Ivan L. Rudnytsky, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History, 1987. Unpublished manuscript.
Trends in Ukrainian Political Thought
Ivan L. Rudnytsky Delineating the Subject
In discussing the development of Ukrainian political ideas, I intend to restrict myself to the modern era, corresponding to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This chronological limitation is suggested by the structure of the subject itself. Pre-modern social thought and political ideologies diverge substantially from those of the last and the present centuries, and their study would require a different methodological approach. A few indications must suffice. Political consciousness in medieval Ukraine (Kievan Rus' and the Galician-Volhynian Kingdom) was expressed primarily in religious-ecclesiastical and dynastic terms. The political consciousness of the Ukrainian Cossack state in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was "estate"-bound, taking the form of a defence of the rights and liberties of the Cossack class; in addition, the ecclesiastical and dynastic elements continued to play a major role.
In contrast with previous ages, Ukrainian political ideas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries evolved within a social setting where the old distinctions of hereditary estate were disappearing, and the traditional rural way of life was gradually being undermined and superseded by the rise of industrial mass society. The dominant themes in Ukrainian social thought of the past century and a half are nationalism, democracy, liberalism, conservatism, socialism, communism, and fascism. All are typically "modern" ideologies, common to all European peoples, although in Ukraine they assumed a specific shape. The peculiar character of modern Ukrainian political and social thought was largely determined by the condition of a people living under foreign domination and struggling to establish their own identity as a nation. This peculiarity becomes especially evident if we compare the development of Ukrainian and Russian ideologies. Ukraine was affected by Russian intellectual and political trends such as Decembrism, Pan-Slavism, Populism, and Marxism, but in the Ukrainian environment all these assumed a distinct character. But Ukraine received its ideological inspirations not only from or through Russia. Polish and Austro-German influences, as well as channels of direct intellectual communication with the West and certain purely indigenous phenomena, were also important.
First, however, a few brief observations about the state of research on the history of modern Ukrainian political and social thought are in order. The latter is still largely an unexplored, virgin land. So far, not a single major scholarly work has been written on the subject. Concerning the former, the essay by Iuliian Okhrymovych, Rozvytok ukrainskoi natsionalno-politychnoi dumky (The Development of Ukrainian National Political Thought, Lviv 1922), is but a brilliant sketch; moreover, it ends in the 1870s. Other works on the history of Ukrainian literature, historiography, and philosophy, such as the excellent study by Dmytro Chyzhevsky, Narysy z istorii filosofii na Ukraini (Outlines of the History of Philosophy in Ukraine, Prague 1931), are general and only partly relevant to our subject. Of basic importance are original sources: the writings of Ukrainian social theorists and publicists, and the programs and policy statements of political parties and movements. However, there are no editions of the collected works of such leading Ukrainian political thinkers as Mykhailo Drahomanov and Viacheslav Lypynsky, and the student is forced to search for the original editions, which often are not easily accessible. Publications of documents pertaining to the ideologies and activities of Ukrainian parties and other political organizations are, with few exceptions, also non-existent.
This unsatisfactory state of affairs is the result of adverse circumstances. Until World War I, the nineteenth century, historically speaking, was still contemporary and hence unsuitable for detached scholarly research. Discretion was also advisable to avoid the intervention of tsarist authorities. A very hopeful start in studying the history of social movements and thought was made in Soviet Ukraine during the 1920s, but these beginnings were cut short by the advent of Stalinism. After a lapse of three decades, studies in that field have been resumed in the Ukrainian SSR in recent years, but only on a modest scale and in a most diffident manner. Among the symposia which have appeared are Z istorii filosofskoi dumky na Ukraini (From the History of Philosophical Thought in Ukraine) and Z istorii ekonomichnoi dumky na Ukraini (From the History of Economic Thought in Ukraine). But the quality of most articles is not impressive. Particularly distressing is the fact that, with rare exceptions, the Academy of Sciences and other scholarly institutions of the Ukrainian SSR do not publish the original works of pre-1917 Ukrainian social thinkers, philosophers, historians and economists, even of those who are officially labelled "revolutionary democrats" and "progressives." The same applies to documents pertaining to the history of political movements. In this respect, there is a striking difference between Russia and Ukraine. For instance, the works of the pre-revolutionary, non-Marxist Russian historians Solovev and Kliuchevsky have been brought out in new mass editions; Russian scholarly institutions feel no compunction about publishing the memoirs of tsarist statesmen, such as Valuev or Witte, not to mention the very extensive documentary and research literature on the history of nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary movements. It would appear that the communist regime discourages scholarly research which might strengthen the Ukrainian community's awareness of its intellectual continuity with its own past.
There are certain indications that valuable unpublished materials on the history of pre-revolutionary Ukrainian political movements and social thought are still hidden in Soviet archives. Conditions under the tsarist regime, especially prior to 1905, were such that many tracts, pamphlets, memoranda, and satirical poems circulated only in manuscript form without reaching the press. It is to be hoped that some day such materials will become available and the history of modern Ukrainian social thought will be seen in a new light, namely as a movement of ideas more continuous, comprehensive, and cohesive than it appears at present.
The Fourfold Structure
The development of modern Ukrainian social and political thought cannot be understood properly if it is visualized as a simple lineal progression. This error has often been made by Ukrainian writers who, by strongly identifying themselves with a particular trend or school of thought, have presented it as the mainstream, while denying the validity and legitimacy of the other trends in their nation's intellectual history.
This bias is particularly evident in the way in which various authors have approached the history of the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917-21. For one group of writers, the one and only true expression of the will of the Ukrainian people was the Ukrainian People's Republic, i.e., the regime represented successively by Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, and Symon Petliura. According to another interpretation, however, a "real" Ukrainian state existed only during the Hetmanate of 1918, headed by Pavlo Skoropadsky. And there exists a third school for which the only legitimate spokesman of the Ukrainian toiling masses, the workers and peasants, was the government of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Each of the three schools tries to monopolize the history of the Ukrainian Revolution (at least in its positive and constructive aspects), while vociferously disparaging the rival trends. The inadequacy of these one-sided approaches is obvious: the history of the Ukrainian Revolution is the totality of the forces which in fact were active among the Ukrainian people during those years. This observation ought to be applied also in the broader context of the history of modern Ukrainian social and political thought.
The basic heuristic assumption of this paper is the following. The development of modern Ukrainian social thought is to be understood not as a single stream, but rather as a process containing several parallel and distinct, although correlated and interdependent, trends. A conscientious researcher has the obligation, in spite of his personal preferences, not to favour exclusively one trend, but to try to comprehend them all, being aware of their positive contributions and their shortcomings and failures.
The proposed approach can be illustrated by examples drawn from the history of other countries. Since the seventeenth century, English political thought has been dominated by the polarities of Cavalier and Roundhead, Tory and Whig, Conservative and Liberal, and finally Conservative and Labour. In German history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we find the polarity of Catholic Austria and Protestant Prussia, each claiming to represent the "true" Germany. In nineteenth-century France the parallel trends were Legitimism, Orleanism, Bonapartism, Republicanism, and Socialism, none of which could be said to be more French than any other.
In modern Ukrainian social and political thought we can identify four basic trends: the democratic-populist, the conservative, the communist, and the integral-nationalist. The first two exclusively dominated the scene before World War I, while the last two emerged after the Revolution. These four trends can be categorized in two ways: first, populism and communism form the "left," and conservatism and integral nationalism form the "right"; and second, there is a link between populism and conservatism in that both are pluralistic, while communism and integral nationalism share a totalitarian outlook, as the diagram below shows.
LEFT RIGHT PLURALISM Populism Conservatism TOTALITARIANISM Communism Nationalism The proposed fourfold division provides an "orientation map" to aid one through the maze of Ukrainian political movements and schools of social thought. The division, however, should be used flexibly, as each of the four major trends contained -- either in chronological sequence or contemporaneously -- a number of parties, factions, and groups, and a variety of shades of opinion. Ukrainian political life has often been charged with a tendency toward excessive factionalism, but this was more pronounced in east-central than in western Ukraine, because the tsarist regime, at least prior to 1905, denied the Ukrainian people the opportunities for free civic self-expression which existed under the constitutional Austrian regime. As a result, in Russian Ukraine political movements were driven underground, which reduced them to small, informal circles and splinter groups, frequently isolated from each other. This applies all the more to conditions under Soviet rule, where, even during the comparatively liberal 1920s, unorthodox political ideas could be expressed only in an allusive manner by using "Aesopian language" in poetry, fiction, literary criticism, and works of scholarship.
The very fact that the Ukrainian people had been living in different states (the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires before World War I, and the USSR, Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia during the inter-war period) led to the formation of political organizations on a sectional basis, determined by the specific conditions of each state. Nevertheless -- and this point needs to be stressed -- all four major trends of political thought were all-Ukrainian in their nature, encompassing, with varying degrees of intensity, all territorial sections. For instance, outstanding representatives of populist thought, Drahomanov and Hrushevsky, who were natives of east-central Ukraine, exercised a formative impact on the development of Galicia. There exists a mistaken opinion that integral nationalism was peculiar to western Ukrainian lands only. It is obvious that this trend, which crystallized in the 1920s and 1930s, could not penetrate Soviet Ukraine overtly. However, the chief ideologist of integral nationalism, Dmytro Dontsov, was an eastern Ukrainian emigre, and among the leading personalities of the movement we find several who were of eastern Ukrainian background.
As a final methodological observation, I confess that I do not subscribe to the Marxist theory which views political ideologies as direct reflections of economic class interests. It would be easy, for example, to ascribe conservatism to the landowning gentry, or communism to the industrial working class, but such an interpretation would amount to an oversimplification. In Soviet polemical literature one often encounters the term "bourgeois nationalism," but this is a form of abuse rather than a useful category. Ukrainian integral nationalism, in whatever way one wants to judge it, is not the ideological superstructure of a (largely nonexistent) national bourgeoisie. It is self-evident that social and political ideas do not develop out of thin air, but in a concrete social setting. However, the relationship between trends of thought, on the one hand, and social classes and economic interest groups, on the other, is highly complex; ideologies, although to some extent conditioned by the social environment, possess also an autonomous dynamic of their own. A key role in the formulation and development of political ideas was played in Ukraine, as in other modern East European nations, by the intelligentsia -- a peculiar social stratum which transcends economic classes. Thus we find contradictory schools of political philosophy supported by intellectuals whose personal social background and living conditions were often quite similar.
The paper will now proceed to an individual discussion of the four major trends noted above. The scope of this study allows us to characterize them only in briefest outline.
Populism
Modern democratic political and social ideas appeared in Ukraine in the 1820s in the wake of the Decembrist movement. A group particularly relevant from the viewpoint of the evolution of Ukrainian thought was the Society of United Slavs, whose program combined implacable hostility to serfdom with the idea of a democratic Pan-Slav federation.
The democratic-populist trend came of age with the Cyrillo-Methodian Society, a circle of young intellectuals in Kiev in 1846-7. The chief theorist of the Society was Mykola Kostomarov (1817-85), a gifted historian who later founded the populist school in Ukrainian historiography. Also associated with the Society was the poet Taras Shevchenko (1814-61), whose genius has made him the most influential figure in the intellectual life of modern Ukraine.
The new element in the ideology of the Cyrillo-Methodian Society, in comparison with that of its Decembrist predecessors, was Ukrainian nationalism. This was due to the influence of the Ukrainian cultural revival of the early decades of the century, mostly connected with Kharkiv University, which, although non-political in nature, awakened both an enthusiasm for the "people" and an awareness of a Ukrainian ethno-cultural identity. The program of the Cyrillo-Methodian Society was a synthesis of Romantic nationalism with the radical political and social ideas derived from the Decembrist movement, infused with the spirit of ardent Christian faith. The Cyrillo-Methodians wanted to base their country's national rebirth on the emancipation of the peasant masses; their goal was an independent Ukrainian republic within a federation of Slavic nations and a new social order incorporating the Christian principles of freedom, justice, and equality. The world-view of the Cyrillo-Methodian Society implied also an interpretation of history in which the democratic tradition of Ukraine (as embodied in the Cossacks) was favourably contrasted with aristocratic Poland and autocratic Muscovy-Russia.
The tenets of the Cyrillo-Methodian Society determined the ideological orientation of the Ukrainian national movement in the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. From the 1860s to 1905 the organizational basis of the movement was the network of hromady ("communities"), semi-conspirational circles of the liberal-populist intelligentsia. The leader of the hromady movement was Volodymyr Antonovych (1834-1908), a distinguished historian and founder of the Kiev historical school. Beginning in the 1860s populism also affected Galicia, where its supporters were known as narodovtsi.
The outstanding Ukrainian political thinker of the second half of the century was Mykhailo Drahomanov (1841-95). What differentiated him from the Cyrillo-Methodians was his consistently positivist and secular philosophical outlook. Drahomanov was a non-Marxist socialist, influenced by Proudhon and close to Western evolutionary socialism. He produced elaborate proposals for a constitutional reorganization of Russia on federalist lines, with strong guarantees of individual civil rights and of self-government for regions and nationalities. Drahomanov hoped to secure Ukraine's national interests through a federalization of the existing states, Russia and Austria-Hungary.
The first Ukrainian political parties came into existence in Galicia in the 1890s. The two main parties were the National Democrats and the Radicals. The former was a broad coalition whose platform contained the planks of democratic nationalism and social reform. The latter, founded under the direct inspiration of Drahomanov, was a party of agrarian socialists and militant anti-clericals. The outstanding exponent of democratic thought in Galicia was Ivan Franko (1856-1916). An encyclopedic mind, Franko distinguished himself as a poet, novelist, historian, literary scholar, critic, and brilliant publicist. A co-founder of the Radical Party, he gradually moved away from the federalist teachings of his teacher Drahomanov and became one of the first exponents of the idea of a fully independent, democratic Ukrainian state.
In east-central Ukraine, embryonic political parties appeared only at the turn of the century and especially after the Revolution of 1905, but their existence remained precarious. The leading groupings were the Social Democrats, the Socialist Revolutionaries, and the Radical Democrats, who in 1917 changed their name to Socialist Federalists. All three were subdivisions of the broad democratic-populist trend; this applies also to the the Ukrainian Social Democrats, despite their official adoption of Marxism. The most prominent intellectual of that generation was Mykhailo Hrushevsky (1866-1934), a disciple of Antonovych, the last and greatest of Ukrainian populist historians, also eminent as an organizer of scholarly research and as a political publicist. Hrushevsky was originally associated with the Radical Democrats, but gradually moved to the left, and during the Revolution joined the Socialist Revolutionaries. Another noteworthy figure was Mykola Porsh (1877-1944), the Social-Democratic theorist who ably defended the ideal of Ukrainian autonomy with economic arguments.
In the thinking of all shades of the democratic-populist movement we can notice two distinct components: a striving for civic and national liberty and for social justice. Of the two, the latter component was probably more pronounced than the former. A concern for the socio-economic interests of the downtrodden masses, combined with a strong egalitarian bias, was the ideological leitmotif of the whole trend. On the other hand, Drahomanov's insistence on the importance of an adequate and well-planned democratic institutional framework did not leave a durable imprint. The desire for liberty was authentic in Ukrainian populism, but its content was primarily negative: an intense loathing of the oppressive features of tsarist autocracy. The sense of the "rules of the game" in an effective democratic system, and of the restraints which representative government necessarily implies, remained underdeveloped.
The culmination of the democratic-populist trend came in 1917. Ukraine's revolutionary parliament, the Central Rada, was the direct outcome of a line of development which started with the Cyrillo-Methodian Society. The Central Rada proclaimed the Ukrainian People's Republic, whose first president was Hrushevsky. After the interlude of a conservative regime in 1918, the so-called Hetmanate, the Ukrainian People's Republic was restored by the end of that year. It was headed now by a collective Directory whose chairman was Volodymyr Vynnychenko (1880-1951), a Social Democrat, noted as a novelist and playwright. He was succeeded by Symon Petliura (1879-1926), a former Social-Democratic journalist. Petliura's name is associated in history with the military struggle in 1919-20 for the preservation of an independent, democratic Ukrainian state.
The inter-war period was a time of decline for Ukrainian democratic forces. They were forcibly repressed in Soviet Ukraine, although during the 1920s intellectuals with a democratic-populist background continued to play an influential role in the country's cultural life. In western Ukraine, which had been annexed by Poland, the traditional democratic parties remained the official spokesmen of the Ukrainian community until the outbreak of the Second World War. But their position was challenged and undermined by the rise first of communism and later of integral nationalism. The decline of Ukrainian democracy resulted in part from the fact that it had to bear the blame for the failure of Ukrainian independent statehood in the years 1917 -- 21, and in part from the general crisis of European democratic systems and the ascendency of left- and right-wing totalitarian regimes.
Conservatism
The first expression of modern Ukrainian conservative thought was Istoriia Rusov (the Rusy being the Ukrainian people, as heirs of old Kievan Rus'), an anonymous historical-political treatise written about 1800. In the form of a historical narrative, embellished with fictional features, this work formulated a concept of Ukrainian "historical legitimism": by the Treaty of Pereiaslav (1654), the Ukrainian nation voluntarily accepted the suzerainty of the Russian tsar under a guarantee of full self-government; the agreement was violated many times by Russia, but this did not affect Ukraine's imprescriptible claim to the restoration of its constitutional rights, which the author equates with the traditional liberties and privileges of the Cossack class. The Istoriia Rusov, widely circulated in manuscript form, enjoyed great popularity and exercised a lasting influence on Ukrainian historical and political thinking. This influence can be traced in the programmatic documents of the Cyrillo-Methodian Society and in the writings of Shevchenko. The work was representative of the way of thinking of a large part of the nobility in Left-Bank Ukraine, descendants of the former Cossack officer class. Dreams about the restoration of an autonomous Cossack state lingered on in those circles until approximately the middle of the century.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, Ukrainian landowners inclined toward conservatism found an outlet in the institutions of zemstvo local self-government; they also financially supported Ukrainian cultural activities and kept in touch with the moderate elements of the hromady movement. However, the conservative forces were unable to oppose the dominant democratic-populist trend with any consistent political program of their own. Historical legitimism and the concept of "state rights," based on the Treaty of Pereiaslav, had become obsolete, and no new idea was found to take their place. This failure can, perhaps, be explained by the Ukrainian nobility's dynastic loyalty to the Russian throne; such allegiance did not preclude Ukrainian territorial patriotism, but it deprived the nobility's political thinking of a focal point located within their own nation.
An exception to the intellectual sterility of conservatism in that era was Panteleimon Kulish (1819-97), a brilliant and versatile writer. A former Cyrillo-Methodian, Kulish gradually adopted a rightist position from which he criticized the comrades of his youth, Shevchenko and Kosto-marov. Kulish was sensitive to the weak spots of populist ideology: the naive adoration of the peasant, the condoning of destructive and retrograde popular revolts, and the prejudice against the elitist elements that are necessary for the cultural and political life of a civilized community. However, he was unable to provide a constructive alternative to populism, and his idiosyncratic and bitter polemics only caused his isolation.
An interesting attempt to revive the historical-juridical program of the Itoriia Rusov was advanced, at the turn of the century, by Mykola Mikhnovsky (1873-1924), a lawyer from Kharkiv. In his pamphlet, Samostiina Ukraina (Independent Ukraine, 1900), he called on his compatriots to resume the struggle for the restoration of the "Pereiaslav Constitution." His appeal, however, met with only a very limited response because of the populist preference for natural rights based on ethnic nationalism over historical rights and legalistic arguments.
In Galicia, where the Greek Catholic Church was the main Ukrainian national institution, conservatism was stronger than in east-central Ukraine. The Greek Catholic clergy formed a semi-hereditary class, which in its way of life resembled a lesser gentry. The Galician Ukrainians made their political debut during the 1848-9 Revolution. Their leadership was at that time predominantly clerical, and their policy was pro-Habsburg and socially moderate. The so-called Old Ruthenians or Russophiles were an expression of the conservative trend in the second half of the century. The rise of populism and modern Ukrainian nationalism gradually reduced the Old Ruthenian faction to insignificance. But the more moderate elements among the narodovtsi were also tinged with conservatism. The same can be said of their successors, the National Democrats, Galicia's leading Ukrainian party, organized in the 1890s. Galician conservatism was not so much a deliberate philosophy as a mental attitude which could go hand-in-hand with democratic principles. This attitude was revealed in a dedication to legal, parliamentary methods of political struggle, a down-to-earth sobriety, and an instinctive respect for established authority. The Galician conservative mentality manifested itself during the years of Revolution and struggle for national independence. The "Western Provinces of the Ukrainian People's Republic" of 1918-19 officially adhered to the same democratic-populist principles as the Ukrainian People's Republic on the Dnieper, but in practice the government of Western Ukraine pursued a moderate policy, avoided extremist social experiments, and showed a high regard for law and order.
The culmination of the conservative trend in east-central Ukraine was the regime of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky in 1918. The Hetmanate undoubtedly owed its existence to the German occupation, but it also enjoyed the support of the conservative and moderate strata of Ukrainian society, which were dissatisfied with the radicalism of the Central Rada. One has to take into account that after the fall of the Russian monarchy conservative elements in Ukraine had become free from the bond of allegiance to the Romanov dynasty and were now able to direct their loyalty to a Ukrainian state which claimed to be a revival of the traditional Cossack body politic of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Upon the withdrawal of the German army, the Hetmanate was easily overwhelmed by a new surge of democratic-populist forces, but conservatism had at least asserted its presence in the spectrum of Ukrainian political trends.
One of the surprises of recent Ukrainian history is the sudden flowering of conservative thought during the inter-war period. This movement of ideas took place in the western Ukrainian lands outside the USSR and in the Ukrainian diaspora of Western Europe and North America. The development was largely due to the impact of Viacheslav Lypynsky (1882-1931), who belonged to the Polish nobility of the Right Bank and early in life had identified himself with the Ukrainian national cause. In his historical writings, some of which were published before the war, Lypynsky advanced a startlingly new interpretation of Ukrainian history. Populist historians from Kostomarov to Hrushevsky had viewed the great anti-Polish revolt of the mid-seventeenth century, headed by Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, as an elemental rising of the masses. Lypynsky, on the other hand, stressed the contribution of the upper classes, the Ruthenian gentry of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth who provided the Cossacks with an educated and politically sophisticated leadership, and he interpreted the Khmelnytsky revolution as a process whose goal was the creation of a Ukrainian Cossack state. The experiences of the 1917 Revolution and the failure of Ukrainian independence turned Lypynsky into a sociologist and political thinker. His sociological concepts, although essentially original, in certain ways resemble those of Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca; his underlying philosophy, however, is close to that of Burke and Tocqueville. Lypynsky insisted on the irreplaceable function of the elite in any organized community, and especially in every state. He believed that healthy social development requires a balance between the forces of change and stability, liberty and authority. His vision of the future independent Ukraine was that of a constitutional monarchy with a differentiated class structure under the hegemony of a class of prosperous farmers. While some of Lypynsky's ideas were obviously anachronistic (for instance, his advocacy of the claims of the Skoropadsky family), many of his deep insights ought to be considered a durable enrichment of Ukrainian political and social thought. Lypynsky was the central figure of a group of distinguished intellectuals among whom the following deserve to be mentioned individually: the historians Dmytro Doroshenko (1882-1951), Stepan Tomashivsky (1875-1930), and Vasyl Kuchabsky (1895-1945) (all of whom were also active as publicists), and Osyp Nazaruk (1883-1940), probably the most brilliant Ukrainian political journalist of the inter-war era.
Thus we can state the paradox that of the four major trends of Ukrainian political thought, conservatism, which was the weakest in physical strength and mass support, was the one that made the greatest intellectual contribution in the course of the present century.
Communism
Soviet historiography has not succeeded, despite great efforts, in tracing the origins of Ukrainian communism to pre-revolutionary roots. To be sure, Bolshevik groups existed in Ukraine before 1917, but they drew their membership from the Russian and Russified Jewish urban ethnic minorities. The few ethnic Ukrainian Bolsheviks stood completely outside their country's national-liberation movement. It is impossible to point to a single Bolshevik who, prior to 1917, made the slightest contribution to Ukrainian letters, scholarship, or social thought.
Ukrainian communism is an offspring -- although the fact is hotly denied in Soviet historical literature -- of the national revolution of 1917. It was the strength and the mass character of the Ukrainian liberation movement that induced Lenin and the Communist Party leadership to give some consideration to Ukrainian national aspirations. The first Soviet government in Ukraine, the so-called People's Secretariat, was formed in December 1917 for the purpose of countering the Central Rada. If there had been no independent, democratic Ukrainian People's Republic, it is very doubtful whether a Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic would ever have come into existence.
Bolsheviks of Ukrainian background, however, did not remain untouched by their country's national rebirth. While retaining loyalty to the Party and the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, they also began to think of themselves as Ukrainian. The local Bolshevik groups in Ukraine were given a common organization in 1918, although the Communist Party (bolshevik) of Ukraine (CP[b]U) remained a regional branch of the Russian Party, completely subordinated to the central leadership in Moscow. The national element in the CP(b)U was strengthened by the influx of some former Ukrainian Social Democrats and Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries (the left fringe of the democratic-populist trend) who in the course of the Revolution had broken away from their parent parties. Thus the old Bolsheviks of Ukrainian background, whose national consciousness had been activated, as well as the ex-SDs and ex-SRs who had turned communist, gradually gave the CP(b)U a more pronounced local colour, which it had originally lacked. Nevertheless Ukrainian nationals remained, until well into the 1920s, a numerical minority among the members of the CP(b)U.
Communism is the only one among the four major trends of Ukrainian political thought which may claim to have succeeded. After all, there exists today a Soviet Ukrainian Republic, while both the Ukrainian People's Republic of Hrushevsky and Petliura and the Ukrainian State of Hetman Skoropadsky collapsed in a rather short time. But this apparent communist triumph has one very questionable side: it was due primarily to Soviet Russian military intervention. There is, in this respect, a basic difference between Russian and Ukrainian communism. In Russia the Bolsheviks were the legitimate heirs of their nation's revolutionary tradition, and they had conquered and retained power by their own devices. In Ukraine, on the other hand, the communist regime was only weakly rooted in the native tradition, and it could not have been established without the "fraternal aid" of the Russian Red Army. Thus, Ukrainian communists have never been masters in their own house, and they were condemned to the thankless role of intermediaries between their own people and the overlords in Moscow.
Still, the 1920s witnessed a considerable growth of Ukrainian communism. The younger generation of the intelligentsia in the Ukrainian SSR felt that the traditional populist-democratic outlook had become outdated and provincial. Communist ideology had an appeal for them because of its dynamism, supposedly scientific foundations, and world-wide perspectives. On the Ukrainian communists devolved, by force of circumstance, the defence of their homeland's national and state interests. At that time Soviet Ukraine still possessed a measure of effective autonomy, especially in educational and cultural matters, and it was possible to believe in good faith that the process of building a Ukrainian socialist nation was under way. The cultural achievements -- in letters, scholarship, and art -- of the decade 1923-33 were impressive. This cultural work was largely carried out by non-party intellectuals who were still schooled in the older democratic tradition, but the movement was officially sponsored by Ukrainian communists. An achievement which must be credited to them particularly was the Ukrainization of urban life. The pre-revolutionary Ukrainian movement was ideologically and organizationally oriented toward the countryside, while the cities resembled alien enclaves. Now, for the first time in modern history, Ukrainian culture began to assume an urban character, while the cities gradually became more Ukrainian in language and general tenor.
Evidence of the vitality of Ukrainian communism in the 1920s was the fact that it was able to make recruits outside the frontiers of the USSR, where it was not backed by the might of the state. Communist and pro-Soviet sympathies were very noticeable among Ukrainians in Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia, emigres in the countries of Western Europe, and Ukrainian settlers in the United States and Canada. The appeal of communism -- besides the usual economic grievances -- was to some extent also patriotic: the positive national achievements in the Ukrainian SSR provided an attractive contrast to the oppression and humiliation to which Ukrainians were exposed in other countries, especially under the chauvinistic and vexatious Polish domination of Galicia and Volhynia. The spread of pro-Soviet sympathies also reflected the crisis of the traditional democratic-populist outlook. It was certainly symptomatic that some former leading personalities of the Ukrainian People's Republic, such as Hrushevsky and Vynnychenko, proclaimed their adherence to the Soviet system; the former even returned to the Ukrainian SSR.
But the development of Soviet Ukraine was bound to clash with Moscow's centralism. Violations of state and national-cultural rights of the Ukrainian Republic -- rights nominally guaranteed by the party program and Soviet law -- provoked reactions on the part of some Ukrainian communists. This was the origin of the so-called nationalist deviations within the CP(b)U, which were a frequent occurrence during the 1920s. The very fact that there were communists willing to defend the rights of their nation to the point of conflict with Moscow proved that communism had become a Ukrainian political trend, and not simply a tool of Russian imperialism, as anti-communist Ukrainians have often asserted. At the same time, these deviations illustrated the tragic dilemma of Ukrainian communists: the difficulty of reconciling two incompatible loyalties, to the party with its demands of total conformity on the one hand, and to their own nation on the other.
The basic text of Ukrainian "national" communism was the treatise by Serhii Mazlakh and Vasyl Shakhrai, Do khvyli: Shcho diietsia na Ukraini i z Ukrainoiu (On the Current Situation: What is Happening in Ukraine and to Ukraine, 1919). It contained a drastic critique of the ambiguities of Bolshevik policy toward Ukraine and culminated in the program of an independent Ukrainian Soviet Republic, allied with Soviet Russia and other socialist states on a footing of genuine equality, and of a separate Ukrainian Communist Party, associated with the Russian Party only through the Communist International. Of the numerous nationalist deviations in the CP(b)U perhaps the most interesting intellectually was the case of Mykola Khvylovy. Khvylovy (1893-1933), a noted communist novelist and essayist, turned from a favourite of the regime into its sharp critic. A man endowed with a charismatic personality who exercised a strong influence on the young and the intelligentsia, Khvylovy preached a reorientation of Soviet Ukrainian culture toward the West, away from Russia. Nationalist deviations in the Ukrainian SSR had repercussions among Ukrainian communists in other countries. At one point, the majority of the Central Committee of the underground Communist Party of Western Ukraine sided with the national opposition in the CP(b)U.
The catastrophe of Ukrainian communism came in the 1930s. Virtually the entire old leadership of the CP(b)U was purged by Stalin. Affected were not only those who had been identified previously as deviationists, but also the former loyal upholders of the official party line. One of the early victims, driven to suicide, was Mykola Skrypnyk (1872-1933), the Leninist stalwart, who for many years had been the authoritative interpreter of party policy on nationality issues. Stalin's reign of terror, the artificially induced famine of 1933, and the renewed Russification drive in the Ukrainian SSR delivered a heavy blow to Ukrainian communism. A reliable barometer of the crumbling of communism as an indigenous Ukrainian trend was the rapid and irreversible decline of pro-Soviet sympathies among Ukrainians outside the USSR. Prior to the outbreak of World War II, the communist movement in Galicia and Volhynia had dwindled to the point of insignificance, retaining some influence only in Transcarpathia (in Czechoslovakia), the most backward and nationally most underdeveloped of all Ukrainian lands.
Integral Nationalism
First it is necessary to clarify a point of semantics. In English, the term nationalism is used to designate any conscious striving toward national self-expression. In this broad sense Ukrainian patriots of all ideological hues -- democrats, conservatives, and even "national" communists -- may be described as nationalists. But in Ukrainian political terminology the word is usually given a specialized, partisan meaning to designate an intense, militant, and exclusive devotion to one's own nation. To avoid a possible confusion of terms, and to differentiate clearly between the broad and the specialized meanings of the word nationalism, I shall use, in the latter case, the term integral nationalism.
The nationalist trend originated in the 1920s as a reaction to the defeat of the struggle for Ukrainian national independence. The nucleus of the movement consisted of veterans of the Ukrainian army, especially young officers, who refused to accept the fact of defeat and decided to continue the armed struggle for national liberation by revolutionary, underground means. For this purpose they created, as early as 1920, a secret Ukrainian Military Organization (Ukrainska viiskova orhanizatsiia, UVO), whose commander was Colonel Ievhen Konovalets (1891-1938). The UVO was originally intended to be non-partisan and included men of various political convictions.
The second root of integral nationalism is to be found in the circles of young intellectuals, mostly students, in Lviv, Prague and Vienna. In the two latter cities, large Ukrainian communities existed in the 1920s. The problem passionately debated in these groups was the assessment of the causes of the recent failure of Ukrainian statehood. The leaders of the Ukrainian People's Republic were indicted for their "softness" and the humanitarian and cosmopolitan ideas by which they allegedly had deflected popular energies from the supreme goal of national independence. To remedy the deficiencies of their populist predecessors, the nationalists proposed the fostering of a "new spirit" characterized by uncompromising militancy and resolute assertion of the primacy of national self-interest.
The publicist whose impact was decisive in the formation of the ideology of Ukrainian integral nationalism was Dmytro Dontsov (1883-1973). A native of Dnieper Ukraine, educated in St. Petersburg, Dontsov settled in Lviv, where he became the editor of an influential monthly journal, Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk (Literary and Scientific Herald). A brilliant controversialist, he advocated in his treatise, Natsionalizm (Nationalism, 1926), and in numerous articles and pamphlets a philosophy of "national voluntarism" partly derived from Nietzsche. Dontsov was mainly responsible for giving the ideology of Ukrainian integral nationalism a deliberately irrationalist, anti-intellectual, and voluntarist bias. A peculiar trait of Dontsov's thought was his implacable execration of Russia, not just of the tsarist or Soviet state but of the Russian people and culture. (It is to be noted that for western Ukrainians, among whom Dontsov worked, the primary national adversary was not Russia, with which they had had only limited experience, but Poland.) At an early date Dontsov began a determined campaign against the pro-Soviet sympathies which were widespread in Galicia and Volhynia at that time. Later tragic developments in Soviet Ukraine were to confirm Dontsov's predictions, thus enhancing his prestige. He also devoted much of his labour to literary criticism, for which he had a real gift. He assembled around his journal a group of noted poets and writers who left a durable mark on the evolution of modern Ukrainian literature.
Nationalist ideological groups and the UVO, from which members of other political leanings gradually withdrew, moved closer together. They merged at the First Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists held in Vienna in 1929. At the Congress the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (Or-hanizatsiia ukrainskykh natsionalistiv, OUN) was created and Konovalets was proclaimed its leader. The OUN was to combine the functions of an "underground army," fighting the foreign rulers of Ukraine, and of a political movement, in fact a party (although the word was avoided) aspiring to a predominant position in Ukrainian society.
According to the program of the OUN, the supreme goal, national independence, was to be achieved by revolutionary means. The Ukrainian masses were to be kept in a state of permanent unrest, thus preventing the consolidation of the power of the "occupiers." The chain of acts of terrorism, civil disobedience, and local riots and uprisings was to culminate in a great future conflagration, out of which an independent Ukrainian state was to be born. The nationalists scornfully rejected any accommodation of Ukrainian policies to the existing order of things, which they condemned as shameful opportunism and a betrayal of the national ideal. They refused in principle to co-operate with other Ukrainian parties and political movements, which were all, according to them, tainted with opportunism. The OUN's vision of a future independent Ukraine was that of a dictatorial, one-party state. The nationalists were not very specific on social and economic questions, but, in general terms, they advocated "national solidarity," i.e., a social order in which competition among classes and economic interest groups would be permanently eliminated. There were several causes for the Ukrainian integral nationalists' rejection of democracy: the conviction that democracy was mainly responsible for the downfall of Ukrainian statehood in 1917-21; resentment against Western democratic powers which had denied recognition and support to the Ukrainian nation; the desire to emulate the successes of the Russian Bolsheviks and the dictatorial Pilsudski regime in Poland; and the notion that the cruelty and cynicism of these foreign oppressors could be resisted only by equally ruthless means.
While Ukrainian integral nationalism was an indigenous growth, it undoubtedly modelled itself on contemporary fascist movements and regimes in the West. This orientation was strengthened by considerations of international policy. As many Ukrainians, besides integral nationalists, felt the existing international order to be unbearable, it was natural for them to look to those powers from whom a revision and overthrow of the Versailles system could be expected. The integral nationalists, aware of their ideological kinship with Western fascism, were able to profit politically from the desire for international change which was widespread in Ukrainian society. Despite cautionary voices raised by a few far-sighted publicists, Ukrainians had in general little appreciation of the dangers which Nazi Germany presented to their people. They relied on the fact that German and Ukrainian ethnic areas were not contiguous, and they were confident that in the event of a great European showdown Germany would be obliged in its own interest, as during the Brest-Litovsk era, to back Ukrainian claims.
The decade from 1929 to 1939 was a time of rapid expansion of the integral-nationalist movement. The headquarters of the OUN were abroad, but its primary operational field was Ukrainian ethnic territory in Poland. According to nationalist doctrine, the revolutionary struggle was to be conducted against all "occupiers" simultaneously, but in practice the terrorist activities of the OUN were directed almost exclusively against Poland. The nationalists' anti-Russian stand was, at that time, expressed by occasional assassination attempts against Soviet diplomats and by a vigorous struggle against any surviving communist sympathies within Ukrainian society outside the USSR. The nationalists were able to capture much of the revolutionary ferment among the population of Galicia and Volhynia, which the Communist Party of Western Ukraine had previously tried to exploit. A particular success of the OUN was its solid support among the young. Integral nationalism had the character of a youth movement, and the antagonism between the OUN and the traditional democratic parties assumed the psychological dimension of a conflict of generations. While the old parties retained their role as official spokesmen of the Ukrainian minority in Poland and leadership in the "legal" community organizations (co-operatives, educational institutions) still tolerated by the Polish government, their position was increasingly undermined by the nationalist underground.
The rise of the integral-nationalist trend must be seen against the historical background of the 1930s. For the Ukrainian people this was an exceptionally tragic era: the time of the Stalinist purges and massacres in Soviet Ukraine and of the ever-increasing chauvinism and oppressiveness of Polish rule in Western Ukraine. In such circumstances, the nationalist movement appeared as the embodiment of the Ukrainian people's defiant will to survive. The aura of heroism and self-sacrifice which surrounded the OUN attracted thousands of idealistic young men and women. Neither the half-hearted opposition of the older democratic parties nor the repressive measures of the Polish administration were able to stem the tide. The gaps created in the ranks of the organization by arrests were easily filled by new recruits. In Polish prisons and concentration camps, raw youths underwent a transformation into hardened professional revolutionaries -- a human category previously unknown in western Ukraine. There was a saying during those years in Galicia and Volhynia that "prison is the Ukrainian university." But this transformation took a heavy toll in human lives and broken existences. To concerned observers, even within the movement, it was becoming increasingly evident that Ukrainian integral nationalism was contaminated by serious intrinsic ills. This led to a blunting of moral sensibility, as demonstrated by the use of physical and moral terror against Ukrainian political opponents. The voluntaristic character of nationalist ideology, and its reliance on "myth" rather than knowledge, interfered with the ability to perceive reality objectively and therefore with rational and responsible decision-making. While integral nationalism enhanced the militancy and resilience of the Ukrainian people in times of great stress, it also lowered the level of their civic maturity.
World War II
The years of the Second World War brought both the apogee and the crisis of integral nationalism. The annexation of the Galician-Volhynian lands by the USSR in the autumn of 1939 caused the demise of the Ukrainian democratic parties in that area, while the clandestine OUN was able to preserve its underground organization. Also, among the numerous Ukrainian refugees who fled to Germany and German-occupied Poland, the nationalists obtained an almost monopolistic preponderance. But at this very time, when the OUN was facing its greatest opportunity, a split occurred within its ranks. It was caused by the struggle to succeed Konovalets, founder and leader of the OUN, who was assassinated by a Soviet agent in 1938. The two rival factions were commonly designated after their respective leaders, Andrii Melnyk (1890-1964) and Stepan Bandera (1909-59), the "Melnykites" (melnykivtsi) and the "Banderites" (banderivtsi). Originally the schism had no ideological connotations; both groups adhered to the same totalitarian ideology and claimed the name of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Nevertheless, the conflict also possessed a psychological dimension. The supporters of Melnyk were generally to be found among the more mature and moderate elements of the OUN, the military veterans of the 1917-21 era and the old emigres who had spent most of their lives in foreign countries. The Banderites, on the other hand, were the "Young Turks" of the movement, and their faction attracted the professional revolutionaries from western Ukraine, many of whom had just emerged from Polish prisons. The ugly factional conflict, which soon degenerated into reciprocal vilification and terrorism, shattered the nationalists' claim to provide unity and leadership to the Ukrainian cause in a critical time.
The German occupation of Ukraine lasted about three years (1941-4). The everyday life of the Ukrainian people was dominated by physical privations and the overriding concern for sheer survival. The vicious cruelty and naked colonialism of the German occupation regime are too well known to need elaboration. It must be stressed, however, that, in spite of the indiscriminate application of mass terror, the Nazis were not able to control Ukrainian society as throughly as the Russian Bolsheviks. While any autonomous intellectual life had come to a standstill in the Ukrainian SSR in the 1930s, a fairly lively underground exchange of ideas took place during the German occupation.
Both groups of the OUN, but especially the more enterprising Banderites, succeeded in expanding their clandestine networks from the western Ukrainian base into the former Soviet territories of east-central Ukraine, where they attracted considerable local support. The Bandera faction provided the nucleus for a guerrilla force, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, whose operations, conducted simultaneously against Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, were a powerful demonstration of the Ukrainian people's will to national independence, asserted under the most adverse circumstances.
Confrontations with Hitler's system, on the one hand, and with the realities of east-central (former Soviet) Ukraine, on the other, spurred revisionist tendencies within the intellectually more flexible segments of the nationalist movement. The drift of the changes was toward a liberalization of the ideology of integral nationalism: putting a new stress on the rights of the individual, rejection of ethnic or racial exclusiveness, toleration of philosophical pluralism (as against the former adherence to compulsory "idealism"), and attempts to formulate an attractive social and economic program which would combine the best features of socialism and capitalism. Still, these changes, however significant, did not make the nationalist movement democratic. Fascistic authoritarianism was deeply rooted in the nationalist mind, and revisionist tendencies were checked by the orthodox adherents of both factions. Even the most advanced nationalist revisionists remained ambiguous on the crucial questions of political pluralism and representative government. One has also to take into consideration the brevity of the period during which these developments took place, not allowing them to grow to maturity. After the re-establishment of Soviet rule, the remnants of the nationalist underground continued their activities for several years until their final eradication at the beginning of the 1950s. The programmatic statements which emanated from the underground had, by that time, lost the specific traits of the old OUN ideology (save, of course, the goal of national independence), and their general tenor may be defined as reflecting an outlook of democratic socialism.
Ukrainian democratic forces were at a disadvantage during the war years, as they were not prepared to engage in underground operations, and the conditions of the time did not allow them to organize overtly. People of democratic convictions found an outlet in non-political cultural and relief activities, precariously tolerated by the German authorities. Circumstances for such work were more favourable in Galicia than in the former Soviet territories. The Ukrainian Central Committee in Cracow and Lviv was able to render substantial services to the population of Galicia in the area of education and social welfare. This body, although outwardly conforming with the requirements of Hitler's "New Order," was staffed predominantly with members of the old western Ukrainian democratic parties and civic organizations. A similar centre came into existence at the opposite end of Ukraine, in Kharkiv. That zone, near the front line, was under military administration, and conditions there were somewhat less oppressive than in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, which encompassed the central portion of the country.
A remarkable fact needs to be noted. Twenty years of Soviet rule had not eradicated the memory of the Ukrainian People's Republic, and the name of Petliura still enjoyed great popularity. This applied not only to the few surviving members of the old intelligentsia, but also to many young people who had no personal memories of pre-Soviet days. All over east-central Ukraine informal circles sprang up whose participants, without possessing any formal political program, professed allegiance to the traditions of the democratic Ukrainian state of 1917-21. In comparison with the tight network of underground cells which the integral nationalists were building up, the democratic trend remained fluid and inchoate, but it was more broadly based. It represented a potential force which, under the adverse circumstances of the time, could not find adequate expression. Only in the post-war years did the movement crystallize in the Ukrainian Revolutionary Democratic Party (URDP), created in the refugee camps of western Germany. The leader of the party was the writer and journalist Ivan Bahriany (1907-63), a former inmate of Soviet concentration camps. The URDP found its supporters mostly among emigres from east-central Ukraine. It must be considered a reincarnation of the old democratic-populist trend which attempted to incorporate the experience of the Soviet era of the 1920s and 30s.
The years of World War II also gave a new lease on life to Ukrainian communism. The fresh horrors of the German occupation to some extent overshadowed the tragic memories of the 1930s. In a historical conjuncture which did not offer realistic prospects for the achievement of national independence, and faced with the stark Nazi-Soviet alternative, many Ukrainians felt that while there was hope for their nation as a Soviet Republic, there was none as a German colony. This conclusion was facilitated by Soviet wartime propaganda, which employed Ukrainian patriotic symbols, cleverly insinuated that the "mistakes" of the 1930s would not be repeated, and implied that the Ukrainian people could expect better treatment in the future. If one accepted the premise that the defeat and expulsion of the German invader was the primary, overriding goal, it followed logically that one had also to accept the Soviet system and the necessity of continued close Ukrainian-Russian association under the hegemony of Moscow. Thus a new generation of Ukrainian communists, almost all of whom had fought as officers in the Soviet army or partisan units, was forged by the wartime experience. Few, however, had any but nominal links with the traditions of the working-class movement and revolutionary Marxism. For the last quarter of a century, but especially since Stalin's death and the advent of Khrushchev, men of this background have furnished the leading party and government cadres in the Ukrainian SSR.
The Contemporary Scene in Soviet Ukraine
The outstanding recent event in the intellectual life of Ukraine is the emergence of a group of vocal dissidents in the 1960s. The writings of Ivan Dziuba, Sviatoslav Karavansky, Viacheslav Chornovil, Valentyn Moroz, Mykhailo Osadchy, Ievhen Sverstiuk, and others, circulated in Soviet Ukraine clandestinely, have been published abroad both in the original Ukrainian and in translations, and have attracted world attention.
Certain points should be noted concerning the background of the Ukrainian dissidents. Most are young, usually in their thirties, born and educated under the Soviet system. This fact makes nonsense of the label of "bourgeois nationalism," which official propaganda tries to pin on them. Socially, all can be classified as typical intellectuals: writers, literary critics, artists, historians, educators, journalists. Geographically, they represent all sections of Ukraine, not excluding such strongly Russified regions as the Donbas. Numerically, they are a tiny group. The total number of persons identified in one way or another as participants in the movement does not exceed 1,000 out of the republic's population of 47,000,000 (according to the 1970 census). But there are indications that the avowed dissidents -- men and women of truly exceptional civic courage -- ought to be considered as the visible tip of a much larger iceberg. In "legal" literary and scholarly publications from Soviet Ukraine one often finds ideas analogous to those of the dissidents expressed in veiled, allusive form. We are even entitled to surmise that the dissidents have enjoyed the sympathy and tacit protection of some elements in the republic's governing circles. It is, finally, to be observed that the Ukrainian dissidents have carefully eschewed any formal organization. The movement seems to have taken the shape of a ramified network of informal, personal contacts.
The ideas formulated by the spokesmen of Ukrainian dissent can be subsumed under two headings. To the first group belong issues of a general libertarian nature: protests against infringements of human and civil rights and particularly against the denial of intellectual freedom. The second group includes points of a specifically national character: protests gainst the curtailment of constitutional state rights of the Ukrainian SSR, the diluting and perversion of the nation's cultural heritage, the discrimination against the Ukrainian language in education and public life, and demands for cultural rights for Ukrainian minorities residing in other parts of the USSR.
It is well known that dissent has become vocal in recent years not only in Ukraine, but also in Russia. A comparison of the ideas of Ukrainian and Russian dissidents is most instructive. In the area of general libertarian postulates the goals of the two movements largely coincide, but there are a notable divergence between them concerning the national problem. While Russian dissidents have condemned ethnic discrimination in the USSR (i.e., the regime's anti-Semitic tendencies or the expulsion of the Crimean Tatars from their homeland), they have been wary of taking a stand on the issue of the non-Russians' right to national self-determination. It would seem that even those Russians who are dissatisfied with many aspects of the existing system are reluctant to oppose it to a point which might endanger the coherence of the Russian imperial state and weaken its international position. This apprehension that liberalization might be detrimental to Russia's great-power interests is also the chief cause of the impotence and isolation of the Russian dissidents within their own national community. The communist government can claim the credit for having elevated Russia to a pinnacle of unprecedented power and prestige. A dissociation of Russian patriotism from the Soviet regime is likely to occur only in the event of serious setbacks suffered by the USSR in foreign policy. This hypothesis is supported by the evidence of history. In old Russia reform and/or revolution was a regular concomitant of unsuccessful foreign wars: Crimean, Balkan, Japanese, and, finally, World War I.
One can see now that Ukrainian dissent is, in this respect, placed differently from its Russian counterpart: it is not checked, but fed, by national instincts. The national issue provides an ideological complex of great emotional appeal, to which all the other frustrations and grievances, diffused in the society, tend to gravitate and around which, circumstances permitting, they could easily coalesce. The ideas of the Ukrainian dissidents, therefore, possess a potentially high mass appeal, irrespective of the limited number of currently active participants. Within many Ukrainian families there have been members who, within the memory of the living generation, have at one time or another made sacrifices for the national cause or suffered persecution for its sake. Experiences of this kind leave indelible marks on the collective mind of a society in which family ties are still very strong. This is the deep well-spring from which the present intellectual ferment in Ukraine draws its strength. The reassertion of independent Ukrainian thought, after decades of indoctrination and repeated purges of the nation's "brain," its intellectual elite, is a portent of great historical significance.
If we try to apply to recent Soviet Ukrainian dissent the model of the four trends proposed earlier in this paper, the most plausible location for this dissent is within the tradition of national communism. Ukrainian dissidents have not, as a rule, attacked the premises of Marxist-Leninist philosophy, neither have they rejected socialist economics, nor the Soviet political system, nor even the membership of the Ukrainian republic in the USSR. They have only criticized the distortions of the system and called for bringing Soviet practice into line with true Leninist principles, especially in the field of nationality policy. Dziuba, perhaps the most articulate spokesman of Ukrainian dissent, refers constantly to the writings of Lenin, to former Communist Party resolutions, and to the texts of the USSR and Ukrainian SSR constitutions and Soviet laws.
Students of Soviet affairs have already pointed to the continuity of thought between early Ukrainian communist national deviationists, such as Shakhrai, and contemporary dissidents, such as Dziuba. There is, however, between the generations of the "twenties" and the "sixties," separated as they are by a quarter-century of Stalinist rule, a perceptible distinction which needs to be carefully defined. Communist ideology of the revolutionary and early post-revolutionary epoch was an ardent faith in an imminent radical transformation of man and society. This millenarian myth has been beautifully expressed by the communist writer Khvylovy in his vision of the "commune beyond the hills" (zahirna komuna). In contrast to this strong ideological motivation of the early Bolsheviks, both orthodox and deviationist, the present dissidents' approach to Marxism-Leninism seems to be mostly pragmatic. They ransack the "classics" for arguments to promote certain desired reforms. They try to prove that Lenin was more broad-minded on the nationalities problem than the present leadership of the CPSU, and that respect for Ukrainian national rights is compatible with the principles of socialist economics and the Soviet political system. This pragmatic use of Marxism-Leninism is, of course, also characteristic of the men of the Soviet establishment, only the latter apply it in a sense opposite to that of the dissidents -- to provide ideological legitimacy to the status quo and to rationalize current policies of the government.
While the national-communist strand is the most pronounced in contemporary Soviet Ukrainian dissent, a study of the relevant literature also shows the presence of other strands of thought. The writings of Valentyn Moroz, for instance, display features reminiscent of integral nationalism of the inter-war era: the postulate of personal moral integrity to be maintained against all odds; a resolute rejection of Realpolitik, if the latter implies an accommodation to conditions incompatible with individual or national honour; and a definitely voluntaristic turn of mind. In contradistinction to Dziuba, Moroz has shown little interest in constitutional and institutional issues; he also forgoes any citations from Marxist "classics." His primary concern is with the maintenance of an uncompromising national ethos regardless of any considerations of political expediency. The stress on the primacy of will and character was an important part of the integral-nationalist ideology. It should be made clear, however, that neither Moroz nor any other of the contemporary Ukrainian dissenters has shown any trace of the specifically fascist features of the old OUN program: glorification of the one-party state and dictatorship, fostering of ethnic exclusiveness, deliberate irrationalism, and anti-intellectualism. Carry-overs of this kind are precluded by the basically libertarian and humanist outlook of Ukrainian dissent.
Communism and integral nationalism represent the two younger, post-revolutionary trends in Ukrainian political thought. Can one also ascertain the presence of vestiges of the two older trends, democratic populism and conservatism? This can be answered in the affirmative. We have already noted the libertarian colouring of the ideas of the Ukrainian dissenters, and their defence of human rights and intellectual freedom. They have also advanced proposals for an improvement of living standards and the welfare of the people, as well as the removal of the existing discriminatory measures against the peasantry. Going beyond the literature of dissent, we find evidence in Soviet Ukrainian academic and intellectual circles of an increased interest in the legacy of prerevolutionary democratic-populist thought. For instance, the selected works of Kostomarov and Drahomanov have appeared in recent years in new (though heavily censored) editions, and the number of scholarly studies dealing with such topics is growing.
A noteworthy phenomenon in the intellectual life of contemporary Ukraine is a marked return to the national tradition. Because of official restraints and manipulations, the movement has assumed primarily non-political, cultural forms. The manifestations are manifold and include the drive for the preservation and restoration of historical monuments; a revival of folk customs and arts, and their adaptation to modern urban conditions; frequent treatment of historical subjects in fiction and poetry; the labours .of scholars intent on recapturing the nation's cultural heritage. In other countries, where the continuity of national life has never been disrupted, such activities might be considered routine. In the case of Ukraine, however, with its tragically fragmented development, such cultivation of the nation's historically continuous cultural identity is bound to have political implications.
The preceding statement leads to a discussion of the conservative element in contemporary Ukrainian intellectual life. The term "conservatism" is in bad odour in the Soviet Union, but the absence of the label does not preclude the presence of the phenomenon. A conservative orientation is characterized by two traits: a strong sense of tradition and continuity (as opposed to an eschatological and futuristic view of society) and a high regard for legal and orderly modes of procedure (in contrast to revolutionary rejection of precedent and established form). In applying these criteria to the contemporary Ukrainian scene, we have already taken note of the heightened cultural traditionalism. As to the second point, the Soviet establishment itself has lately become more conservative, inasmuch as it is trying to divest itself of arbitrariness and to approximate the model of a Rechtsstaat. (In the course of doing so, it has become increasingly enmeshed in intrinsic contradictions, as the nature of a totalitarian dictatorship is incompatible with the requirements of the authentic rmule of law.) Concerning Ukrainian dissent, its legal and constitutional character has already been stressed. It has tried to operate in the manner of a loyal opposition within the framework of the existing system. The purpose of the Ukrainian dissidents is not to destroy existing institutions, but to adapt them in order to promote civil rights, general prosperity, and Ukrainian national interests. In this sense, Ukrainian dissidents may be called "conservative reformers." Such an interpretation also helps us to understand the attitude of Dziuba and his colleagues toward the statehood of the Ukrainian SSR. In their view, the Soviet Ukrainian body politic, despite all its obvious deficiencies, represents a valuable form which must not be destroyed, but rather strengthened and gradually filled with a new, living content. This concept strongly recalls the way of thinking of the patriotic Cossack nobles of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (as reflected, for instance, in the Istoriia Rusov), who based their resistance to the encroachments of St. Petersburg centralism on the Treaty of Pereiaslav as a constitutional act guaranteeing their nation's autonomous status. By the workings of historical dialectics, Soviet constitutional arrangements, resulting from a great revolutionary explosion and imposed on the Ukrainian people by superior outside force, have assumed the character of "historical" rights. The future will tell whether the attempt of contemporary Ukrainian dissidents to formulate a national policy on the platform of a Soviet version of historical legitimism will be more successful than the endeavours of their predecessors two centuries ago. Such a policy could have a chance only if the defence of Ukrainian state and national rights were to be taken up by the leading cadres of the CPU and the Republic's administrative and economic elite. This would mean a return to the policy of Skrypnyk, the loyal Bolshevik, who did not hesitate to stand up for the interests of Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s. The conditions for this are today, in a way, more favourable than in the past, inasmuch as the membership of the CPU has become predominantly Ukrainian in its ethnic composition. On the other hand, the present CPU leadership is the product of the conformist Stalinist era and wartime experience. The cardinal points in the private philosophy of these men seem to be to take full advantage of the good things life has offered them, and otherwise to exercise extreme caution. A change may take place with the rise of the next generation of leaders, who will no longer have a personal memory of Stalinism and World War II and who perhaps will be less fearful of asserting the rights of their nation.
The Ukrainian Diaspora
A problem which still remains to be considered is that of the role of the Ukrainian diaspora. The total number of people of Ukrainian descent in the countries of Western Europe, North and South America, and Australia amounts to about two million. Ukrainian emigration has occurred in several waves, beginning in the 1890s with the economically caused movement overseas and ending with the post-World War II displaced persons, whose motivation was primarily political. Ukrainians in the diaspora are undergoing a gradual but inevitable assimilation to the host countries, and this process has advanced quite far among various generational and occupational groups. The retention of a national identity by Ukrainian emigrants and their descendants is strengthened by their conviction that conditions in Ukraine are abnormal and that their brethren there are suffering from oppression. This conviction places Ukrainians in the diaspora under a moral obligation and endows them with a feeling of historical mission: to work for the liberation of the homeland. To some extent, this commitment gives the entire Ukrainian diaspora the colouring of a political emigration, independently of the time and circumstances of each individual's or his forefathers' departure from Ukraine.
It is well known that exile communities tend to perpetuate in a fossilized form attitudes and modes of thought which, because of changed conditions, have lapsed in the country of origin. Thus every political current, from the monarchist to the communist, which has been active in Ukraine over the past two or three generations still has its spokesmen within the Ukrainian diaspora. The politically most articulate segment are the post-World War II emigres. Besides maintaining their own institutions and organizations (including a "government-in-exile," with headquarters in Munich, which claims to be the continuation of the government of the Ukrainian People's Republic of the years 1917-21), they have also largely taken over the leadership of the older community organizations in the United States and Canada. This preponderance of the "new" emigration contributes to keeping the bulk of the Ukrainian diaspora militantly anti-communist, save for small "progressive" (pro-Soviet) groups among the old-time settlers in North America.
The Ukrainian diaspora lacks the numerical and financial strength to influence the policies of Western governments as a pressure group. Moreover, its political effectiveness is handicapped by the legacy of integral nationalism. The OUN factions continue to play a leading role in the life of the Ukrainian emigration. Although they have become more moderate over the years, their ingrained totalitarian mentality alienates them from the political climate of the Western democracies, as well as from the libertarian trends in contemporary Soviet Ukraine. This has also been the cause of their repeated political blundering: misunderstanding the defensive nature of the American containment policy; investing false hopes in the so-called liberation program during the Eisenhower-Dulles era; relying on right-wing extremist groups in the United States and West Germany; collaborating with Chinese nationalists in Taiwan; and misreading the character and goals of the current dissident movement in the Ukrainian SSR. The democratic groups of the diaspora have failed to establish a credible alternative policy of their own. As for the mass of ordinary Ukrainian emigrants, they are preoccupied with everyday cares, and for sentimental reasons often tend to trust those leaders who prove their "superpatriotism" by energetically waving the blue-and-yellow flag.
The above critical remarks do not mean that the Ukrainian diaspora ought to be written off as a political factor. On the contrary, it exercises an important function whose center of gravity, however, lies in a different sphere from the sterile and narcissistic posturing of the emigre politicians and professional community leaders. The significance of the diaspora is attested by the extreme vigilance with which the Soviet authorities watch everything that goes on among Ukrainians abroad.
The true function of the diaspora consists in the auxiliary but essential contribution which it is making to the evolution of the Ukrainian people in Ukraine. The very fact that free Ukrainian political thought and cultural life exist on foreign soil has had an invigorating effect on the intellectual climate in the Ukrainian SSR. The contemporary diaspora has not produced great individual political thinkers of the stature of Drahomanov or Lypynsky, but Ukrainian exiles are bringing out several respectable journals of opinion and literary magazines. Ukrainian scholarly organizations, institutions, and literary groups are active in Western Europe and North America. Emigre writers, artists, and scholars, among whom are men and women of distinction, have produced works which will retain a permanent place in Ukrainian cultural history. Because they are able freely to treat subjects and use approaches prohibited in the USSR, their productions complement and stimulate Soviet Ukrainian cultural processes, which have been forced into a Procrustean bed. Access to the works of the diaspora is, of course, extremely limited in Ukraine, but through various channels relevant, even if fragmentary, information is reaching interested circles. Members of the Soviet Ukrainian creative intelligentsia have eagerly availed themselves of every opportunity to establish relations with their compatriot colleagues abroad. To anyone who has taken part in such exchanges one thing is particularly striking: their almost overflowing emotional warmth, which strangely contrasts with official Soviet deprecation of the "bourgeois-nationalist rabble." It is not rare to hear Soviet Ukrainian intellectuals express privately their respect and admiration for the very same emigre figures on whom the soviet press heaps such scurrilous abuse. Circumstantial evidence suggests that the positive achievements of the emigration have been used by influential members of the intellectual community in the Ukrainian SSR as a lever in pressing for cultural concessions. All the points touched upon in this paragraph pertain to the cultural sphere, but their cumulative political effect should be regarded as self-evident. Only a slight relaxation of conditions would be needed to begin an overt political dialogue between democratic intellectual elements of the emigration and the reformist stratum of the party and non-party Soviet Ukrainian intelligentsia. Such a possibility is alarming in the highest degree not only to the Soviet establishment, but to the emigre die-hards as well.
One has, of course, to keep in mind that there are probably several million Soviet Ukrainian citizens who have relatives abroad. With the easing of correspondence and travel restrictions in the past decade, countless divided families have re-established direct contacts. Every year thousands of Ukrainians visit their relatives in the "old country.'' In a society which for many years has been hermetically isolated from the outside world, such contacts cannot but act as a tonic. The Ukrainian people under Soviet rule are reassured by the awareness that their kinsmen in foreign lands think of them and wish to help them.
Last but not least, the role of the diaspora is that of a spiritual link between Ukraine and the outside world. The Soviet regime's intention is to minimize individual and institutional communications between Ukrainian scientists, scholars, and other cultural workers with their counterparts in Western, democratic nations. Undoubtedly, it would prefer the world to forget the existence of Ukraine. Therefore, the responsibility for keeping the world informed about conditions in the Ukrainian SSR and the Ukrainian problem in general is incumbent on scholars of the diaspora. Theirs is an arduous task in view of the fact that, especially in English-speaking countries, knowledge of things Ukrainian has been, and largely still is, sorely inadequate. The difficulty is that the Western scholarly community's understanding of eastern Slavdom is dominated by a centralist viewpoint derived from the intellectual traditions of imperial Russia.
Conditions have, however, improved somewhat in this respect over the past twenty years. It is possible to point to a number of solid recent works in English dealing with Ukraine, and it is no longer unusual to find Ukrainian topics treated in scholarly journals and at professional meetings. This change is due to the general growth of Slavic and East European studies and to the labours of scholars of Ukrainian descent, particularly those employed in American and Canadian universities and colleges. What has been accomplished so far is only a modest beginning. Vast stretches of Ukrainian history and culture are still unrepresented by a single monograph in English or any other Western language. But the academic community in the United States and Canada has at least become aware of the existence of Ukraine as a potential field of study. The centralist conceptual framework alluded to above has by no means been dislodged -- such mental constructs are extremely ingrained and resistant to change -- but it has become problematic. Information about Ukraine no longer comes exclusively from hostile sources. This may be considered in important positive step.
While these developments in the intellectual sphere have no impact on the current policies of the Western powers, their probable long-range political significance cannot be overlooked. To state the matter briefly: the scholarly and other cultural endeavours of the Ukrainian diaspora are an essential dimension of the Ukrainian people's struggle for a better life ind complete nationhood.
Conclusions and Forecasts
Historians are justifiably wary of making predictions. But inasmuch as "futurology" has lately achieved academic respectability, I will venture o advance some forecasts about the direction which Ukrainian political thought is likely to take. This obviously can be no more than an extrapolation from past experiences, and the conclusions must remain tentative.
1. As a result of the territorial consolidation of Ukrainian lands within one body politic, future currents of ideas and political movements will be less sectional than in the past. This does not preclude the possibility that certain areas with pronounced geographical and historical traits (for instance, Transcarpathia) will retain a regional identity. But regionalism will play only a subordinate role within the framework of a unified Ukrainian nation.
2. In the past the Ukrainians were overwhelmingly a peasant people, and this fact was reflected in their ideologies. Populism, the dominant trend of the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was peasant-oriented. The conservative trend also had an agrarian coloration. The social structure of Ukraine has, however, undergone a profound transformation during the past half-century. At present, about one-lalf of the Ukrainian people are already urban, and the rate of urbanization is bound to increase. Despite the communist regime's conscious policy since the 1930s of Russifying the cities, a Ukrainian industrial working class and an urban technical intelligentsia have come into existence. The latter group fulfills a function analogous to that of the middle class in Western societies. Hence, it is reasonable to assume that Ukrainian social thought and political programs of the future will be less determined by peasant concerns than in the past. Yet it is likely that a marked "village background" will remain a characteristic feature of Ukrainian life and thought for a long time to come. This diagnosis is suggested not only by the fact that the urbanization of Ukrainian society is comparatively less advanced than in Western countries, but also by the circumstance that Ukrainian city dwellers retain an awareness of their recent village origins and have many family and emotional ties with the countryside.
3. The image of intellectual uniformity which Soviet Ukraine, together with all of the USSR, offers to the world should be considered a superficial and necessarily transitory phenomenon. The varieties of thought and opinion have not been eliminated, only forcibly silenced. They still lurk beneath the surface, not only as survivals of the past, but as living intellectual forces, generated anew by the dialectical nature of society and human thought. According to official Soviet doctrine, there is no place for ideological diversity in a "socialist" society, where antagonistic classes allegedly no longer exist. But this claim is belied by the tremendous exertions of indoctrination, propaganda, and outright repression which the regime must constantly apply to maintain the appearance of ideological uniformity. Any lifting, or even partial weakening, of restraints is bound to lead in a short time to a resurgence of ideological and political pluralism.
4. The four main trends of modern Ukrainian political thought are still alive, if only in latent form. This assumption is based on the experiences of the World War II era and on a study of contemporary intellectual ferment in the Ukrainian SSR. Given the opportunity, the traditional trends would surface again, although certainly in a new, changed form. It is impossible to assess their future relative strength, or to predict which of them will become a leading force. The resolution of this question will depend not only on internal Ukrainian factors, but also on the prevailing political climate in Eastern Europe as a whole. The two most likely alternatives, however, are either an evolution on national-communist lines (i.e., the endowing of the fictitious statehood of the Ukrainian SSR with real substance), or, in the event of a revolutionary upheaval, a turn toward democracy (i.e., a revival of the traditions of the Ukrainian People's Republic).
5. Perhaps the most portentous issue in the future evolution of Ukrainian thought will be the problem of a synthesis of antagonistic political-ideological trends. The absence of such a synthesis was a major cause of the failure of the independent Ukrainian state in 1917-21. In view of the country's precarious geographical location, its political survival will depend on Ukrainians' ability to resolve their internal differences amicably and to maintain a reasonable degree of solidarity against foreign threats and pressures. Civil wars are a luxury that Ukraine can ill afford. But what could be the meaning of such an envisaged synthesis? It certainly does not imply the reduction of antagonistic trends to a single unitary formula. It should rather be conceived as a process of mutual adjustment. The trends, which in the past were simply juxtaposed, would have to learn the art of constructive interaction. Before this could take place in the practical political sphere, and finally be institutionalized, it would have to occur first on the intellectual plane. A step in this direction would be the cultivation of an inclusive vision of history, embracing all the facets of the nation's past, even those which in their own time were irreconcilably opposed to each other. What is needed is a type of mentality which makes it possible to find in London monuments to both Charles I and Oliver Cromwell. Such an attitude precludes neither a critique of personalities, groups, and ideas nor the taking of a definite stand on controversial current issues. But it requires a spirit of catholicity which views all the nation's past and present spiritual and material achievements as a common inheritance, and not the exclusive property of any faction. Obversely, it also implies the willingness to accept a share of moral responsibility for one's nation's mistakes and follies, even if they were perpetrated by specific groups or individuals.