Playing with the past: does the decolonisation of the history of Ukraine make sense?

The dismantling of the monument to Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonosov in Dnipro, Ukraine last January. Photo: deniska_ua / Shutterstock

However, Tooze understands Europe as a continent and community without Ukraine, which has been perceived as a foreign body and not truly party to European culture and values. Such assessments, which are based on pathos and the instrumentalisation of knowledge, determine the distortion of the contemporary and historical image of Ukraine.

As an object of study, Ukraine has been subjected to many prejudices and stereotypes regarding the history of Central and Eastern Europe. Certainly, Ukrainian history is neither isolated nor unique, but historical misrepresentations have addressed only the national grand narrative about Ukraine. This treatment has been applied not only by western academia, but also by Ukrainian historians themselves. This raises two important questions. First, to what extent is the discrediting of history as a science reflected in the perception of Ukrainian history? Second, does Ukraine still require historiographical legitimisation?

The decolonisation fad

After the Russian invasion in February 2022, the rhetoric of decolonisation concerning Ukraine among American, British and German scholars, intellectuals, and especially journalists, has been directly linked to the necessity of decolonising East European, Russian and Eurasian studies. In March 2022, the authoritative academic journal Slavic Review published reflections by historians, political scientists, and slavists on the decolonisation and prospects of Ukrainian, Russian and East European studies. Some of the forum’s participants cited the necessity of abandoning national-imperial fantasies and deconstructing the “Russozentrische Optik”, while other participants stated that Ukraine-centred history was important to Central and Eastern Europe and used the comparison of Ukrainians to David confronting Goliath. Decolonisation has become a kind of trend surrounding Ukraine. One author in Yale Daily News even wrote that American universities still view regional history as a discipline through a Russian or Russophile lens.

Russia’s 2022 invasion made Ukraine a suitable object and tool for the rhetoric of decolonisation regarding the history of Russia and Eastern Europe. Once again, as participants in this debate have stated, although explanations and interpretations of Russian and Eurasian history might be found in Ukraine, the subjects of Ukrainian history will remain a source and laboratory for such explanations, rather than being perceived as an independent discipline. In other words, in discussing decolonisation, most historians have failed to consider Ukraine and instead looked to Ukraine’s theoretical and empirical potential to enhance Eastern European, Russian and Eurasian history.

Against this panoply of ostensibly correct statements, a relevant question has arisen: what has prevented the study of Ukrainian (as well as Belarusian and Moldovan) history through a different lens? These calls for decolonisation are even more cynical in that they have come only after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Recall that after 2014, when the war between Ukraine and Russia truly began, studying topics related to Ukrainian nationalism, multi-faceted ethnic irredentism and the politics of memory became popular in western academia. The whole of Ukrainian history has been explained through the complex phenomenon of Ukrainian nationalism, which has been perceived disdainfully through Hans Kohn’s assessment of Eastern European nationalism as ethnic, aggressive and illiberal.

Ukraine remains in the category of “bad” nationalism, as prominent American historian Mark von Hagen has explained. By marginalising the experience of a revolutionary Ukraine and the nation-state’s creation in 1917-21, as well as the history of the 1932–33 Holodomor, western studies have demonstrated an arrogant mindset and sometimes lack of knowledge, distorting the public understanding of Ukrainian history by suggesting that it can be viewed through anticolonial, postcolonial and civilisational approaches.

Today, western historians often recall one of the most important articles on the Ukrainian history of the last century, “Does Ukraine Have a History?”[1], opportunistically instead of scientifically. The article’s author, von Hagen, stated without embellishment that giving Ukrainian history full historical legitimation was important and he called for a revision of the established paradigms of Eastern European, Russian and Eurasian history. Consider, however, von Hagen’s warning that in the West, as well as in Ukraine, there lacks an intellectual organisation of professional historiography, so this infrastructure must be created.

Calls for decolonisation by western academics have been voiced differently by historians from East Central Europe, who have asked more specific questions and not offered ephemeral formulations. For example, Polish historians have especially discussed overcoming Russia’s imperial complex and de-imperialising Ukraine’s history. Recently, the Polish historian Jan Jacek Bruski wrote insightfully that “the imperial logic followed by the USSR [as well as the imperial] authorities often worked against their own long-term interests. This was also the case with efforts to solve the Ukrainian question.” Meanwhile, Andrzej Nowak has explained to a wider audience in even more detail that “Ukraine is a daughter of Rus’, raised in the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, rebelling against her stepmother Moscow.” I should note that some isolated, reasonable voices have emerged from western academia. Recently, Serhii Plokhii stated that Ukraine helped build the Russian empire and now stands in the way of its resurrection. But this type of analysis is an exception, rather than a widespread trend.

Alternative notions of Ukrainian history

The current approach to decolonisation as a topic represents a huge problem. In many cases, this issue stems from politicisation and ideological calls to decolonise the history of East Central Europe, which have nothing to do with a methodological, or academic discussion. Usually, the term East Central Europe has been replaced by Russia, Eastern Europe, or the ideological term Eurasia. In general, the rhetoric of decolonisation has been based on the assertion that Russia and the Soviet Union were colonial empires. Furthermore, this discussion has not included Austria-Hungary or even the history of the medieval Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which some scholars have defined as an empire. Interestingly, the Austria-Hungary case has undergone significant “de-imperialisation”, as studies that have referred to the state as “the Habsburg monarchy” have shown. In Ukraine’s case, other interpretations are common. More important, however, is understanding the extent to which and how Ukraine, as a region and as part of East Central European history, has been considered a true part of East Central Europe. Alternatively, has Ukraine been marginalised and perhaps decolonised in this respect? I have many doubts as to the answers to these questions.

The issue concerning modern Europe’s real and imagined borders, as well as the development of Ukraine’s historical grand narrative, occupies a rather provocative place in the contemporary debate on decolonisation. After the Second World War, the vision of politicians and intellectuals from East Central Europe was based on the idea of an internal, historical division of Europe.

In Ukrainian intellectual and historical thought in the 20th century, Ukraine was regarded as belonging to Europe through a geopolitical and civilisational choice. However, Western and Central European intellectuals and politicians considered this issue differently. Ukraine had not always been conceived as part of East Central Europe, and it had been treated as part of Eastern Europe, which was historically associated with Russia and perceived as Russia’s sphere of influence. Academic and public discourses on East Central Europe have remained a kind of political statement emphasising civilizational differences from Russia and Eurasia and an attempt to scientifically delineate a geopolitical and geographical location in the East from Berlin. For these reasons, the concepts of Central Europe and East Central Europe (including geopolitical visions of the Intermarium and a Third Europe) are territorially identical and based on the geographical location between Germany and Russia.

Central Europe and East Central Europe have not been considered geographically real but, rather, political and historical entities. The notion of East Central Europe was considered conditional and metaphorical, like most definitions of historical divisions and geographical spaces. However, during the Cold War, that very term included Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, while some historians also added Austria. Today, East Central Europe should be redefined by including Ukraine, Belarus and possibly Moldova. This redefinition would imply considering Ukrainian and Belarusian history as part of East Central European studies. Tellingly, today’s Ukraine is not seen as part of either East Central Europe’s common history (in Poland and Czechia, Ukrainian subjects are mostly a core body of Eastern studies at the university level) or Russian and Eurasian studies. Most scholars automatically situate Ukraine in East European studies, which are understood as part of Russian studies, and not vice versa.

In general, the dichotomy between Germany and Russia has been important in Ukraine’s history and in the development of its national grand narrative, as well as for other countries of East Central Europe, particularly Poland. The aforementioned von Hagen referred to Ukraine as a place in studies from the English and German-speaking worlds; importantly, however, Ukrainian topics have now been considered an eminent part of the region’s history. Contributions by several generations of Polish historians are well known to have been among the most important – if not the only important – elements of this historiographical transformation. These contributions have included the plotting of Ukrainian history in the narrative of East Central Europe because the old Rus’ lands were part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, while Moscow did not belong to Ruthenian history. According to Polish historian Oskar Halecki, this region’s conventional and geopolitical borders ran along the Dnipro river and even further onto the East.

Does Ukraine still require historiographical legitimisation?

In the current academic discourse, Ukraine and East Central Europe’s decolonisation primarily involves the recast of Russian and other (post)imperial interpretations that justify Ukraine’s cultural and political discrimination and annihilation as a nation. In examinations of East Central Europe’s historical potential, Ukraine is usually considered a multi-ethnic and multi-religious region but not a political or cultural entity. This is very evident in the field of historical memory and the contemporary politics of history. While Ukraine is considered part of Europe’s Polish identity, on the contrary, Russia is not. This approach means that Ukraine is an important element in the thinking on and perception of Europe in contemporary Poland. Ukraine’s role differs in German, French and British historical memory, where Russia occupies one of the central places in the European identity and is seen as part of a common European history and culture. However, in these understandings of Europe, Ukraine is instead marginalised.

Visible competition has arisen between national grand narratives and national historiographies within the framework of decolonising East Central Europe’s history. In this respect, any call for a transnational approach or an entangled history, is perceived as an attempt to violate the integrity of the historical process’s teleological understanding – an attempt to destroy the correct national vision of history. To some extent, paradoxically, the interaction between national narratives has reinforced the asymmetry in historiographical assessments and historical memory, when common historical episodes are seen as competing options. For instance, consider the ongoing, heated discussions between Polish and Ukrainian historians about assessing the occupation or incorporation of Eastern Galicia into the revived Poland in 1918-23 and the horrible events in Volhynia during the summer of 1943 (the “Volhynia massacre” in Polish historiography, and “Volhynia tragedy” in Ukrainian historical understanding). The discussion on decolonisation has largely ignored the competition and confrontation between national narratives in East Central Europe. The region’s history has been concerned with identifying which elements transcend national boundaries to promote desired perceptions of the past. Therefore, in my opinion, the path to historiographical legitimation is not through decolonisation models but through transnational history, which offers similar approaches to investigation without relativising the historical process. Compared to most of its neighbours’ pasts, Ukrainian history has been discontinuous in the wider history of East Central Europe, or, rather, this conditional discontinuity has been questioned due to historical and cultural permeability, as von Hagen noted.

Only one axiomatic truth applies in this context: Ukraine has no historical ties to either Poland or Russia, but it has had historical relations with them. The same is true for Belarus, Romania, Moldova, Slovakia and Hungary. Hence, certain attitudes emerged about the Europeanness of Ukraine and Ukrainians, which constituted the fundamental approach to demonstrating differences both between Ukrainians and Russians and between Ukrainians and Poles. Ukrainian history could be recast by overcoming this narrow eurocentrism in thinking about East Central Europe. Adopting such a historical perspective would make understanding political, cultural and social hierarchies and their inversions in a very heterogeneous East Central European space easier, as well as the experiences of violence, mass murder, genocide, and the spread of populist ideologies in the region.

Therefore, I do not believe in and feel uncertain about all the discussions of decolonisation with regard of Ukraine that have been initiated in former imperial states, and characterised by an updated yet (post)imperial language of analysis and self-description. These discussions are currently based on political calculations, and they have not yet proposed a constructivist approach. Ukraine needs new historiographical legitimisation, but not on the basis of decolonisation, which requires Ukrainian history to be understood through a broad Russian and Eurasian historical paradigm.

Finally, after communism’s collapse, the American and Polish historian Piotr Wandycz noted that East Central Europe sometimes “has resembled a laboratory in which various systems are being tested”. Wandycz expressed this remark in his book The Price of Freedom: A History of East Central Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present (1992), which he dedicated to Halecki and Hugh Seton-Watson. Similarly, von Hagen, in his aforementioned article, called Ukrainian history “a veritable laboratory” for considering processes of state and nation-building. This laboratory metaphor is among the most dangerous for historical analysis because it rejects a global perspective and cultivates intellectual conjuncture. In this respect, I fear that Ukraine will again be treated as a laboratory in which to recast Russian and Eurasian studies in the context of decolonisation rhetoric, rather than part of East Central Europe. Thus, Ukraine could be perceived once more as an alien country that lacks any connection to European history.

Gennadii Korolov is the director of the Institute for the Study of East Central Europe in Kyiv. He is also an associate professor with the Institute of History of Ukraine at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

[1] von Hagen, M. “Does Ukraine Have a History?” Slavic Review (Autumn, 1995), 54 (3), pp. 658–673.

academia, Colonialism, history, Russia, Soviet Union, Ukraine