Bohdan Chuma: “Ukraine’s history is a normal and typical history of a European nation”

Putin is trying to write a history of the Russian Empire that begins with the Tsarist Empire, continues with Soviet Communism, the Red Empire, and now continues under his government.

Dr Bohdan Chuma is an associate professor in the Department of History and the founder and director of the Iberian Studies programme at the Catholic University of Ukraine (UCU) in Lviv. I got to know Professor Chuma through the course he taught with Professor Oleksandr Pronkevych on Ukrainian history in collaboration with the University of Cadiz. In this interview we discussed many of the milestones of Ukrainian history.

Álvaro Peñas: I guess you have often heard that Lenin was the creator of Ukraine?

Bohdan Chuma: Yes, and now Vladimir Putin is saying the same thing. Politicians everywhere use history in favour of their ideology, because we all know some history, but not enough, and they manipulate it. Now it seems that Putin has become a Stalinist and Leninist, whereas years ago he was clearly against it, and he is trying to write a history of the Russian Empire that begins with the Tsarist Empire, continues with Soviet Communism, the Red Empire, and now continues under his government. It is strange how Lenin and Stalin are lumped together with Tsar Nicholas II, who was murdered by the Communists.

A very important milestone in Ukrainian history is “Kievan Rus” and also one of the most controversial.

It is important to understand the terms, because in Slavic languages “Rus” and “Russia” are two different terms, but for Westerners they are the same. Rus is a historical term that refers to the first organised state in these territories, the Kievan Rus, a typical medieval state that existed from the mid-9th to the mid-13th centuries, and in which the most important thing was the dynasty. After its fall, the debate about who was the heir to the Rus’ dynasty began. Fortunately for Ukrainians, its centre was Kyiv, our present capital, and it covered a large part of Ukrainian territory. As for the name of Russia, we find in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 14th century a palatinate with its capital in Lviv called “Red Russia” and in Belarus “White Russia”. However, it was the Grand Duchy of Muscovy that adopted the name Russia, Greater Russia, in the 18th century. This Great Russia is opposed to a Little Russia, Ukraine, but who is really the Great Russia and who is the Little Russia? It is important to understand that we are not talking about modern states and that the meaning of terms is constantly changing.

When was the national idea born in Ukraine?

As in many other places, in the 19th century, when modern nations were created. Even the Russians, who developed their own national idea at the same time as they were building their empire. At that time, it was considered a duty to create as straightforward a national history as possible. In Ukraine, this happened at the end of the 19th century with Mykhailo Hrushevsky, a historian who later became one of the leaders of Ukrainian independence. He wrote the history of ‘Rus Ukraina’ and from this came the idea of national unification, of a great nation with a population of thirty million at the time. This process took place later than in other parts of Europe and was still going on during the revolutions of the early 20th century.

With the defeat in the First World War and the Revolution, many nations freed themselves from the Russian yoke: Poland, Finland, the Baltic states and also Ukraine.

Indeed, with the revolution against the Tsar, the Ukrainian elites proclaimed the creation of a nation divided between two empires, with multiple nationalities, such as Polish, Jewish or Russian, and with different identities, such as the Ukrainians who felt part of the Russian imperial idea or the small Ukraine. In the War of Independence there is a struggle between these projects and identities, as well as an ideological one, and this is the main reason for the failure of the Ukrainian Revolution.

There is a war event that has been called the Ukrainian Thermopylae, in which some 300 cadets detain thousands of Bolsheviks for hours. What is the significance of this feat for Ukraine? 

The battle of Kruty is a historical event and is very important in the construction of the national myth in the face of the Russian/Soviet invasion. The Kyiv government did not have an army to face the Soviets because the only pro-independence military forces were in the west, and several hundred students were the ones who gave their lives to resist the invader. Their number, around 300, has a clear mythological connotation that brings to mind the Spartan resistance against the Persians. Such national myths exist in many other countries and I think it is very important to underline that Ukraine’s history is a normal and typical history of a European nation.

A terrible event in Ukrainian history is the Holodomor. Attempts have been made to minimise the crime by claiming that it was the result of misguided agricultural policy and that the famine happened elsewhere in the Soviet Union.

Famine did punish other places, but what happened in Ukraine was the “pacification” of the rebellious lands through a great famine. There is an interesting documentary by the Institute of Ukrainian Memory, “Why was the Holodomor possible?”, which explains the Soviet documents very well. In the 1920s, the policy of social and economic liberalisation led to national and political liberalisation, and even Ukrainian communists became nationalists, adopting the slogan “far from Moscow”, because they understood that Ukrainian history and culture had more to do with Europe than with Muscovy. The national idea remained strong in the much more traditional countryside, while Soviet ideas were more readily adopted in the big cities. For this reason, Stalin and the Communist leaders felt it necessary to “pacify” the countryside, and this was the main cause of the Holodomor, to destroy Ukrainian identity and implant the Soviet mentality, “homo sovieticus”.

Researchers have no doubt that this was an artificial famine, planned and directed from Moscow with very clear instructions. This happened not only in Ukraine, but also in other areas where there were highly differentiated ethnic groups, such as Kazakhstan and Kuban, which had to be “pacified”. The latter is a very interesting story because the Kuban Cossacks were the heirs of the Ukrainian Cossacks of Zaporizhia, but they had developed their own identity.

Is the Maidan revolution the culmination of all these attempts to break away from Moscow in the 20th century?

We recognise that modern nations were created in the 19th century and we have to recognise that national identity is not a closed thing. After the fall of the Soviet Union in independent Ukraine there were millions of people who identified with Russian identity, in many cases as a result of Russification, but the children of many of these “homo sovieticus” who spoke Russian at home became good citizens of Ukraine and participated in the Maidan revolution. At the moment, many of the soldiers fighting against Russia still speak Russian. This is a very difficult phenomenon to understand outside Ukraine, but it is proof of how identity changes.

Researchers have no doubt that this was an artificial famine, planned and directed from Moscow with very clear instructions.

This happened not only in Ukraine, but also in other territories where there were highly differentiated ethnic groups, such as Kazakhstan and Kuban, which had to be "pacified". The latter is a very interesting story because the Kuban Cossacks were the heirs of the Ukrainian Cossacks of Zaporizhia, but they had developed their own identity. Is the Maidan revolution the culmination of all these attempts to break away from Moscow that took place in the 20th century? We recognize that modern nations were created in the 19th century, and we have to recognize that national identity is not a closed thing.