School of hatred

In the past few years, approximately since the time of the Ukraine without Kuchma action of 2001, some Ukrainian and Russian mass media have started waging another vigorous anti-Galician campaign. The first campaign of this kind took place in 1989-94, when Galicia (Halychyna) was the hub of the national renaissance and state-building movement.

In both cases, this is an aggressive reaction of the Muscophile and “Little Russian” segments of Ukrainian society. In both cases, it is a revival of old Russian stereotypes and myths that portray Galicians and Galicia as something totally alien to Ukraine, hostile, destructive, “bourgeois-nationalistic,” etc. In reality, both then and now Galicia is a status symbol of the entire Ukrainian national movement that Moscow has always feared as something that can thwart its imperial ambitions and claims. Demonizing Galicia has always sought to present the Ukrainian movement as marginal, pathological, and menacing.

There are two main factors behind today’s mounting anti-Galician campaign. First, the Party of Regions is trying to reinforce its external propaganda by reanimating old Soviet anti-Ukrainian myths and slogans, like “Down with fascist henchmen” and “No to bourgeois nationalism,” although these two slogans are complete nonsense from the standpoint of historical truth and national logic.

Second, the past few years (since Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia) have seen fierce geopolitical and strategic competition for Ukraine, in which the national weakening of our state occupies by far the most crucial place. While the Party of Regions uses anti-Galician (read: anti-Ukrainian) propaganda mostly for tactical purposes, trying to whip up emotions and enlist the support of the Russian and Russified residents of Easternern and southern Ukraine, whose mentality is still full of anti-Ukrainian stereotypes, Moscow has embarked on an anti-Galician crusade with the strategic goal to split Ukraine regionally and weaken it through internal conflict.

Anti-Galician stereotypes in Ukraine have other, deeper, roots. First of all, the nation spent a long time under the leveling pressure of the Russian Empire, a well-run “melting pot” that generated a specific phenomenon known as the “Ukrainian Little Russian mentality” (or “Creole mentality,” according to Mykola Riabchuk). Today, outright rejection of Galicia’s social traditions has formed within a considerable part of Ukrainian society — the dominant part, which has a powerful impact on the shaping of current government policies, cultural and social values, and which remains under the protracted mental, ideological, and cultural influence of Russia.

This is the reason why there are secret instructions against Galicians and all things Galician, such as the hounding of Galician politicians, freezing of economic and business contacts with the region, and tendentious misinformation, while the central media, not to mention those in Easternern and southern Ukraine, mostly report negative or, at best, neutral but never positive, information about Galicia. This creates the overall impression of an area described as being “almost totally depressed,” “backward,” and “hopelessly provincial.”

On the one hand, this is an objective phenomenon because the difference between Creole-type consciousness (post-imperial, inferiority-complex-ridden) and Galician (nation-centered, civic) is too great for such a hidden conflict not to exist. On the other hand, it carries within it the clear threat of a split in the nation.

The press, academic publications, and television have featured so many anti- Galician materials in the past few years that it would take a separate monograph to review them. So I will try to analyze only the main, most deeply rooted, and rabble-rousing stereotypes that distort Galicia’s image and essence in Ukraine’s informational, political, and cultural space. Since they are mostly rooted in the traditions of Russian great-power imperialist ideology, they require historical and scholarly analysis. Let us look at Galicia as a distinct phenomenon of culture and mentality. The chief stereotypes in the negative assessment and perception of Galicia are as follows:

1) In terms of civilization and mentality, Galicia is alien to and dangerous to the Eastern Slavic (read: Russian) civilization and culture and, therefore, Ukraine itself.

2) Galicia has always been part of the Church Union; it is too open to the West and thus has a corrosive effect on the Eastern Slavic Orthodox civilization.

3) Galicia and Galicians were excessively spoiled by Polish culture and thus are utterly alien to the rest of Ukraine.

4) In the 19th century Galicia became an oasis, a “laboratory” of sorts, of the modern Ukrainian nation, and it “infected” the rest of Ukraine with nationalism, thus breaking the “sacred” unity of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples.

5) In the last quarter of the 19th and the early 20th century Galicia stemmed the Muscophile movement, the ideology and policy of the “true champions of fraternal Slavic unity,” which dealt an irreparable blow to the monolithic Eastern Slavic union.

6) Galician writers and cultural figures exerted a negative influence on the new Ukrainian culture, “befouled” the Ukrainian language with foreign Galician dialects and “incongruous” esthetic components.

7) During the interwar period and World War Two, Galicians formed the OUN-UPA, a very “aggressive bourgeois nationalist movement” that collaborated with the German occupiers, relentlessly fought against the USSR, and thus won the dubious distinction of being “traitors” and “fratricides.”

8) Having been affected with the above-mentioned “poisons” — Middle European (Austro-Hungarian) and Polish spirit, the Church Union, nationalism, and a categorical anti-Moscow stance — Galicia preserved its traditions and identity even in the Soviet era; it did not bow to Moscow and was not mentally Russified; instead, it strengthened, becoming a kind “Carpathian Croatia,” an eternal bulwark and enemy of the Orthodox Eastern Slavic world (even though the latter took the form of an atheistic and communist USSR).

Let us now elucidate the causes and ideological foundations of the anti-Galician stereotypes in the same sequence:

1. True, in terms of mentality and civilization, Galicia posed a threat to the “Eastern Slavic civilization,” but only in the sense that this kind of civilization does not exist. The fake vision of this civilization emerged in the imperial ideology of the 19th-century Russian Slavophiles (Ivan Kireevsky, Aleksei Khomiakov, Konstantin Aksakov, Nikolai Danilevsky, et al) who tried to substantiate the right of Russia to own Middle Europe (from Poland to the Balkans) and developed the idea of “Moscow as the Third Rome” with its claims to being “the only center of Orthodoxy” and the right to fight for Constantinople (Istanbul), i.e., the right to pursue an aggressive foreign policy. That this required the complete assimilation of the empire’s two other great Slavic peoples — the Ukrainians and Belarusians — was a foregone conclusion. This is why the imperial doctrine did not show any greater contempt and disgust for anybody but these two — allegedly “fraternal” — peoples, for they “disturbed” the empire’s internal unity. In reality, the “Eastern Slavic civilization,” i.e., Kyivan Rus’, a superpower that was united for a short time by the Varangians (the Normans, who established several states in Europe through conquest), disintegrated in the 12th century, when three large geopolitical centers — the Polotsk Principality, the Novhorod Land, and the Volodymyr-Suzdal Principality — seceded, one by one, from the central Kyivan Principality. This was a natural fact in all the three main dimensions — geopolitical, national, and mental/civilizational. The Baltic geopolitical circle “drew away” Polotsk and Novhorod. The Great Eastern European Plain became the cradle of the future Muscovite Principality, while the Black Sea coastal area shaped the future space of Ukraine. In ethnological terms, the Belarusians (Polochans and Dregoviches) were a symbiosis of Baltic and Slavic ethnoses, the Novhorod people were a mixture of Balts, Veneds, Slovens, and proto-Finns, the Muscovites were a union of Slavs and various Finno- Ugric peoples, and the Ukrainians were a symbiosis of Slavs and Sarmatian Scythians. In the dimension of mentality and civilization, Polotsk and Novhorod experienced a strong cultural influence of the Baltic macroregion and Scandinavia; Muscovy — Turkic nomads; and Ukraine — the Mediterranean (Byzantine Empire) and Central Europe (the Balkans, Hungary, and Poland).

The differences between Muscovy, Ukraine, and Belarus became especially evident in the 14th-17th centuries, when the latter two were part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It was the time when Ukraine and Belarus experienced the powerful influence of Catholicism, the ideas of the Renaissance, and Baroque culture. The nobility formed its own ethics, a specific moral code based on the Western aristocratic and knightly spirit. Urban culture was on the rise: cities were granted the Magdeburg Law. Muscovy could not endure this. Although the closeness of the three Eastern Slavic languages was preserved, this was due to the great role of the Old Church Slavonic spiritual, cultural, and written-language tradition rather than to some mystic affinity among these peoples. Closeness of languages that have a great cultural tradition is a typical phenomenon in world history. For example, the Romance languages (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Romanian) are very closely related, and Arabic is a common language for very different peoples from Morocco to the Persian Gulf, and so on. The problem of both Belarus and Ukraine was that, after they were annexed by Russia in the 18th century, Moscow relentlessly destroyed all these socio-cultural and spiritual traditions and forcibly imposed the Russian language and culture on them. In this space, Galicia (along with Transcarpathia and Bukovyna) remained the only island free of coercive Russian “influences,” above all, because it became part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1772. This is why its civilizational and psychological difference from the rest of the gigantic Russified space is so pronounced. But this natural distinction fully corresponds with the social structure, culture, and spirituality of Central Europe — the world between the Baltics and the Balkans, between the Alps and the Black Sea. The roots of this world are hidden in the depths of people’s hearts, so all kinds of differences in Belarusians and Ukrainians continued to emerge whenever Russian pressure eased.

2. The second myth concerns the “accursed” Church Union of Galicia. Indeed, the assessment of and attitude to the Union have a mystical, superstitious, and fanatical nature in Russia. The reason is that Moscow embraced too sincerely and blindly the teachings of Greek fugitives about its exclusive “mission” in saving the Orthodox world from the “Latinizers” and “infidels.” This geopolitical role dovetailed perfectly with the idea of the “Third Rome,” i.e., the strategy of establishing a pivotal imperial political Eurasian center in Moscow. This why Russia has always considered the Union as the most perfidious and effective blow to the unity and strength of the Orthodox world. Thus, all things related to the Union were literally demonized and interpreted as a “sacrilege” and mystical “crime” against the spiritual foundations of Orthodoxy. Meanwhile, what was ignored was the fact that the Church Union was a natural phenomenon for all Central European peoples because it proceeded from their psychological and philosophical background and the principle of openness to West and East. As long ago as the 12th century, the princely and boiar elite of Kyivan Rus’ adhered to the concept of a dialogue with the Roman Church. The ideology of the Union ran through the Ukrainian church milieu throughout the 13th-17th centuries. The Union of Brest in 1596 was a qualitatively new and strategic step of the Ukrainian Church to respond to the challenges of history: the church embraced Western theological schooling, which at the time was of a much higher quality than the Orthodox one; it opened up to the progressive world of ideas, synthesized the influences of Renaissance culture (which gave rise to the phenomenon of Ukrainian Baroque), and at the same time preserved its own Byzantine rite, customs, liturgy, and language, thereby becoming a decisive factor of Ukrainian nation building.

Contrary to the Polish political elite’s expectations, the Uniate Church did not become a “bridge” for converting the Ukrainians and Belarusians to Catholicism. Instead, it only cemented Ukrainian- Belarusian society and made it more mobile. The Uniate Church became a truly national church. Even the fact that this church structurally revived and gradually won a prevailing position throughout Right-Bank Ukraine after the reign of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, when the Cossacks essentially destroyed it, shows its special organizational dynamics and wholesome directions of development. As early as the 18th century, both Poland and Russia regarded the Uniate Church as the main threat to their domination in Ukraine and therefore were bent on destroying it. In the 19th century, and especially between the 20th century’s two world wars, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was not only a reliable bastion of Ukrainian spirituality and the national idea but also an active and influential religious structure, which, in terms of clergymen’s education, level of theological thought, and the influence of high-quality rites on the proliferation of the true faith in society, was the equal of the most powerful national churches of Central Europe. This occurred at a time when the Russian Orthodox Church was the principal tool and ideologue of the mass-scale denationalization of Ukrainians in the rest of Ukraine. So the Union could only exert a “bad” and “corruptive” influence on Ukraine in the sense that it showed the illustrative example of a dynamic national church as a source of the nation’s increasing spirituality.

3. The third myth is that Poland “spoiled” Galician. Galicia was as much “spoiled” by Poland as Slovakia was by Hungary, which dominated this Slovak nation for over 1,000 years, Bohemia by Germany, Slovenia and Croatia by Austria, Bulgaria by Turkey, and Ireland by Britain. In all these cases, centuries- long colonization of these nations indicates only that they managed not only to resist the pressure of the dominant nations for such a long time and finally gain their independence, but also create a distinct culture, strengthen their national character, and preserve a high level of spirituality and social mobility. That the conquered nations borrowed some psychological, social, behavioral, cultural, and linguistic features from the conquerors while preserving their deeply rooted national particularities and traditions attests to the complex and multifaceted nature of their ethnic structure rather than their “inferiority” or “backwardness.” The once enslaved nations are in no way worse than the former dominant nations in terms of sociopolitical mobility and creative potential. In other words, the Polish social and cultural influences that Galicia experienced could not prevent it from preserving its inner Ukrainian essence: it managed to resist the extremely powerful assimilationist pressure of the Poles and harden its national character. By all accounts, all nations develop in a never-ending, broad dialogue with each other. Thus, more often than not foreign cultural influences can play a positive, encouraging, and enriching role. Suffice it to recall the cultural wealth England that once took from its conquerors, the Franco-Normans, France from Italy, Spain from the Arabs, etc. It is only the blinkered and xenophobic strata of the population that can regard the spiritual and social interrelations of peoples as “illness,” “loss,” etc., without seeing in this the great stimulating function of international existence. The myth of the Polish “bane” (recall the works of the great imperial Russian writer Fedor Dostoevsky, in which all the Polish characters are portrayed as highly demonic enemies of the “Orthodox world” or simply wretched milksops) gained such high currency in Russia’s imperialistic and chauvinistic propaganda because Poland, with its extremely developed culture, dauntless spirit of Catholicism, and brilliant and militant aristocracy and nobility, was the main obstacle to Russia’s domination over Central Europe. In other words, the point is not in the “bad” Poles but in Russia’s imperial pretensions.

4. It is illogical to accuse Galicia of spreading nationalism all over Ukraine because it was precisely Dnipro Ukraine that offered Galicia the first and main impetus to national development. Ivan Kotliarevsky, the Romantic poets, Mykhailo Maksymovych, Taras Shevchenko, Panteleimon Kulish, Oleksandr Konysky, Ivan Nechui-Levytsky, Mykhailo Drahomanov, and Mykhailo Hrushevsky were the chief leaders and inspirers of the 19th- century Galician national renaissance. In the 20th century, they were joined by Dmytro Dontsov, Viacheslav Lypynsky, Yevhen Malaniuk, Yurii Lypa, Oleh Olzhych, and others. Galicia became the center of the national movement only because it was freer within the framework of the Austrian constitutional monarchy, and there was no relentless imperial pressure on the part of Russia, allegedly the Ukrainians’ “greatest Slavic brother.” By all accounts, the Galicians carried out the nation-forming program, as did every former conquered and oppressed European nation. The Czechs, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, Bulgarians, Romanians, and others have also resorted to the same forms and methods of national mobilization and cultural renaissance in order to become full-fledged nations. There was no “wolfish” nationalism in Galicia: its nationalism was as militant as the repression of the conquerors was aggressive.

(To be continued in the next issue)