more or less subtle manipulations. National consciousness always possesses a historical dimension. This is the reason for the Soviet regime's extraordinary watchfulness in all matters pertaining to Ukrainian historical studies and writing, both academic and popular, including historical fiction.
Under Soviet conditions, it is impossible to challenge official doctrines overtly. This does not mean, however, that Ukrainian society, and especially the intellectual circles, have accepted the Pereiaslav myth and all that it implies. In this connection, it is worth quoting a long passage from a recent statement by a Soviet Ukrainian dissident, Iurii Badzo:
The falsification of Ukrainian history in contemporary Soviet historiography is not limited to an individual period, but encompasses the entire history of the Ukrainian people. It negates our historical development as an autonomous process and subordinates interpretation to the political interests of the Russian state. The concept of the "Old Russian nationality," which is merely an ideological twin of the theory of the "one Soviet people," completely suppresses the early feudal period in Ukraine's history. . . . [For the period] before the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the reader will find nothing Ukrainian in Soviet literature: no territory, no language, no culture, not even an ethnos. The scientifically and historically absurd idea is being asserted that, from the ninth to the thirteenth century, the Eastern Slavs constituted one people, one ethnos, which, of course, was Russian: the Ukrainians and Belorussians [allegedly] appeared only in the fourteenth-fifteenth centuries. They appeared for no other purpose than to "dream" about "reunification" with Russia. All peoples of the world aspired, and still aspire, toward national independence. Only the Ukrainians and the Belorussians are an exception: their dream was to "reunite" with Russia. We have reached the point where the Soviet press and literature write about Ukraine's wish to reunite with Russia "in a single state." This is a gross distortion of historical truth even from a formal point of view. Documents testify that the Ukrainian government headed by B. Khmelnytsky, in negotiating an agreement with the Russian state's representatives, reserved for itself substantial political autonomy. The conception of "reunification" implies the idea of one people, and in essence it denies the Ukrainian people the right to a separate, independent state.... The falsification of Ukrainian history by Russian great-power nationalism is a most important factor in the national oppression of the Ukrainian people.6Only the future will tell whether these insidious efforts to manipulate the historical consciousness of the Ukrainian people will succeed or fail. One prognosis can be ventured, however: the Pereiaslav agreement is a topic which, besides its scholarly historical interest, is likely to retain for a long time also a political dimension. This situation enhances the relevance of John Basarab's work, in which the author has candidly and competently undertaken to set straight the historiographical record of the Pereiaslav problem.
Notes 1. S. Divovych, "Razhovor Velykorossii s Malorossiieiu," in O.I. Biletsky. ed., Khrestomatiia davnoi ukrainskoi literatury, 3d ed. (Kiev 1967), 474. In my translation I have somewhat simplified the baroque wording of the original.
2. Ukrainofil, "Eshcheobukrainofilstve,'' Russkoe bogatstvo, part 2, no. 2 (1882): 11.
3. K. Levytsky, Istoriia politychnoi dumky halytskykh ukraintsiv 1848-1914 (Lviv 1926), 720.
4. D. Doroshenko, Istoriia Ukrainy 1917-1923, v. 2, Ukrainska Hetmanska Derzhava 1918 roku (Uzhhorod 1930), 83.
5. V.V. Shulgin, Anshlus i my (Belgrade 1938). Summary and quotations are derived from W. Ba.czkowski's review article, "Perspektywy anschlussu.. . rosyjsko-ukrairiskiego," Biuletyn Polsko-Ukrainski (Warsaw) 7, no. 35, 18 September 1938, 377-8.
6. Iu. Badzo, Vidkrytyi lyst do Verkhovnoi Rady Soiuzu RSR ta Tsentralnoho Komitetu KPRS (New York 1980), 17-18.