Bohdan Kistiakovski and the modern Ukrainian project
A Ukrainian version of Susan Heuman’s book Kistiakovski: the Struggle for National and Constitutional Rights in the Last Years of Tsarism was recently published.
Now that we have to simultaneously adopt the form of Ukrainian statehood and the formula of general national identity, the inquisitive Ukrainian reader’s interest in Bohdan Kistiakovski is very timely and relevant. In fact, it would be difficult to find a more appropriate figure for the program strategy for our “European path,” “humanistic values,” and return to the European roots of the Ukrainian nation and Ukrainian culture (more often than not at the level of slogans).
Kistiakovski died over eighty years ago. He was a noted jurist, philosopher, and companion of Max Weber. Despite the years, his ideas have not become obsolete; on the contrary, they await implementation in specific sociopolitical form in contemporary Ukraine. All of his humanistic endeavors were aimed at asserting the legal form of statehood.
He is an attractive figure, because he took a remarkably integral stand and never deviated from it, be it etatism or some national idea (so characteristic of the Russian intelligentsia in the early twentieth century). Bohdan Kistiakovski could be described as a knight errant of the law and the Don Quixote of legality. His quixotism was not the result of bookish, theoretical philosophy, but an existential choice, a graphic example of his neo-Kantian intuitive world view concerning the difference between the world of values and the empirical world; it was proof that one could remain true to the humanistic idea of law and individual sovereignty in an epoch having no prerequisites whatsoever, when the first sprouts of lawful statehood and sense of justice were swept under a wave of obscurantism.
Kistiakovski consistently defended his basic principles, yet he was anything but intolerant or extremist, nor did he romantically demonize any excesses, the latter being a very strong temptation at the time, to which most noted intellectuals involved in or with the Silver Age culture invariably succumbed. Kistiakovski balanced on a razor-thin line between the bottomless crevasses of ideological intolerance on both sides. His was a measured road, one of the golden mean, reflected even in his literary style: inconspicuous, modest, without any stylistic frills, let alone shocking, unconventional outbursts. The special features of his style explain how Kistiakovski remained European rather than cosmopolitan; why he adhered to the idea of law rather than liberal fundamentalism (laissez faire). He had an express Ukrainian national-cultural identity; he did not support the concept of ethnocracy but was a cosistent individualist albeit without Berdiayev’s sociopolitical nihilism.
Throughout his public and political career Kistiakovski’s political views underwent considerable transformations. He was influenced by cultural Ukrainophiles, Drahomanov’s federalism, and the Marxist version of social democracy. In the end, however, Kistiakovski became a representative of revisionism and ethical reform-socialism, a political trend among the social democratic and Left-liberal theoreticians who, relying on the ideas of neo- Kantianism, sought to direct society to overcome social conflicts and assert the humanistic ideology of national solidarity and common advantage. Ethical socialists — among them Eduard Bernstein, Mykhailo Tuhan-Baranovsky, Leonard Nelson, and Willi Eichler — were at the roots of the transformation of social democratic doctrine (as Ukrainian political scientist Yuri Levenets points out quite correctly) from orthodox Marxism to its modern version. For example, British Premier Tony Blair’s views formed influenced by ethical socialist ideas (not in the neo-Kantian modification, but more akin to Scottish philosopher and theologian John MacMurray).
The presence of purely social- democratic and typically liberal motives in the stand taken by reform-socialists like Kistiakovski makes their legacy the apple of discord among modern bearers of social democratic and liberal ideologies in Ukraine. This, in particular, explains the epistolary polemic between Mykola Zhulynsky and the social democratic circles representing the SDPU(o) publishers Osnovni Tsinnosti [Basic Values] that published the Ukrainian version of Prof. Heuman’s book.
Which challenges facing modern Ukraine does Susan Heuman’s book about Bohdan Kistiakovski (very accurately revealing his Weltanschauung ) respond to? Primarily, working out a scenario combining the formation of a European-standard state ruled by the law and the attainment of Ukrainian identity conforming to the democratic, not ethnocratic paradigm of state building. Without exaggeration, all the key problems of Ukrainian society consist in the absence of an inherent linkage and constant recreation of differences between the Ukrainian “national idea” (which does not reach beyond the limits of ethnically oriented nationalism) and the democratic idea of law (which the national patriots often identify with cosmopolitanism, borrowed Americanism, exported democracy, and estrangement from the native domain). The continuous confrontation between the romantic patriarchal character of the so-called native domain and modern globalism causes social stagnation in Ukraine, with both trends actually blocking each other’s way.
Given today’s obvious collapse, Kistiakovski’s main lesson is in placing emphasis on human rights as a priority humanistic value, the cornerstone and principal criterion of whatever social transformations. To Kistiakovski, any given individual was precisely that domain, in which he could build his own scenario of both state reform and a solution to the so-called national question. To this end, the scholar was mainly concerned with preserving individual freedom, protecting the individual from encroachments by two forms of individual collectivism, the state and the nation. The development of the institution of law was for Kistiakovski a way to protect individual freedom from possible encroachments by authoritarianism, nationalism, and etatism.
The main forms of resistance to the authoritarian temptation, in Kistiakovski’s opinion, were constitutionalism and federalism, both understood as not only social institutions, but also principles, strategies, and techniques of transforming authoritarian regimes into those ruled by the law, counterpoising technologies, revolutions, and mobilization. Noncoercive and gradual social transformations in the spirit of the legal and social democratic paradigm allowed a strategy of immersion, cultivation of legal relationships within an authoritarian society, in contrast with the revolutionary-apocalyptic orientation, aimed at the total destruction of the institutional foundations of a future state ruled by law. For example, Kistiakovski regarded as a the most important criterion of the constitutional system not only the implementation of the principle of division of power, but also the independence of the judiciary, it being an extremely important institution, the quintessence of the principle of law. He pointed to the fallacy of the tsarist policy with regard to the jury, describing the latter as the most significant democratic gain, which was finally suppressed in Russia. The relevance of this aspect of Kistiakovski’s social program in today’s Ukraine is self-evident.
Kistiakovski’s program articles as part of polemic with PСtr Struve (signed Ukrainets [The Ukrainian]) are very important, in that they illustrate the application of his general legal doctrine, his personalistic and individualistic stand in the national matter. Susan Heuman details the polemic’s key points, except the distinctions with Volodymyr Zhabotinsky, another Struve’s opponent who was an ideologue of Ukrainian as well as Jewish national particularity. In our opinion, the important thing is that Kistiakovski and Zhabotinsky did not belong to the same camp, and that the distinctions in their views are the essence of Kistiakovski’s national identity.
This all comes down to Zhabotinsky regarding the rights of a nation outside the context of building a state ruled by the law, stressing the ethnic and, on a large scale, the “natural” aspect of forming a nation (e.g., landscape, the ethnic substrata of which he called tribe, objectively formed tribal mentality, depending on the physical environs, and the language as a tool of this mentality or the so- called national character), never reaching above the paradigm of blood and earth.
With Kistiakovski, two possible scenarios of forming the national identity are characteristic, depending on the emphasis on the sociopolitical aspects of human rights: Ethnic federalism. In Russia, a multiethnic empire at the time, a consistent approach based on the concept of the state ruled by the law would have meant turning the empire, with the Russians having the dominant status, into a federation of national and ethnic groups. This principle was directed against the state nationalism of the dominant nation, allowing the national minorities to defend their national interests within state institutions. Given this approach, the formation of the so-called titular nation with its inherent notion of own privileged status, implying the possibility of discrimination against other nations, would be sheer nonsense.
Political nation. This opportunity was implemented by Kistiakovski as Ukraine gained independence [for the first time before the long decades of the Soviet regime], when actively assisting by the enactment of the law on Ukrainian citizenship (July 18, 1918). Under that law, Ukrainian citizenship was to be granted everyone living within the territory of Ukraine, if they so desired and agreed. Although the concept of the ethnic nation remained largely the predominant world view of Ukrainian identity at the time of the Directory and Central Rada, this way of thinking was utterly alien to Kistiakovski. While federalism was acceptable as an adequate form of achieving national identity within the empire, in an independent Ukraine he saw identification of the national and public as the only nondiscriminatory formula that would exclude predominant state nationalism. Given such circumstances, the Ukrainian identity would not be a natural result (stemming from the ethnic group), but a free cultural choice regardless of ethnic origin.
The problem of Ukrainian national identity remaining open, the equivocal formula of the titular nation’s statehood blocking the formation of a political nation, and outbursts of social extremism on ethnic grounds are all evidence that ethnocentrism has come to a dead end, that there is a threat of Ukraine getting into a Balkan situation, and that it is necessary to look for new forms of Ukrainian national unity.
Thus the actualization of interest in Academician Bohdan Kistiakovski is for the modern Ukrainian public a profoundly symptomatic, significant phenomenon. We believe that a detailed study of his ideas will help overcome predominant stereotypes, such as “Ukrainian roots,” Ukrainian “national patriotism,” and will make a different formula of the Ukrainian national identity public property, in contrast with whatever right-radical nationalist recidivism.
Susan Heuman’s book, published by the Harvard Institute of Ukrainian Studies in 1998, is now available in Ukraine courtesy of the Osnovni Tsinnosti Publishers and is an excellent guide to the Weltanschauung of our celebrated fellow compatriot.
