Away from Russia? History Writing Before, During, and After the War

My first book Making Ukraine Soviet: Literature and Cultural Policies under Lenin and Stalin examines the non-linear process of cultural Sovietization of Ukraine in the interwar period, and the ambivalent role of Ukrainian writers and cultural managers in the process of consolidating the Soviet rule in Ukraine.¹ In the centre of the book is the so-called Literary Discussion of 1925–28, waged by artists, art officials, and politicians on the issues of proletarian art, the audience and literature’s social role, as well as the artistic orientation of the new proletarian literature. It was in this context that Ukrainian writer and an undisputable leader of the 1920s artistic generation Mykola Khvyl’ovyi called upon Soviet Ukrainian writers to ‘flee as quickly as possible from Russian literature and its styles’. By questioning the cultural and political relationship between Ukraine and Russia, this debate quickly acquired a political aspect, involving even Stalin himself.²

When I submitted the manuscript for the publisher’s evaluation back in 2018, one of the suggestions from the anonymous reviewer was to account for the role of Russia in determining cultural production in Ukraine. While Russia went through similar processes during the 1920s, it was Moscow that kickstarted many of those artistic debates, the reviewer implied. So why would I not speak of Russia in the first place?

Nonetheless, following those recommendations would mean undermining the very argument I was trying to make – in the cultural sphere, and to a lesser extent in the political realm, Ukraine in the 1920s followed its own course, which was informed by Ukraine’s pre-Soviet experiences. One can think of Ukrainian modernism, the Ukrainian Revolution, and Ukraine’s own communist movement, which opposed the Bolshevik ideological monopoly and its exclusive right to represent the Ukrainian working class. Indeed, Ukraine became part of the Soviet Union in 1922, but until Stalin’s ‘Great Break’ in 1928, the Ukrainian government, although receiving directives from Moscow, interpreted and implemented those policies more or less independently.³

Take the Soviet nationalities policy of korenizatsiia (indigenization), launched in 1923 Union-wide for instance. In my book, I argue that Moscow and Kharkiv (the then capital of Soviet Ukraine) had very different understandings of this policy’s goals. While both parties equally aimed to cope with the imperial legacies of Russification, Moscow used korenizatsiia to overcome deep distrust of central institutions and fight illiteracy (political illiteracy most importantly) with the help of native languages. At the same time, Ukrainian communist elites strove to free Soviet Ukraine of cultural and economic dependency on Russia and thereby transform it from Malorossia – the term used to define the Ukrainian-speaking provinces of the Russian Empire, into a fully-fledged national republic with its own Ukrainian political elites, Ukrainian working class, and highbrow Ukrainian culture.⁴

Although the creators and advocates of the two Soviet cultural projects used the Ukrainian language as their medium, their intentions behind the promotion of Ukrainian were different. Whereas the second group saw Ukrainian as a prerequisite for creating a modern, urban-based culture with an equal appreciation of traditional social structure (specifically the Ukrainian-speaking peasantry) and pre-Soviet cultural trends; the first group used the Ukrainian language (the language of the largest ethnic group in the republic) as a necessary concession to achieving certain strategic goals. In this regard, the Ukrainian language was yet another symbolic marker of national identity on par with folklore, dress, food, historical heroes and events, and classic literary works.⁵

So why would an esteemed Western scholar specializing in Soviet studies refute those arguments, pushing me instead to consider the dominant role of Russia? I would argue that those comments mirrored the well-established Russo-centrism of Western academia that has come to dominate our field. In turn, such epistemological hierarchies are reflective of Russia’s global influence and the success of its soft power aimed, among other things, at the covert manipulation of Western experts and scholars.

Russo-centrism is easy to discern in the language used and chronologies applied when dealing with the history of the region. Russia is being conventionally used as shorthand for the Russian (Romanov) Empire and the Soviet Union. Western textbooks continue to call Russian rulers ‘the great’, as in ‘Peter the Great’ and ‘Catherine the Great’. Western metrics are being applied to measure ‘Russia’s evil’. In this way, the prevailing modernizing imperative legitimizes the hegemonic and repressive nature of Stalinism;⁶ Stalin’s crimes fade away if set against the Nazi dictatorship.⁷ Such tropes shape our understanding of the past by shifting our focus to the achievements and successes of the empire (Russian or Soviet for this matter), often downplaying or totally neglecting the cost of those accomplishments.⁸

Not surprisingly, Russia finds itself on top of the political and cultural hierarchies. It is conventionally recognized as a ‘better brother’, with ‘Moscow’ or ‘the Kremlin’ – yes, this reductionism goes further still – being regarded as a sole decision-making authority. This monocentric approach has informed a dominant in Soviet studies model of diffusion, according to which – if we refer back to my own research specialism – all cultural trends originated in Moscow from where they filtered down to other Soviet republics. This model cements the view that Russian cultural (or political, economic, social, etc.) trends were superior and that literary developments and negotiations in Moscow determined cultural developments in the periphery.⁹

Equally, conventional historical chronologies contribute to essentializing Russia and conserving its domination over the region. Little has been done to challenge the sequence and path dependency of the (Kyivan) Old Rus’ – Moscow Tsardom – Petersburg imperial period – Soviet Union – Putin’s Russia. By adhering to this periodization, scholars feed into Russian propaganda and readily forget that those narratives are themselves modern constructs originating in late eighteenth century St Petersburg. Nationalization and magnification of Russia’s history were kickstarted by the conservative Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin. In his twelve-volume History of the Russian State, published between 1781 and 1826, Karamzin developed the narrative of one ‘Slavic-Russian’ people, to which Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarusians belonged, whose shared history can be traced back to the Kyivan Rus’. Hence, it was only in the early nineteenth century that those lands of the Rus’ became ‘Russian’ (rather than Rusian).¹⁰

Nonetheless, simple historical facts can debunk those linear chronologies: the Ukrainian lands were first seized by the Romanov Empire following the 1654 military contractual agreement between the Cossacks and the Russian Tsar Alexis, which Russian scholars have interpreted as a voluntary union between the two states.¹¹ Equally, the Chersonese, the legendary place of baptism of the Kyivan Prince Volodymyr in today’s Sevastopol, was annexed by the Empire in 1783 during the Russo-Turkish wars. Uncritical reproduction of those chronologies, therefore, turns Western historians into contributors and collaborators in the process of Russia’s official identity making, built around a notion of an unbroken, thousand-year continuity from Kyiv through to Vladimir, Suzdal, Moscow, and the St Petersburg of the tsars, back to Moscow of Vladimir Putin.

Recently, Susan Smith-Peter underscored that the field of Russian history in the US was founded by Russian emigres, students of the leading Russian Imperial historian Vasilii Osipovich Kliuchevskii (1841–1911), who transferred the idea of Russian exceptionalism and the view of the Russian people as ‘the primary agents of history in the Eurasian plain’ to the West.¹² Little has changed since, so even today most professors and chairs in Eastern European history are filled by Russian historians or historians of Russia. This Russo-centrism in academia goes further still. For decades western universities collaborated with Russian institutions and benefited from the expertise of Russian colleagues, and used sources in Russian archives, while the Russian government sponsored events and translations of Russian books; professorships and library collections have been set up with Russian financial support.¹³

Russian has remained by default the foreign language taught as an entry point to the discipline. Students went to Russia to enhance their language skills. With the same purpose, western students have been going to Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, and Georgia, thus perpetuating the false image of those independent republics as Russian-speaking and not-that-different from Russia itself. One may even say that organizers of such language schools played into the Kremlin’s hands and provided legitimacy to the so-called ‘Russkii mir’ (Russian world), an intellectual concept devised by pro-Kremlin intellectuals in the late 1990s, and publicly introduced into political discourse by Vladimir Putin in 2001. This perception presents Russians as a ‘divided nation’, an ‘imagined community’ of Russians in Russia and Russian-speakers abroad whose boundaries transcends national borders, instead being determined by the spread of Russian language and culture.¹⁴ The geopolitical use of Russkii mir became evident in Putin’s Crimean speech on 18 March 2014, where he spoke of the Russian nation as ‘one of the biggest, if not the biggest ethnic group in the world to be divided by borders’, and ‘the aspiration of the Russians, of historical Russia, to restore unity’.¹⁵ It is telling that very few experts and scholars in the West objected to Russia’s ‘legitimate right’ to the peninsula following its occupation in 2014.¹⁶

All this explains why ever since the end of the nineteenth century, Russian studies in the West have tended to have a ‘colonization but’ stance, using Smith-Peter’s metaphor. While it is hard to object to Russia’s heterogeneity, the interpretative lens has shifted to the metropole’s ability to accommodate diversity, and its commitment to modernize ‘backward’ peripheries and modernize ‘racially inferior’ peoples. This viewpoint strengthened as part of the ‘imperial turn, an intellectual and methodological paradigm initiated in the early 1990s and institutionalized with the launch of the journal Ab Imperio in 1999 in Kazan that wished to challenge the old and ‘simplified interpretation of the Russian historical experience as a binary opposition “empire-nation”’.¹⁷ Taking a cue from those Russian scholars wishing to revisit and normalize the nature of their empire, many scholars of Russia followed suit to determine ‘empire’ not by conquest or the existence of colonies, but by its diversity.

The resultant, and often unanimous belief in Russia’s exceptionalism is, perhaps, one of the reasons why Russia’s actions in Ukraine prior to 2022 have not received proper critical assessment in the West. The year 2014 became a test for the international scholarly community on how to evaluate Russia and its actions. The Revolution of Dignity, a series of events in 2013–14 in Kyiv and other major cities across Ukraine in support of Ukraine’s European integration and political reforms, and the subsequent occupation of Crimea and Russia’s involvement in the war in eastern Ukraine, were seen by Western observers as ‘the Ukrainian crisis’, with scholarly debate being centred around the question of Ukrainian far-right nationalism.¹⁸ Parallels between Ukrainian radical nationalist paramilitary groups active during the Second World War and protesters at Maidan were routinely made in the press and determined public perception of the events in the Ukrainian capital.¹⁹ The events in Crimea and the Donetsk and Luhansk regions were assessed through the identity/language affinities. In this context, it is remarkable to see how many western scholars have continued to search for Ukrainian ‘nationalists’, while completely overlooking the long-term processes of radicalization and militarization of the Russian society, which eventually resulted in overwhelming public support for the war against Ukraine within Russia.²⁰ The all-out war in 2022, therefore, became a late wakeup call for a sharper reaction and deeper consideration of these issues.

As we are still watching the war unfold, it is high time to move to a ‘colonization and’ framework (yet another term by Smith-Peter), removing the aura of innocence that Russia has enjoyed.²¹ Today’s invasion of Ukraine is a striking reminder that empires do not simply grow or expand. Instead, they have always been the result of violent conquests, while their cohesion was based on power hierarchies and the exercise of brutal violence.²²

If Russo-centrism of Western academia failed to help us discern the true nature of Russian authoritarianism, diversifying positionality and factoring in local expertise, instead, can help find the way out of this deadlock. While until now only scholars of Russia were seen as credible and invited to discuss matters of imperial and Soviet history, as well as the history of its border regions, a genuine epistemological shift (the true decolonization of the field if you like) will occur only when scholars with non-Russian expertise are lent power to comment on matters outside their respective regions or communities, and on Russia broadly defined. This way, their positionality would stop being a burden, becoming instead a benefit for a more nuanced and inclusive understanding of the centre, and history more generally.

With archival research in Russia becoming institutionally impossible, the war also forces us to diversify our research gaze in terms of archival collections. Indeed, Russia, as the former metropole, accumulated the largest corpus of primary sources for the entire imperial realm.²³ The fall of the communist regime and the opening of formerly closed archives turned Moscow into a Mecca for historians studying the region that stretches between the Baltic, the Black and the Bering seas. The ‘archival revolution’ provided more than just access to new empirical material. According to Peter Holquist, the opening up of Soviet archives ‘provided us with the possibility to think outside of previously prescribed categories [which] resided in existing narratives and unarticulated assumptions’.²⁴ While these empirical sources allowed scholars to develop new methodological perspectives and enabled new lines of enquiry,²⁵ the initial ‘archival revolution’ hardly challenged the long-established Russia-centred historical narratives. Important shifts in this regard started to occur in the mid-2010s. Scholars of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe started challenging conventional relations and dependency between centres and peripheries, paying more attention to those borderlands and questioning their constructed nature.²⁶ The war in Ukraine and the extent of Russia’s belligerence will necessarily accelerate this process, helping eventually undermine the century-long fascination and over-dependency on Russia.

Recently, Hiroaki Kuromiya, one of the most distinguished Soviet historians, questioned the impact of the archival revolution in the study of Russian and Soviet history, suggesting it had turned out to be an illusory ‘revolution’.²⁷ He posits that Moscow continues to guard its archives, especially for some historical periods, and ‘releases archival documents carefully and selectively so as to steer historians’ views in its desired direction’. In this regard, Kuromiya mentions documents on Stalinism, many of which are still sealed in the former Communist Party Archive, the Presidential Archive, military archives, and archives of the Foreign Ministry and Federal Security Services. Moreover, even the ‘open’ files of Stalin and the Politburo in the former party archive have numerous pages that are still classified.

Beyond the selective release of archival documents, Moscow has put significant constraints on entering Russia and gaining access to archives. Back in 2015, Sheila Fitzpatrick assured young scholars that ‘archival research has largely ceased to be an adventure and a battle of wits to get material’. Those jubilations were premature, however. In Russia, access to many archives was tightened in the early 2000s, with many documents re-classified.²⁸ Changes to the process of obtaining a Russian visa – according to which each scholar wishing to work in archives requires an official invitation letter from a Russian institution – turned research in Russia into yet another privilege, another prize to be won. Generally, access to archives is a barometer of any regime’s transparency. In the case of Russia, it has become yet another form of manipulation and control over what we think we know about the past.

Instead, access to the archives in many former Soviet republics has been less restrictive than those in Russia, or even fully open. In Ukraine, for example, the archives of the former Soviet secret services have been opened to the public, disregarding nationality, following the October Revolution in 2004.²⁹ The 2015 law ‘On access to the archives of the repressive bodies of the totalitarian communist regime from 1917–1991’ made all documents from the Soviet era open and accessible. Scholars can freely take photos of almost all documents in the archives. In every archive, it is possible to order scan copies of documents that will be delivered to your inbox.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has become a true challenge for scholars whose research heavily depends on accessing archival documents. Many archival collections have been damaged or destroyed. Among the biggest losses were the library and archival collection of the Karazin National University in Kharkiv, shelled by Russian artillery in March 2022, with more than 60,000 valuable volumes destroyed or damaged as a result. Another Russian rocket hit the archive of the State Security Service of Ukraine in Chernihiv Region, destroying tens of thousands of records from the former KGB archives. There are also reports of seizing archival documents in the occupied areas and their transfer to Russia. Archives in localities close to the frontline remain inaccessible to researchers. In the meantime, archivists are working around the clock to safeguard their collections. Danger to these collections and historical records further accelerated the digitalisation of the archival collections, ironically making Ukraine’s heritage available to scholars worldwide from the safety and comfort of their office.

In line with Holquist’s evaluation above, the opening up of archival collections becomes ‘revolutionary’ when the available breadth of sources translates into novel interpretations and research methodologies. In this regard, Kuromiya, a strong proponent of research in republican and local archives, in the above-quoted piece revealed that it was in Ukraine, and not in Russia, where he had received his most critical training in understanding Russia and the Soviet Union. For him, Ukraine’s collections opened ‘new and strikingly revelatory perspectives on history’.³⁰

Archival collections in Ukraine help develop a more nuanced understanding of the Soviet past and challenge some conventional assumptions about the nature of the regime. Empirical evidence held in Kyiv can enhance our understanding of the Russian civil war (where it took the Bolsheviks at least three attempts to establish their rule), the NEP era (challenging the conventional view on the period as a retreat from revolutionary violence), and the more tolerant 1920s. In one of his latest studies, Myroslav Shkandrij showed how documents easily accessible in the Archive Department of the Security Service of Ukraine (the former KGB archive) help challenge the dominant revisionist approaches to the nature of the Soviet regime, and instead highlight Moscow’s responsibility for repressive policies and mass murder, including during those more tolerant 1920s.³¹ In my book Making Ukraine Soviet, I utilized evidence from the Ukrainian archives to demonstrate that persecution based on political affiliation, often defined by national orientation, had long preceded the class-based discrimination employed during Stalin’s Great Break. And such examples are numerous.

Botakoz Kassymbekova is one of the most ardent fighters for an epistemological revolution in the field of Easter European, Russian, and Soviet studies. Real decolonization, Kasymbekova maintains, can only occur when ‘copies of the central archival collections of Moscow and St. Petersburg of the tsarist and soviet periods would be fully transferred to all former republics, and not only those relating to them, but all copies of all central archives’.³² Such decentralisation of knowledge production will dethrone Moscow as the knowledge keeper. For now, of course, such developments are wishful thinking. Given the role the manipulation and weaponization of history played in legitimizing Putin’s autocracy and in justifying brutal wars with its neighbours, control over the past will remain the Kremlin’s priority.³³

Regardless of Moscow’s determination to stay in control, it is possible to start the process from the other direction. In her keynote address at the 2023 BASEES convention in Glasgow, Judith Pallot, an eminent scholar of Russia, recommended young historians to forget about Russian archives and adapt research questions to those primary sources available elsewhere.³⁴ As it is no longer institutionally possible and ethically appropriate to continue research in Russia, newly independent republics along the Russian perimeter will assume a far greater role in research and study. Even Ukraine, with no end to this war in sight, remains far better placed for research than Russia. Of course, to decentre the field, scholars of Russia would need to leave their comfort zones, ask new research questions, and develop new professional networks. Most importantly, they would need to study non-Russian languages. But if we cannot push ourselves to acquire in-demand skills, how can we ask the same from our students?

Challenging Russia-centred narratives has other urgencies too. History has become one of the weapons of Russia’s war against Ukraine. The invasion of this sovereign country is being justified by a twisted version of history, which denied Ukraine’s existence both as a country and as a nation.³⁵ It took centuries to cement the Russian narrative of common origin and unity between Ukrainians and Russians. As a Ukrainian historian and Ukrainian citizen, I can only hope that the gruesome realities of war have encouraged many more people to question those myths. If manipulating historical narratives is a tactic employed by Putin to wage this war, correcting these distortions can be seen as a modest yet attainable step towards Ukraine’s victory.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Olena Palko

Olena Palko is Associate Professor at the Department of History, University of Basel, and a co-convener of the BASEES Study Group for Minority History.

Notes

1 Palko, Making Ukraine Soviet.

2 Khvylovy, The Cultural Renaissance in Ukraine.

3 On local agencies in determining the nationalities and educational policies, see: Pauly, Breaking the Tongue; Liber, Soviet Nationality Policy. On the role of Kharkiv in negotiating and drawing Ukraine’s borders, see Rindlisbacher, “From Space to Territory”; Palko and Ardeleanu, Making Ukraine.

4 Fowler, “Beyond Ukraine or Little Russia.”

5 Based on Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, 12–3.

6 See numerous publications by Botakoz Kassymbekova, in which she rejects the modernization paradigm as applied to Central Asia, e.g. Kassymbekova and Chokobaeva, “Writing Soviet History of Central Asia.”

7 On the potential comparison between the two when the population policies are concerned, see a 2002 Slavic Review forum on the topic of race, sparked by Eric D. Weitz’s article “Racial Politics without the Concept of Race”. The forum included contributions from Hirsch, “Race without the Practice of Racial Politics”. In the same forum, Amir Weiner also rejected the notion that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany could be compared in terms of racial politics, “Nothing but Certainty”; and Lemon, “Without a ‘Concept’? Race as Discursive Practice”. See also Tismaneanu, The Devil in History.

8 For a discussion of why no major studies on the Holodomor (the manmade famine in Ukraine in 1932–33) have emerged in Germany, see, Wessel, “The Concept of Empire”.

9 Mayhill Fowler challenges this model as applied to the study of Soviet culture in the 1920s. See: Fowler, “Mikhail Bulgakov, Mykola Kulish”.

10 Plokhy, Unmaking Imperial Russia.

11 On the contested memory of the Pereyaslav agreement, see Plokhy, “The Ghosts of Pereyaslav”; Davies, “The Road to Pereiaslav”.

12 Smith-Peter, “What Does Decolonizing Russian History Mean?”

13 Mikhail Khodorkovsky was the Foundation Fellow of St Anthony’s College in Oxford, which is home to REES: Russian and East European Studies Centre; his Oxford-Russia Fund, which has provided financial support and scholarships for Russian students to study at the University of Oxford. The Library in St Anthony’s College also bears his name.

14 Jilge, “Die Ukraine aus Sicht der ‘Russkij Mir’.”

15 Address by President of the Russian Federation. 18 March 2014. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/20603 (Accessed on 11 August 2023).

16 The Crimean question remains one of the most difficult to solve as Ukraine is trying to liberate her territory. Foreign Affairs Asks the Experts, “Will Ukraine Wind Up Making Territorial Concessions to Russia?” 24 January 2023. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ask-the-experts/will-ukraine-wind-making-territorial-concessions-russia. (Accessed on 11 August 2023).

17 Gerasimov, et al. “Ot Redaktsii”, 11.

18 Forum “The Ukrainian Crisis and History” and its criticism by Andriy Zayarnyuk, “A Revolution’s History, A Historians’ War”.

19 See, the documentary “What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy”, Directed by David Evans (2015).

20 Levada-Centre Polls “Konflikt s Ukrainoi: Oktiabr’ 2022 goda” https://www.levada.ru/2022/10/27/konflikt-s-ukrainoj-oktyabr-2022-goda/?fbclid=IwAR1cTy-jQ6Ba82zWhBJ99sLMTEauhAP45knEtlvhyZ84gd07W5zsOCJ3S3w. (Accessed 26 June 2023).

21 Kassymbekova, “How Western Scholars Overlooked Russian Imperialism”.

22 Schenk, “Russlands Überfall Auf Die Ukraine 2022”, 547.

23 Plamper, “Archival Revolution or Illusion?”.

24 Holquist, “A Tocquevillean ‘Archival Revolution’”, 77.

25 Fitzpatrick, “Impact of the Opening of Soviet Archives”.

26 Scholars associated with the Peripheral Histories Project are doing great work in challenging those perspectives. https://www.peripheralhistories.co.uk/about.

27 Kuromiya, “Russia’s undue influence on Western scholars”.

28 Shkandrij “The Archival Revolution and Contested Memory”.

29 Since 10 March 2022, citizens of Russia and Belarus cannot access archival collections in Ukraine. See: The International Council of Archives terminates relations with the state archival institutions of russia and belarus. 11 March 2022. https://archives.gov.ua/ua/2022/03/11/міжнародна-рада-архівів-припиняє-від/. (Accessed on 11 August 2023).

30 Kuromiya, “Russia’s undue Influence”.

31 Shkandrij “The Archival Revolution and Contested Memory”.

32 Kassymbekova, “Buty khoroshoiu liudynoiu”.

33 McGlynn, Memory Makers.

34 BASEES 2023 Keynote “From Cold War to Hot War: Reflections on an Academic Life in Area Studies”. Professor Judith Pallot (University of Helsinki) in conversations with Professor Sarah Badcock (University of Nottingham), 1 April 2023, University of Glasgow. https://youtu.be/36jI_-3G5Cg (Accessed on 11 August 2023).

35 Address by the President of the Russian Federation. 21 February 2022 http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/67828.