On Being Ukrainian

By Walter Kish

Several weeks ago, while watching the European Discovery channel in Kyiv on cable TV, I was dismayed by a bio-documentary on the life of the great “Russian” inventor of the helicopter, Igor Sikorsky.

Sikorsky was an aeronautical engineering genius who had toyed with the idea of a helicopter since he was a youth, finally achieving his life-long dream of building a working model in 1939 in the United States, where he fled to after the Bolshevik revolution. Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. is currently one of the oldest and largest helicopter manufacturers in the world.

The fact that dismayed me was the references to Sikorsky as having been born and grown up in Russia, accompanied by the corollary assumption that he was Russian.

In fact, Ihor Sikorsky was born and raised in Kyiv. His father was a pioneering pediatric psychiatrist who taught at the University of Kyiv and who, in 1912, founded the first Institute of Pediatric Psychology in the world. Ihor attended high school in Kyiv, continued his studies at the Naval Academy in St. Petersburgh, and trained in Paris under the famous French aviator Louis Bleriot, who was the first pilot to fly across the English Channel. He then returned to Kyiv to finish his studies at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. Eventually, he immigrated to the United States where he forged his fame and fortune.

I guess I should not be surprised that he is referred to as Russian, considering that, at the time, Kyiv, and a large chunk of what is now Ukraine, was part of the Russian empire.  Similarly, such famous names as Gogol, Bulgakov, Prokofiev, Moiseyev, Nijinsky, and others commonly presumed to be “Russian,” were in fact born and lived a significant part of their lives in Ukraine.

All of this is a preface to the crux of the issue – namely, what do we mean when we say that someone is Ukrainian or Russian? Do we mean that the person is of “ethnic” Ukrainian or Russian origins, or that someone comes from the designated nation state that is called Ukraine or Russia? The distinction, though minor to some, can be very significant to many people for political and cultural reasons.

Many Canadians and Americans find this to be a confusing issue. After all, when someone says he is an American, there can be little doubt as to what that person means, even though from an ethnic perspective, the only people that can truly lay claim to that designation historically are the aboriginals. It would be ludicrous for someone to refer to an American as really being British or Scottish simply because one of their forefathers came from the ancestral isles. One of my American friends here in Kyiv is named Krause and, some generations ago, his family immigrated to Pennsylvania from somewhere in Germany. He is an American through and through, and I do not consider him to be a German. Being an American involves a strong identification with a specific nation state.

When we try to apply a similar interpretation to citizens of imperial Russia, either of the Tsarist or Communist variety, however, we run into difficulties, for the main reason that the American state came together by the mutual consent of its diverse immigrant population who willingly and proudly took to referring to themselves as Americans. Russia, on the other hand, was created through forcible colonial expansion, and the ruling Russians have consistently sought to erase the existence of its constituent minorities, especially the Ukrainians, either as an ethnic entity or as a nation state. The “Russian” label was forcibly imposed on the subject populations and seldom willingly accepted, even to this day. Throughout history, Russians have tried to perpetuate the myth that anyone resident on the captured geographic territory of the Russian colonial empire was “Russian.” This would be equivalent to claiming that an inhabitant of the Indian subcontinent is really British because India for a time was part of its Empire, or that a Congolese tribesman is really a Belgian because of that African country’s once captive status.

So, was someone born in Kyiv prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, regardless of ethnicity or language spoken, Russian or Ukrainian? Instinctively I would say Ukrainian, but I suppose it depends upon whether one’s perspective is oriented backwards into history, or forwards into the future. I would like to think that in our more progressive times when there are no ethnically and linguistically pure countries, and where nations are becoming more a multicultural polyglot of peoples and ethnic groups, it would behoove us to leave behind categorizations based exclusively on racial, historical or political factors.

And that is precisely the major challenge facing Ukrainians. Before you can build a strong and viable nation, you must first agree on what ethnic, cultural, linguistic, political and economic principles it will be based on, and that is a very difficult and contentious task indeed. I think it is less important to understand what a Ukrainian was, and more productive to look at what being a Ukrainian will mean in the future. Alas, for most of the inhabitants of today’s Ukraine, there is yet no common consensus on what being Ukrainian means, either today or in the near future.