Ukraine’s attach in Europe
Born in the 20th century, many of us are loath to accept the notion of progress, be it for utilitarian reasons, or out of sheer skepticism. The associative way of thinking in the early 21st century imposes, albeit subconsciously, hair-raising pictures from the recent past: world wars, devastating revolutions, unheard-of atrocities committed under totalitarian regimes, controversial consequences of the technological boom, industrial breakthroughs, and man-made disasters. The Orange Dream, that of genuine progress in Ukraine, comes from an idea first developed by a group of European intellectuals back in the 18th and 19th centuries. The idea of progress that emerges in our [21st-century] minds, contains many specific metaphoric symbols, including the notions of the cost of this progress and that of regress, whether a chimera, illusion of progress, etc. This period in Ukrainian history is marked by cynical/ pragmatic/glamorous/politically-correct decisions, and it appears to be shrugging off the ideal values, those of step-by-step advancement, as experienced by several generations of European statesmen, among them distinguished Ukrainian political figures. Simple bestselling paperback truths, blogs with uncensored comments, including risque, exotic headline-seeking ones — boiling down to pop culture stuff — inadvertently fragment and marginalize our Weltanschauung. However, leafing through the brittle pages of old publications, you find yourself wondering whether the idea of civilizational progress — man’s progress, to be precise — should be discarded as obsolete. The Ukrainian classical intellectual heritage (including that of Mykhailo Drahomanov) offers a variety of answers to this painfully topical question from the perspective of past experience, current realities, and prospects.
Without a doubt, Drahomanov occupies a place of honor in the pantheon of Ukrainian historians. This is explained by a number of circumstances. Considering this scholar’s diversified public and cultural practices, as well as his research per se, his status as a Ukrainian intellectual, whose interest balanced precariously between science and politics, becomes perfectly understandable.
Clio, the muse of history, was apparently a major part of Drahomanov’s kaleidoscope of interests and guidelines; this muse was the cultural core of his Weltanschauung. Clio marked that virtual trial range upon which Drahomanov could test his sociopolitical visions, particularly when finding parallels between contemporary and past realities.
Drahomanov’s singular versatile scholarly heritage stems from a combination of positivism and antique legacy. Nor was the historian’s keen contemporary perception of that antique legacy coincidental. The positive notion of progress rightfully occupies a place of honor in the scholarly heritage of Drahomanov the analyst.
Moreover, this notion is the cornerstone of his M.A. research paper. “While in this domain, knowing nothing about the latter-day pertinent foreign literary sources, relying only on classics, it dawned on me that the Roman Empire did not actually signify the fall of the Roman world after the Republic; rather, it meant a degree of progress in the social and cultural spheres, even if not in the political realm,” he wrote in his autobiography.
Let me stress that, with Drahomanov, the notion of progress wasn’t something everlasting, immune to changes. After all, he refuted the then predominant concept of the undeniableness — rather, the irrevocability — of social progress. He regarded it as a metaphysical, therefore damaging, notion.
Drahomanov insisted that the idea was one of the features germane to the philosophy of history, and that it helped a free grouping of peoples, depending on their respective social development stage/level, and that, consequently, the history of progress of any people was left in the backdrop; that the life of such people was viewed from only one angle.
Similar reflections upon progress, specifically in terms of critique concerning the absolute idea of progress, are found in other works penned by Drahomanov. “The abstract idea about the unconditional progress of all humanity, with the attendant fatalistic notion, support the very questionable view on Roman history and its sequel, the Byzantine Empire,” Drahomanov stressed when delivering his first lectures at St. Volodymyr University [currently: Taras Shevchenko National University, Kyiv].
In fact, this scholar ponders at depth over antique classics, over those conditions in which historical progress was possible, relying on the past experience of various bodies political. Drahomanov appears to be tracing down the intellectual and cultural roots of the idea of progress, particularly to define its existence in the sociopolitical and historical mental environment.
In his opinion, “…the idea of progress partially emerged toward the end of antiquity and gained strength in the advanced minds of the 18th century.” He also believed that “…the idea of improving man in history…” was germane to the 18th century.
Drahomanov would later note that the Christian faith came to an end between the Great Rebellion (English Civil War) and the French Revolution in the minds of advanced Europeans, who developed the idea of natural, continuous historical progress.
At the same time, he correctly pointed out that this idea was then as much scholarly as it was a belief, a revolutionary faith. This syncretism of concepts pertaining to historical progress and continuity prompted a number of contemporary intellectuals to come up with diverse, often controversial notions.
Drahomanov believed that, for the French and the British, the notion of progress was revolutionary by nature, whereas the Germans had not only reconciled this idea with their religion, but also lent it “the form of education bestowed upon humankind by Providence.”
Understanding the degree of continuity of some or other phenomena, therefore, depended not on circumstances and/or preconditions, but on a given historian having suddenly perceived the idea of progress — especially considering the diversity of the conceptions of progress in the 18th-19th centuries.
Characteristically, such concepts lent a distinct idealistic touch to one’s pattern of progress, having much to do with the rationalistic belief in the possibility of improving humankind.
Drahomanov wrote that a historian can be genuinely truthful for as long as he remains unswervingly idealistic, adamantly believing in a better man of the future. If he does, this historian can refer to a certain source — be it analytical, moral or creative — in order to comprehend the ultimate ideal and disguise between the shades of facts laid down in a given treatise, and find the signs of progress in all those antipathetic phenomena, as well as detect signs of regress, of all those unnatural occurrences.
The above is proof of Drahomanov’s Weltanschauung, as well as his rather controversial conception of progress, a process subject to rational perception while demanding an idealistic, almost humanistic attitude to the human race.
Drahomanov, it should be noted, usually distinguished between the history of events, processes, and the history of thought, and he gave his preference to the latter in explaining the phenomenon of progress: “Being capable of progress is mostly germane to human thought, and accordingly, it mostly operates in a sphere born of human thought, the so-called inner history of a given people; it will continue to operate there in the sense in which we put it; it will give rise to new needs and seek ways to meet them.”
Drahomanov also supported the idea that “civilizational progress manifests itself and is mainly caused by the strength scholarly, political, and moral conscience.”
Such sophisticated statements demonstrate his rather specific conception of progress in history as a product of human culture and spirituality. At the same time, they explain the major role Drahomanov’s research endeavors in terms of ethnography, mythology, and folklore — the more so that his studies in these realms uncovered man’s inner being in history. It was there that Drahomanov searched for the innermost reasons behind historical progress and its past manifestations.
Unlike the verbal program of Romanticism, with its emphasis on perceiving the existence and/or soul of a given people/nation, Drahomanov tried to trace the social, economic, cultural, and intellectual prerequisites of progress in Ukraine’s “inner” history.
He wrote that Muscovy, put together by the Russian tsars in the 16th-17th centuries, had practically no urban craftsmen — people who served as the foundation of European culture, whose progress would depend on them from the 16th century, ranging between free thinking and dedicated communal membership.
This notion of the special features of Russian history that set it apart from European culture is repeated in Drahomanov’s scholarly woks. He believes that “most national hallmarks of Ukraine, as distinguished from Muscovy, are explained by the fact that Ukraine was closer to Western Europe, before the 18th century, and followed in its footsteps, albeit with delay (owing to the Tatar onslaught), in terms of social and cultural progress.”
The problem of guided progress is quite manifest in his works, the more so that he sought to divide the existing society into a progressive minority and an ordinary majority: “Our society will never identify itself with the progressive minority; it will always be divided into several strata, each having its separate way of progress. The quicker the pace of this majority, the greater the number of the strata, the more complex the chemical relations between them.”
This differentiation substantially complicates Drahomanov’s perception of progress, adding quite a few nuances to it; this progress emerges as a social balance of sorts. Hence his thesis about the “aristocratic” and “democratic” periods in history that are marked by various rates of social transformations and consequences: “More often than not, such quick political and cultural transformations in history occur during the aristocratic periods of history, whereas the slower and deeper-reaching ones take place during the democratic periods. Such blitz and slow and quiet, far-reaching periods of progress, which prepares and educates man, have happened very often in latter-day history.”
The confrontation between the aristocratic, democratic, monarchic, and republican periods in history is clearly traced in Drahomanov’s works. He often considers, assesses not only separate epochs, but also significant past events, like the 1654 Treaty of Pereiaslav: “This alliance between the republican, democratic Little Russia and the monarchic, boyar-ruled Great Russia [Muscovy] was abnormal, considering that the [Russian] tsars wanted to let Poland have the Right Bank of the Dnipro quickly (this happened in 1667), so as to assert their rule on the Left Bank… Naturally, under such circumstances, Ukraine’s alliance with Muscovy couldn’t last long, especially considering the despotic rule of the Muscovite bureaucracy and the difference between the folkways (Khmelnytsky said Moscow was uncivilized).”
According to Drahomanov, progress is not only a degree of social balance, but also competition and mutual additions to distinct social ideals.
Generally speaking, Drahomanov supported the positivist idea of progress. He kept stressing that there was an interrelationship between the ideas of progress and historical regularity: “…the correctness and regularity of historical phenomena found its firm support only in the recognition of the idea of progress.”
These remarks and natural-study metaphors (“chemical relations,” comparing history with physiology, etc.) demonstrate Drahomanov’s positivism. However, while supporting the notion of progress as a regular consequence of human existence and intellectual advancement, he did not ignore the spiritual and ideal factors: “…a historian, when dealing with a certain period in national history, must study the political system in the first place, the ideal of the social order, and only then proceed to examine the conditions that caused this ideal to emerge, finally the possibility of reaching the truth within that society, the possibility of progress, given this [social/political] order. Drahomanov appears to be introducing probability factors into his doctrine, considering that he ponders the possibility, rather than the irrevocability, of historical progress.
Drahomanov regards the presence of a people on the historical arena as that which can be defined in terms of time and space, above all in the context of a given historical period, albeit in diversified forms of political, cultural, social, and public life. His notion of progress has nothing to do with a separate historical domain, but with all that historical diversity, where some phenomena can undergo transformations, moving from one sphere to the next.
Drahomanov sums this up as several general clauses: (a) “…a given people’s history must be studied from the nation-state and general human points of view…”; (b) “…regress/decline on the part of either side does not always entails regress/decline on the part of the other side; moreover, it often causes progress…”; (c) “…a civilized people can show progress that will not stop until this people finds itself in a situation tantamount to physical death, disaster or conquest [by another people] — even though this progress may slow down, turn out inadequate, accompanied by delays or decline on the part of the other side.”
After all, Drahomanov visualizes progress not only as a distinct notion; he sees it in its diversified manifestations, in perspective that shows and allows one to assess the complicated, controversial realm of history. His perception of history involves a number of cultural and intellectual guidelines, and the latter form his singular system of coordinates in interpreting the notion of historical progress.
Among these guidelines is his attitude to revolution, the notion about the unswerving revolutionary nature of the very idea of progress.
Drahomanov made clear his skeptical, rather negative, attitude to revolutionary transformations in his M.A. thesis: “…there have been many uprisings in the 19th century, yet none has succeeded in substantially changing the public, economic, let alone political order. Natural sciences — geology and biology — have of late demonstrated the slow pace of changes across the world, substituting revolution by evolution. Today’s natural sciences must convince the learned communal members to revise their ideas about changes to the [existing] political order, about focusing on public/governmental matters; about quick coups d’etat and revolts. They must be taught to remember that any kind of [social/political] order has to be established and then reach maturity. This can’t be done overnight. Measures taken by the state — or coups and revolts meant to overthrow this state — are only part of the factors that cause changes in human existence; there are lots of other factors.”
These notions remarkably correlate with Drahomanov’s socialist credo. He was much on the self-reflective side and stressed that he was a socialist of the Western European school, rather than a “Russian nihilist.”
In other words, Drahomanov introduced his own revolution/evolution assessment scale, which would serve as his main Weltanschauung touchstone. Moreover, this perception is presented as a polarized view on the ways of progress.
Drahomanov appears to have taken a negative stand in regard to violent actions in both political and public realms. He resolutely condemned the assassination of the Russian emperor, Alexander II, on March 1, 1881, referring to it as an act of cannibalism.
This stand dealt a heavy blow to Drahomanov’s reputation in the contemporary revolutionary quarters, yet his stand was based on European culture. Not coincidentally, Dmytro Ovsianyko-Kulykovsky respected Drahomanov as a “perfect Russian European type,” and Serhii Yefremov aphoristically called him the first Ukrainian attache in the European cultural court.
In fact, Drahomanov’s European stand is manifest in all of his political and historical views; it is his good old touchstone in making comparisons and analogies: “My stay in Europe has convinced me that the European standard — or cosmopolitan worldview that doesn’t reject various ethnic variations in regard to the general idea and form — is the best foundation for Ukraine’s autonomy effort; that any current scholarly or political activities must rest on this international foundation.”
Hence his well-known motto: “Cosmopolitanism In Ideas And Targets; Ethnicity In The Foundation And Forms Of Cultural Work!”
Therefore, the interrelation between his cosmopolitanism and ethnicity adds to Drahomanov’s worldview, his notion of progress.
His cosmopolitanism, however, should not be regarded only in the context of “worldwide citizenship,” rather as a humanistic, spiritual notion. To this end, his European, cosmopolitan stand is proof of his belonging to the progressive part of mankind.
In terms of universal, European progress in the 19th century, Drahomanov not only tried to represent Ukrainian history, but also struggled to represent Ukraine’s contemporary political realities: “A truly scholarly, wide view on Ukrainian history would look hostile in the eyes of our community at large, considering that the fatal local national tasks facing the Ukrainians had to be dealt with under foreign governance, and that progress in Ukraine, albeit given a foreign form, would lay the foundations for a [nationally] conscious Ukrainian community. This serves to demonstrate the degree of civilization Ukraine could have reached and made her contribution to world civilization, given national consciousness and autonomy, something it has repeatedly attempted to achieve; something it can perceive now, being on the road leading to universal progress… being faithful to your country and people will serve its cause only after this country cleanses itself of all that enmity toward ‘strangers,’ after it enlightens itself with the knowledge about universal progress.”
Drahomanov viewed the 19th century through the prism of combining national/ethnic and cosmopolitan projects.
He wrote in his M.A. thesis: “Our century is that of ethnic communities; an era of the merger of Italy and Germany; on the other hand, it is an era in which to enjoy the heritage of all those ages of humanism, the [Universal] Declaration of Human Rights […] A closer look at the idea of making changes in the name of ethnic identity shows that this effort and movement have strength and are understood by the rest of the world, especially where the matter of national identity is also a matter of culture and human rights. Our age is that of national alliances; yet this age is also that of tremendous international industrial undertakings, international exhibits, scholarly congress, and other cosmopolitan projects.”
Be that as it may, Drahomanov’s cosmopolitanism stemmed from his recognition of civilizational achievements, of all that mankind — all the peoples, nations, and ethnic groups — had succeeded in accomplishing over the hundreds of years. This served as a balance of sorts between Drahomanov’s cosmopolitan and global views, although this would never prevent him from writing sharp critiques addressing the Unitarian or chauvinistic manifestations in the late 19th century socialist movement.
Drahomanov visualized historical progress as a dynamic balance between evolution and revolution, between ethnicity and cosmopolitanism, between distinct social ideals and strata, between the “aristocratic” and “democratic” periods in history, between the individual and society, and so on. He believed that the key idea of progress was man’s spiritual/cultural rejuvenation, his turning from a social and ethnographic into a cultural and political entity.
Oleksii Yas, Ph.D. (History) is a senior research fellow with the Institute of Ukrainian History at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
