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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

History and Mythmaking

16 January, 2001 - 00:00

“Historians are dangerous people,” Nikita Khrushchev was quoted as saying in 1956 when he ordered the dismissal of Eduard Burdzhalov as Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Voprosy istorii, then the flagship of Soviet historical journals. It seems that at that time historians had taken advantage of Khrushchev’s thaw to publish more of the truth than the system could tolerate. In particular Burdzhalov and his ilk had the effrontery to note that on the local level Bolsheviks and Mensheviks had worked together and even had joint party committee in a number of cities until well into the summer of 1917. In the Manichaean universe of the Soviet Union, where the Bolsheviks always wore white hats and the Mensheviks worse than Satan himself, of course, such things could never be tolerated. As a former Sovietologist, I was quite well aware of the Soviet use and abuse of history. In that bygone intellectual universe, historians were something like high priests of the great god, History, whose dogmas were enshrined in the Holy Writ of Historical Materialism.

I truly regret that I was unable to take part in the round table on history, the first part of which is published in this issue. I have known Yuri Shapoval and Stanislav Kulchytsky for over a decade, and Serhiy Krymsky is my colleague at the Kiev-Mohyla Academy. Both Shapoval and Kulchytsky have undergone tremendous evolution over the years, one from scholarly secretary of the then Institute of Party History to a scholar who has done more than anyone else to dig out the most gruesome details of Stalinism in this country and the other from writing about what a great idea the forced collectivization of agriculture was to a leading historian of the Manmade Famine of 1933. It is thanks to the evolution of people like these that this country at least has a chance to decide what it is to become, and it is ample proof that, after his fashion, Khrushchev was right. Historians are dangerous precisely because they are important; it is they who help most of all to define what a community is by defining what it was.

Prof. Shapoval is quite right in saying that history cannot and should not be demythologized. This is so because history has an inevitably subjective element. It is and cannot be simply what happened, and it is a long way from everything that happened. The dictum of Leopold von Ranke, the patriarch of nineteenth century German historiography, that history should be wie es eigentlich gewesen ist (like it really was) has long been recognized as a myth. It is what we decide is important for us to know about our past, our inherently subjective understanding of who we are, attained at least in part by projecting concepts and values of later times onto periods when they were unknown. Was Kyivan Rus’ a Ukrainian state? No more and no less than Capetian France, for neither even thought in terms of nations. Did Bohdan Khmelnytsky think he was leading a struggle for national liberation? He thought in terms of his Cossack forces and the Orthodox faith, but in France, which was going through its Fronde at roughly the same time, nobody thought in terms of a French nation either. These events became part of national histories to help affirm the existence of nations in search of themselves. This is myth, of course, but myth that is empirically neither true nor false, but spiritually true, to quote an old friend, myth in its finest sense. The creation of a nation’s history out of facts, which are meaningless in and of themselves, gives meaning to those facts and to the community that history created. It is a kind of dialectic, by creating our past, we are also creating our present and future. The trouble is that, while France or the United States have long since decided who they are and where they come from, Ukraine is still in the process of doing so. It is fascinating to listen those who are feeling their way in the quest to do so. Until they do, Ukraine will remain like Oakland in the eyes of Gertrude Stein: “There’s no there there.”

Prof. James Mace, Consultant to The Day
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