"Ukraine between East and West," Das östliche Mittleuropa in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1966), 163-9. Republished in Ivan L. Rudnytsky, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History, 1987.
Ukraine between East and West The purpose of the present paper is to attempt a typological characterization of Ukraine, a definition of the traits which distinguish that country as a historical entity. I am well aware of the riskiness of this task, and of the danger of facile generalizations. My intention, therefore, is to remain within the boundaries of what can be verified empirically.
Before plunging into the subject, I would like to clarify briefly my theoretical assumptions. I do believe in the existence of something which may roughly he named "national character." It must not, however, be misunderstood in a naturalistic sense. It belongs to the socio-cultural, not to the biological sphere. National character may be identified with the specific "way of life," with the complex of cultural values, patterns of behaviour, and system of institutions which are peculiar to each country. The national character is formed historically, and it is possible to determine the factors that have entered into its make-up. Once crystallized, it is likely to show considerable stability and an ability to reject, or assimilate, disruptive influences. Of great importance is the fact that a national character, or cultural type, is not something unique and original, but rather an individual combination of traits which are widespread through the world, and common to a number of peoples. This last observation may be useful methodologically. In assessing the similarities and dissimilarities that exist among nations, in applying a comparative method, we are able to define both the relative originality of a national type and the degree of its relatedness to other peoples.
The title of the present paper speaks of Ukraine as being "between East and West." But what meaning are we giving these terms, "East" and "West," in reference to Ukrainian history?
Oscar Halecki has stressed that the concept of the "West" is frequently used as a synonym for that of "Europe." According to Halecki, this identification easily leads to an ambiguity, as it represents a pars pro toto reasoning. Inside Europe several zones can be distinguished, of which Western Europe is only one. The "West" in the narrower and precise sense is the Atlantic rim of the continent: England, France, the Netherlands. But the continent also includes other areas, which are no less European (and, hence, "Western," in the wider sense) than the Atlantic zone.
In the formula "Ukraine between East and West," the term "West" refers to Europe as a whole. Ukraine is "Western" insofar as it is an organic part of the community of European peoples. And this is not simply a fact of physical geography. For a historian, "Europe" is not just a large peninsula of the Eurasian continent, but rather a family of peoples, which, although politically divided and in the past often fiercely antagonistic, share a common cultural and social heritage. Not everything geographically located in Europe is also part of Europe in this historical sense. For instance, the late Ottoman Empire, which occupied such a large part of the continent for several hundred years, certainly did not belong to the European community. The same applies to the Moslem states of medieval Spain. There is also a consensus among historians that Muscovite Russia of the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries was essentially non-European. As everybody knows, Russia became "Westernized," or "Europeanized," in the wake of the reforms of Peter the Great. But the nature of this "Westernization" was felt to be problematic even by many Russian thinkers.
Ukraine has never passed through an era of violent and precipitate "Westernization" comparable to the reign of Peter in Russian history. And this is not surprising at all. A country which from its very inception was essentially European, and, in this meaning of the word, "Western," did not need to be assimilated to Europe through abrupt, revolutionary change. However, Ukraine's European outlook was strengthened through contacts with, and influences from, other European countries. With what part of the European community did Ukraine entertain close relations? Not with the Atlantic or West European zone. Relations with France and England existed since the times of the Kievan realm, and can be traced in all other epochs of Ukrainian history, but they always remained rather sporadic. When modern Ukrainians speak of "Western Europe," they usually refer to the area commonly known as central Europe, i.e., to the German-speaking lands from the North and Baltic Seas to the Danubian valley. It was the destiny of the Germans to represent, for better or for worse, "the West" in the eyes of the Ukrainian people. Even closer were the ties with the countries to the east of the German ethnic territory, for which the term "East-Central Europe" (Ostmit-teleuropa) has been coined in scholarly literature: Bohemia, Hungary and especially Poland. Besides them, we must also mention Baltic and Scandinavian areas -- Lithuania, with which a direct political tie existed for over two centuries (from the middle of the fourteenth to the middle of the sixteenth centuries), and Sweden, whence came the stimulus for the formation of the Kievan State.
Among the peoples of the eastern half of the European continent, one notices the curious, almost compulsive, habit of wanting to appear exclusively Western, and of denying any non-Western (non-West European) traits in their national make-up. "Poland -- the bastion of Western, Catholic civilization"; "The Czechs -- the only Slavic nation with a Western standard of living"; "Hungary -- whose Golden Bull is coeval with the English Magna Carta"; "Romanians -- the proud descendants of the Roman legionnaires." Such statements may be factually true -- as far as they go. Still, they sometimes smack of the mentality of poor folk who like to boast of their wealthy relations.
I have stressed the essentially Western (i.e., European) character of Ukraine. But this does not imply the denial of powerful non-Western elements in the Ukrainian national type. Common European characteristics have not been abolished or superseded but modified under the impact of forces emanating from the East.
But what is the meaning of the term "the East," "Orient," in the context of Ukrainian history? The concept is used to refer to two completely different historical entities: the world of Eastern Christianity and of the Byzantine cultural tradition on the one hand, and the world of the Eurasian nomads on the other. It is obvious that these two meanings of the term "East" are completely unrelated. Moreover, although both "Easts" were of the greatest importance for the making of Ukraine, their influence was in each case exercised in a totally different manner.
We will start with the "East" of the Eurasian nomads. The ancestors of the Ukrainians were, from time immemorial, agriculturists. Their home was the belt of parkland stretching from the Carpathian foothills to the eastern tributaries of the Dnieper. To the south of this territory of ancient agricultural settlement were the open grasslands, the steppes, where the nomads roamed. Until the early centuries of the Christian era the nomads of the South Ukrainian steppes were of Iranian stock. It seems that a kind of symbiotic relationship existed between the Scythian and Sarmatian cattle-raisers and warriors and the proto-Slavic agricultural tribes. Ethnologists tell us that traces of this Iranian influence are still to be found in Ukrainian and Russian folklore. The situation changed radically when, in the course of the Great Migration of Peoples, the Iranian occupation of the steppes was followed by a Turkic one. From the Hunnish storm of the fifth century A.D. until the destruction of Kiev by the Mongols in the middle of the thirteenth century, several great waves of Eurasian nomads, mostly of Turkic origin, hurled themselves against Ukrainian lands. No new nomadic people appeared in the Pontic steppes afterward. But out of the divisions of the Mongol Empire emerged, as one of its successor states, the Khanate of the Crimea, which in the fifteenth century became a vassal of the Ottoman Porte. The national industry of the Crimean Tatars was slave-hunting. This caused untold misery to Ukraine, which was exposed, almost every year, to raids. One can safely state that struggle against the Tatar menace was the central theme of Ukrainian history until the destruction of the Crimean Khanate during the reign of Catherine II.
These facts are well known, but our task is to draw out of them certain general conclusions. An analogy may be found between Ukraine and such Oriental countries as Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Iran, which also were subjected to periodic nomadic incursions. But the differences are more striking than the similarities. First, in contrast to these Near Eastern countries, Ukrainian agriculture was always individual farming of the European type, and not a "hydraulic agriculture" (to use an expression of Karl Wittfogel) of the arid Near East, where the survival of a settled civilization in the river valleys and oases depended on centrally regulated irrigation works. Second, there was in Ukraine no clear-cut, naturally determined differentiation between the farmer's land and the nomad's land. The Pontic steppes had a continental climate, but no more so than the American Middle West. This was a fertile plain, eminently suited for agriculture, but also offering ideal pastures for the flocks of the nomad. This caused the absence of a clear demarcation line between the settled country and the so-called Wild Fields. The line was rather a highly flexible and dynamic one. To be more precise, one should not speak of a line at all, but rather of a frontier zone, of a large belt of frontier lands. Here we encounter a suggestive parallel between Ukrainian and American historical processes. Frederick Jackson Turner proposed to study American history as a great colonization process, in the course of which the Wild West (the counterpart of the Ukrainian "Wild Fields") was gradually assimilated to a settled, civilized way of life. Turner's "Frontier Thesis" might also, I believe, be a highly fruitful approach to Ukrainian history. But, again, one must not overstrain the parallel. The balance of forces was different between the Anglo-Saxon Americans and the Indian natives, on the one hand, and the Ukrainians and the Turkic nomads on the other hand. In the case of America, the movement of westward expansion was a continous and irreversible one. In the case of Ukraine, the frontier fluctuated back and forth through the centuries. Agricultural Slavic colonization moved time after time to the conquest of the Wild Fields, attempting to obtain a firm foothold on the shores of the Black Sea; these were conquests of the plough as much as of the sword. And repeatedly these outposts of agricultural civilization were swept away by nomadic waves. Those who had escaped death or captivity had to seek refuge in the more secure northern and western regions, protected by forests, hills and swamps. But at times Tatar raiders were able to reach even this safer zone. This age-old epic struggle came to an end only in the latter part of the eighteenth century when, after the final destruction of the Crimean Khanate, the Pontic steppes were permanently settled by the Ukrainian peasantry.
What influence may one attribute to these relations with the Eurasian nomads in the formation of the Ukrainian national type? This was, first of all, a powerful retarding factor. Tremendous losses of human life, wealth and cultural values are obvious. What needs to be stressed particularly is the destruction of the cities. The Kievan State had already possessed an advanced city life. But these urban centres were systematically levelled by the great Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century. One must also mention the cutting off of commercial routes, which played a great role in the decline of the flowering civilization of medieval Rus'. This decline had set in even before the emergence of the Tatars, owing to the predatory activities of their predecessors, the Pechenegs and the Polovtsians.
But this is only one part of the total picture. The other side is the internal transformation of Ukrainian society under the impact of the challenge presented by the Wild Fields. Here we can return once more to the American analogy. According to Turner, the "Frontier" (meaning the transitional zone between the settled area and the Wild West) exercised a determining influence on the formation of the American national character. The frontiersman -- the pioneer and the cowboy -- became, in many respects, the representative American. Mores and institutions developed under the conditions of the frontier gave a colouring to the entire American way of life, including the areas of old settlement along the east coast. These ideas apply, mutatis mutandis, even more to Ukrainian than to American history. The Ukrainian frontiersman was the Cossack, and the Cossack became, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the representative man of his people. It is noteworthy that the Cossacks are extolled in countless folk songs even in those sections of Ukraine, such as Galicia, to which the Cossack movement did not actually extend. Cossackdom was, essentially, an organization of military self-defence of the population in the exposed frontier territory. The Cossacks were the advance guard of the Ukrainian peasant colonization, but, at the same time, they borrowed a number of tactical devices and customs from their Tatar enemy. (Similarly, the American pioneers borrowed from the Indians.) The military organization which had spontaneously evolved in the frontier zone began to take an increasingly leading role also in the affairs of the settled hinterland. After the Union of Lublin (1569) Ukraine, which previously formed part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (the so-called Lithuanian-Ruthenian State), came under the rule of Poland. The Polish Commonwealth was unable to offer its Ukrainian provinces effective protection against the constant Tatar menace. At the same time, Poland imposed on Ukraine a social system which was alien and hateful to the majority of the Ukrainian people. In the constitutional framework of the Polish Commonwealth, where the monopoly of power belonged to the nobility and where the peasants were totally enslaved, there was no place for a class of free and armed farmers. Polish attempts to suppress the Cossack military order led to an increased tension which finally, in 1648, exploded in a great revolution. After the first clashes between the Cossacks and the Polish forces, almost the entire population of the hinterland rose against Polish rule. People who were by no means Cossacks in the original sense of frontiersmen, but rather were peasants, burghers, and even members of the petty Orthodox gentry, became "Cossackized." The military organization of the frontier expanded over vast areas liberated from Polish domination and served as the foundation of a new social and administrative system. For instance, Cossack military divisions, the "Regiments" ipolky) and "Centuries" isotni), now became territorial, administrative units, and the official name of the new body politic, the Ukrainian Cossack State, was "Zaporozhian Army." The 1648 Revolution was also instrumental in the adoption of a new national name. The word "Ukraine" (Ukraina) means "borderland," and originally referred to the frontier zone, where the Cossack system had its roots. The extension of this system from the frontier to the hinterland helped to spread and popularize the name "Ukraine," which was now applied, at first only in the vernacular, to all territory under Cossack jurisdiction. The new name gradually replaced the traditional one, Rus', derived from the medieval Kievan State.
The "East" of the Eurasian nomads exercised, therefore, a twofold impact on the making of the Ukrainian national character: first, as a retarding factor in the country's normal progress, and, second, through a strong defensive reaction by the Ukrainian people. This, however, did not make Ukraine itself Eurasian. In other words, the Eurasian, nomadic element acted on the Ukrainian people from the outside, without becoming internalized, without becoming a constituent element of the Ukrainian national type. The other great Eastern influence, that of the Greek (Byzantine) religious and cultural tradition, acted in a very different fashion, from the inside, by shaping the very mind of the society.
The Rus' Primary Chronicle contains a charming tale about the "Trial of Faiths.'' The story tells how Volodymyr the Great of Kiev sent embassies to various countries to find out about their respective religions, and how finally the ruler and his councillors, moved by a report about the beauty of the Greek church services, decided to adopt Christianity from Constantinople. This is only a legend, or rather a wandering literary motif, probably borrowed by the chronicler from a foreign source. But still the story seems to indicate that it was the aesthetic aspect of Greek Christianity with which the people of Kievan Rus' felt a special affinity.
There are, however, some modern Ukrainian historians, such as the late Stepan Tomashivsky, an eminent medievalist and church historian, who think that Volodymyr's choice was, in secular terms, a tragic mistake. By accepting Christianity in its Eastern form, Rus'-Ukraine condemned itself to intellectual stagnation and sterility and cut itself off from full membership in the European community. This view finds an echo also in the well known theory of Arnold Toynbee. In his scheme of "civilizations" of the world, Toynbee draws a sharp line between the "Western" civilization, encompassing the Catholic and Protestant nations of Europe, including the overseas offshoots, and the "East Christian civilization," i.e., medieval Byzantium and its modern heir, Russia.
What are we to make of these theories? One has to remember, first of all, that Volodymyr's choice was not an arbitrary one. It was determined by the fact that Ukrainian lands had belonged to the sphere of influence of Greek and Hellenistic culture for more than 1,500 years prior to his time. The coast of southern Ukraine and the Crimea was dotted with Greek colonies from the seventh century B.C. Commercial and cultural ties existed between the coastal city states and the proto-Slavic tribes of the interior. Most of these Greek communities perished during the Great Migration of Peoples, but some survived. The nascent Kievan State entertained, from the very beginning and long before its conversion to Christianity, manifold relations with the Byzantine world.
Moreover, the Eastern Empire was, both politically and culturally, at its peak in the tenth century, under the rule of the great Macedonian dynasty. In that period Byzantium had, probably, more to offer to nascent Rus' than contemporary Latin Christianity was able to give to the newly converted peoples of northern and eastern Europe. The sudden cultural flowering of Kievan Rus', which put that country at once on a level with the relatively advanced sections of Europe, was due to the transplantation of the rich Greek-Byzantine culture (in part taken over directly from Constantinople, and in part adopted in its Bulgarian version) to the fresh and receptive soil of a young Slavic country. It is true that, in the long run, Byzantinism, for all its brilliance and sophistication, had certain striking drawbacks. It was rather static; it lacked the tremendous dynamism and creativeness which Latin Christendom began to display after the year 1000 in its Romanesque and Gothic Age. Still, we are entitled to make the following hypothetical statement. It seems likely that, but for the nomadic invasions, Kievan Rus' would have been capable of overcoming Byzantine immobility and of moving along with the general European progress. These surmises find support in the fact that pre-Mongol Rus', although under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Constantinople, was by no means isolated from or intellectually hostile to the Latin West, in spite of some occasional theological polemics.
At this point we may pick up the thread of our previous argument concerning the Western element in the Ukrainian national type. The remarkable thing about the Kievan State was the following: it combined a predominantly Eastern, Greek, Byzantine religious and cultural tradition with a predominantly Western social and political structure. Most significant is the fact that political Byzantinism remained totally alien to Kievan Rus'. (Byzantine theocracy later found a reception in the rising state of Moscow, where it united with an organizational framework moulded in the pattern of the Golden Horde's oriental despotism.) In pre-Mongol Rus', as in the medieval West -- and in contrast to Byzantium and Moscow -- political and ecclesiastical authority were not fused, but remained distinct, with each of the two autonomous in its own sphere. A social system characterized by contractual relations, a strong regard for the rights and the dignity of the individual, limitation of the power of the prince by a council of boyars and a popular assembly, autonomous communal city life, territorial decentralization of a quasi-federative nature -- all this gave the Kievan polity a distinct libertarian imprint. And this libertarian, essentially European spirit also characterizes Ukrainian state organizations of later epochs. The Galician-Volhynian state of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries evolved toward a feudal structure, and a full-fledged feudalism, including feudal parliamentarianism, may be found in the Lithuanian-Ruthenian state of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. The Cossack State of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries possessed a system of estates (Stixndestaat). It was not a coincidence that in the nineteenth century, during the epoch when Ukraine was politically assimilated to the Russian Empire, all-Russian liberalism and constitutionalism found its strongest support in the Ukrainian provinces of the empire. Had an independent Ukrainian state, reborn in 1917, succeeded in surviving, it would have certainly fitted into the Western pattern of constitutional forms. The majority of the Ukrainian community favoured a democratic republic, with a socialistic tinge, while a conservative minority leaned toward a constitutional monarchy.
The ethos and the aesthetic sensibility of the Ukrainian people are rooted in the spiritual tradition of Eastern Christianity. But as the country was also, in its political and social structure, a part of the European world, the Ukrainians searched after a synthesis of East and West. In the spiritual field this rendered Ukraine the classical country of the Uniate tradition. But the same striving also characterized Ukrainians who were not Catholics of the Eastern rite. It existed strongly among the Ukrainian Orthodox majority, and even the Ukrainian Protestants as well. The seventeenth century, the time of great flowering of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, was also the epoch when it became permeated with Latin influences. This was exemplified by the Kievan Academy, a creation of the Metropolitan Peter Mohyla, which was the leading intellectual centre of the entire Greek Orthodox world, and whose organization and curriculum were patterned on the model of Western universities. In the field of arts, the same tendency found an expression in the style of the so-called Ukrainian or Cossack Baroque, which fused Byzantine and Western elements in a highly original manner.
We arrive at the following conclusion. Ukraine, located between the worlds of Greek Byzantine and Western cultures, and a legitimate member of both, attempted, in the course of its history, to unite the two traditions in a living synthesis. This was a great work, although it must be admitted that Ukraine has not fully succeeded in it. The synthesis has been approached in the great epochs of Ukrainian history, in the age of Kievan Rus' and in seventeenth-century Cossack Ukraine. In both cases, although these epochs were rich in promise and partial achievement, the final synthesis miscarried, and Ukraine succumbed to excessive pressure from the outside, as well as to internal disruptive tendencies. In this sense, it may be said that the great task, which appears to be the historical vocation of the Ukrainian people, remains unfulfilled, and still lies in the future.