Between Politics and History

“Whoever thinks clearly explains clearly.” It would be good if our scholars, especially historians, political scientists, and philosophers, always remembered this maxim of Arthur Schopenhauer. For at the very least, a search for the truth, the essence of any scholarly quest, calls for intellectual honesty, logical thinking, inner harmony, consistent conclusions, and, more often than not, civic courage. All these values were germane to Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky (1919-1984), a prominent historian, political scientist, writer, and public figure of the Ukrainian diaspora. Although this outstanding scholar died twenty years ago, his precise thinking, logical formulations, and carefully thought out analytical approaches (as well as the fact that the vast majority of this researcher’s works were aimed at solving the crucial problems of Ukrainian social studies) make Lysiak-Rudnytsky’s legacy a truly inexhaustible source of scholastic pursuit for younger generations of “knowledge seekers.”

Ivan Petrovych Lysiak-Rudnytsky was born in Vienna, one of Europe’s leading intellectual centers, into the family of Pavlo Lysiak, a prominent Ukrainian lawyer and civic leader, and Milena Rudnytska (1892-1976), a leader of the Ukrainian women’s movement, who was later elected to the Polish Sejm. Ivan was raised in an environment of true spirituality and demanding intellect. According to his personal friend, the distinguished scholar and foreign member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences Prof. Omelian Pritsak, who is also known as the foremost scholar of Lysiak-Rudnytsky’s life and works, Ivan “acquired his intellectual interests with his mother’s milk, perhaps attentively listening to political debates when he was still ‘knee-high to a grasshopper’.” In Prof. Pritsak’s view, owing to the fact that Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky was born “into a family of champions of the Ukrainian cause,” he began regarding books as a basic human need when he was only a child.

Prof. Pritsak believes that the fundamental worth and most characteristic feature of Lysiak-Rudnytsky’s scholarly legacy is that he “created a clear-cut structure of the Ukrainian past as part of the well- known Western intellectual development.” In particular, the historian convincingly showed that Ukrainian medievalism was an integral, albeit atypical, component of Western European development. This equally applies to the results of his research into the history of Ukrainian sociopolitical thought of the 19th-20th centuries. (Lysiak-Rudnytsky devoted more than one year to this question). Naturally, all this was the result of longtime intellectual efforts, amply attested by the scholar’s life story.

In addition to his family, Lysiak-Rudnytsky’s spiritual cradle was the University of Lviv, where his studies were interrupted in the fall of 1939, when the Soviets invaded. Later he continued his studies at Charles University of Prague. After the future historian graduated from the Czech university, he studied for a time in the Department of Political Science of the University of Geneva. Long before he began his studies at Columbia University in the US (1951-1953), the scholar had embarked on the only correct path: to seek an organic synthesis of the best achievements of Western liberal democratic thought and the ideals of the Ukrainian national liberation movement; in other words, the necessity of merging the national and democratic “streams” of a single progressive movement. This seems to be one of the most urgent questions facing Ukraine even today.

Lysiak-Rudnytsky’s favorite genre was a brief essay (or article) rather than a large monograph. Moreover, he knew how to choose the most important subjects. Two, by far the most convincing, examples will suffice to illustrate this: the essay “Ukraine between the East and the West” (1963) and the article “Pereyaslav: History and Myth” (1982).

The first of these is in fact a radically revised Ukrainian translation of a paper that the scholar presented at the Slavic Historical Congress in Salzburg (an essential part of Lysiak-Rudnytsky’s scholarly heritage was originally done in English owing to the specific circumstances of his work). What are the main ideas of this work? They are the same ones that are troubling us now and which are of paramount importance during an election: the European or Eurasian nature of Ukrainian history and the Ukrainian national character and, accordingly, the direction of our further development. What answer does Lysiak-Rudnytsky give?

First of all, let us recall the author’s very important stipulation. “I believe in the existence of something that may be roughly called ‘national character’,” he writes. “Yet one should not understand this falsely in a naturalistic sense. For this phenomenon belongs to the socio-cultural, not biological, sphere. The national character is formed historically, and one can identify the factors that shaped it. After the national character has crystallized, it usually displays considerable stability and ability to reject or assimilate undermining influences.” Taking due account of this stipulation, inasmuch as it is important from the methodological angle, let us try to follow the scholar’s train of thought.

His fundamental leitmotif is: “Ukraine is ‘Western’ as much as it forms an integral part of the European community. It is not just a simple fact of physical geography.” According to Lysiak-Rudnytsky, our native land is a country that “was essentially European — and therefore ‘Western’ — from the very outset and did not need to be assimilated into Europe by way of an abrupt revolutionary upheaval.” Then he considers an interesting problem: what part of the European community has Ukraine been maintaining the closest ties with? The answer is: “Not with the Atlantic, i.e., Western European, area. True, there were some relations between Ukraine and France and England that can be traced through all the epochs of Ukrainian history, beginning in the times of Kyivan Rus’; yet they were by and large sporadic. When modern Ukrainians speak about ‘Western Europe,’ they in fact mean the space better known as Central Europe, i.e., the lands with a German-speaking population from the North Sea to the Danube valley.” Yet Lysiak-Rudnytsky believes one should not narrow this complex and difficult problem because “there were still closer links with the countries to the east of the German ethnic territory, for which scholarly literature has coined the term ‘Middle Eastern Europe’: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland — especially the latter.”

As for “Eastern elements and their impact on the Ukrainian historical process,” Lysiak-Rudnytsky points out that this term (“East,” “Orient”) “is applied to two entirely different historical objects: on the one hand, to the world of Eastern Christianity and the Byzantine cultural tradition and, on the other, to the world of Eurasian nomads.” Moreover, the researcher proves that the Eurasian nomadic element influenced our people “from the outside” but failed to become “a component part of the Ukrainian national type.” Yet the Greek (i.e., Byzantine) cultural tradition exerted an “internal” influence, forming Ukraine’s spirituality. This brings us to the overall conclusion: Ukraine strove to synthesize the Western and Greco-Byzantine cultures into an organic whole for centuries on end, but this “great goal, which amounts to the historical vocation of the Ukrainian people, still remains unachieved and belongs to the future.”

No less urgent is Lysiak-Rudnytsky’s article “Pereyaslav: History and Myth,” in which the author convincingly proves that the process of Ukraine becoming a colony of the Muscovite state (and later of the Russian Empire) could not but be accompanied by the creation of a myth that the new rulers badly needed — about the allegedly “voluntary reunification” of Ukraine and Russia in Pereyaslav. No historical sources, Lysiak-Rudnytsky emphasizes, confirm this thesis, but a myth needs no rational proofs, for it arises exclusively for political reasons. It is no accident that the “Pereyaslav myth” was resuscitated and actively used by the USSR’s communist government from 1954 onwards.

Besides being a profoundly gifted scholar, Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky also had a talent for making truly scholarly, not intuitive, predictions. In his article “Soviet Ukraine in the Historical Perspective” (1970), he writes: “Now that the colonial empires are crumbling, the USSR is an anachronism. Only when Lenin’s slogan of the ‘self- determination of nations, including secession’ ceases to be a hoax will Ukraine and Russia be able to live as good neighbors.” In its turn, the government of Soviet Ukraine, “entangled in the still unresolved differences with the principles from which it sets forth its legitimacy, cannot exist for a long time.” This is exactly the way it happened. This is only one of numerous examples of the superior analytical skills and truly extraordinary ability of Lysiak-Rudnytsky to make forecasts, which makes his heritage all the more important for us.