By Natalie Spolsky Tomcio
The Foundation of the Ukrainian Academy of
Sciences: Russian Imperial Science meets Ukrainian National Identity was
the title of the Sixth Annual Vladimir Mackiw Lecture delivered in English by
Prof. Elizabeth V. Haigh, presented by the Shevchenko Scientific Society of
Canada on Thursday, February 22, 2007 in Toronto.
The lecture was well
attended by academics and Bohdanna Mackiw with her eldest daughter Christina,
who expressed the family’s appreciation to the Shevchenko Scientific Society of
Canada (Naukove Tovarystvo Shevchenka – Canada) for another memorial
lecture. Dr. Daria Darewych – President of the NTSh-C opened the evening with
an official welcome and Dr. Marko Stech introduced the speaker. Prof. Haigh
teaches the History of Science at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, N.S.,
identifies with her Ukrainian roots and still speaks the language of her
forbearers.
Prof. Haigh started by
stating “The language of science is deemed to be international. Its practice is
a source of the nation’s pride. It is also the source of industrial and
military strength”. In a brief history of the Russian Academy of Sciences,
Prof. Haigh traced its roots to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences
developed by Leibniz and hired for that purpose by Tsar Peter I (the Great).
The vision of an Academy
of Sciences had obsessed
Peter I after he visited the London Royal Society in l697. He mandated the
creation of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, founded in 1725. For most
of the XVIII century, the Academy had “to import academicians from abroad”
because of a desperate backwardness in Russia. However, by 1900, the St.
Petersburg Academy of Sciences “had matured into a formidable and influential
institution”.
Mykhailo S. Hrushevsky and
Volodymyr I. Vernadsky both were members of the Russian
Academy of Sciences when they met in Moscow in the Summer of
1916. Both were Ukrainian and they agreed that a Ukrainian Academy of Sciences
would be of great advantage to their country of birth. However, Ukrainians, at
the time, lived under the rule of the Poles and the Russians, who were mostly
Ukrainophobic. Therefore, conversation between the two scholars was just talk
and wishful thinking. Soon thereafter, in 1917, came the Bolshevik Revolution
and Civil War. National minorities intensified their struggle for autonomy and
self-determination. Ukraine
was in political turmoil and in the Central Council (Rada) in Kyiv,
Hrushevsky played a leadership role, fighting for an independent Ukraine.
Vernadsky had been supporting a Constitutional Democratic Russian Federation.
Both men were keenly interested in the establishment of a viable
government-funded Ukrainian Academy of Sciences to benefit all Ukrainians.
In early 1918, the Central Rada was replaced with a German-backed
conservative government of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky, interested in promoting
Ukrainian intellectual and cultural life. Foundations were laid for new
scientific and cultural organizations including national archives, an art gallery,
a national library, a theatrical institute, a Ukrainian historical museum, a
drama and opera theatre and a symphony orchestra. The Ukrainian Academy of
Sciences (Ukrainska Akademia Nauk) was the next big project, for which
Skoropadsky himself promoted Hrushevsky as President of the UAN.
Hrushevsky was a distinguished historian who
presided over the Shevchenko Scientific Society (Naukove Tovarystvo
Shevchenka) in Lviv and the Ukrainian Scientific Society in Kyiv (Ukrainske
Naukove Tovarystvo Kyeva). These privately funded learned societies grouped
scholars interested in publishing, lecturing and conferencing in the Ukrainian
language. These societies, given government recognition and funding, and
“reorganization” could become the core of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (UAN).
In June 1918, Hrushevsky implored Vernadsky to wait for the proper political
climate to establish the UAN with a strong department of History and in
Ukrainian Studies. Soon, “Vernadsky accepted enthusiastically” an invitation
from Mykola Vasylenko, Skoropadsky’s Minister of Education, to set up an
organizational committee to lay the foundation for the Ukrainian Academy of
Sciences. Hrushevsky retreated to the Shevchenko Scientific Society (NTSh)
in Lviv.
Vernadsky “recruited thirteen
scholars, including two from Russia”
Stepan Tymoshenko from Petrograd and Ahatanhel Krimsky from Moscow. At their first organizing meeting on
July 9, 1918, Vernadsky presented his vision of the future UAN,
concerned mainly with the international prestige it could gain for Ukrainians.
“Over the next four months, ten commissioners drew up a set of statutes to
enact the UAN as Ukraine’s
highest scientific establishment. They outlined its relationship to the
government, its financing, the structure of its executive, the types of members
which it would have and how they would be selected. A special committee was
provided with an initial sum of 200,000 rubles and created a national library,
15 institutes, 15 permanent commissions, six museums, two laboratories,
botanical gardens, an astronomical observatory, a biological station, and
printing press.”
On Nov. 14, 1918, the
organizational committee appointed twelve academicians with Vernadsky as
President and Krimsky as Secretary General. Vernadsky renounced all his
political affiliations because “the Academy’s President ought not be partisan”.
One month later, Skoropadsky’s government collapsed and the Bolsheviks were
approaching Kyiv. Krimsky met with the Ukrainian Soviet administration and was
successful to enlist support of the newly founded UAN. The first meeting
of the UAN under the Soviet regime was held on Feb. 12, 1919.
In Aug. 1919, the White Army
under the command of Anton Denikin, swept through most of Ukraine. The
new administration cut off the UAN funding and banned its meetings. By
the end of 1919, the White Army had already been retreating before the
advancing Red Army. Vernadsky, a mineralogist who had been mainly interested in
natural sciences and well-equipped laboratories was “seduced by an offer of a
special laboratory” in Petrograd. At the
request of the Russian Academy of Sciences he was transported to Petrograd in a sealed wagon “to protect him from Cheka
harassment”. Eventually, Volodymyr Vernadsky became “a Star of Soviet Science,
one of the few allowed travel abroad”.
In 1920, the UAN
became the VUAN (All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences) under the leadership
of Ahatanhel Krimsky and Serhij Efremov. In spite of financial shortages, the
VUAN was doing well. “In 1922, the VUAN acquired the press on the grounds of Pecherska
Lavra (Monastery of the Caves in Kyiv) and over one million new titles for
the library, many of them holdings confiscated from individuals and
institutions”.
Attracted by the Soviet
Union’s relatively liberal New Economic Policy (NEP), Hrushevsky came back to
Kyiv in March 1924, and took up the Chair of Ukrainian History at the VUAN,
or as he called it, the “NeUkrainska Academia Nauk” (“non”-Ukrainian
Academy of Sciences). At the onset, separate funding for Ukrainian Studies within
his division was met with resistance from an administration set in their ways
of allocating the VUAN budget by general consensus.
By 1925, the NEP ended. The Russian Academy
of Sciences was renamed the Academy of
Sciences of the USSR as a
republican institution but became state-controlled under the jurisdiction of
the Council of Ministers. The Soviet government, now centralized in Moscow, had been
introducing Marxist ideology in every sphere of Soviet life. Failure to
implement dogma was monitored by commissars who identified “guilty”
individuals, subject to senseless accusations, humiliating show trials and
brutal punishment. Serhij Efremov and others were sentenced to Gulags or
condemned to death in prison. Hrushevsky’s scientific methods and assumptions
were questioned and from 1931 “he was allowed to work in the area of Ukrainian
literature as a member of the Academy
of Sciences of the USSR”. He died
in 1934, the result of “deliberately bungled surgery” and received “a hero’s
funeral” in Kyiv.
In 1936, the VUAN was
reanamed the Academy
of Sciences (Akademia
Nauk) of the UkrSSR. “Its budget had increased 20 times now to 22,000,000 karbovantsi.
Their goal was to surpass the capitalist nations economically”. Upon the Soviet
occupation of Western Ukraine in 1939, Lviv’s
Shevchenko Scientific Society (NTSh) “was made an affiliate of the ANUkSSR”,
their holdings were transferred to Kyiv or “… redistributed. Ukraine was
united!” concluded Prof. Haigh.
Throughout her lecture,
Prof. Haigh refered to “a competition that developed between Hrushevsky and
Vernadsky for the right to establish the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (UAN)
and to determine its nature and form” with a backdrop of tumultuous political
events and Ukraine’s
autonomy.
Natalie Spolsky
Tomcio supports the Shevchenko Scientific Society of Canada and reports on NTSh-C
lectures and events.