Myths and History

By Walter Kish

Having spent four of the past 13 years living in Ukraine has purged me of many preconceptions that I had accumulated about the country during my Canadian-based upbringing.  The idyllic and romantic perceptions of my parents, the strongly nationalistic and idealistic teachings at Ukrainian school, the patriotic, propagandistic influences of the various Ukrainian organizations that I belonged to and the lack of comprehensive and unbiased historical literature on Ukraine in the diaspora had shaped an image of a mythological Ukraine that was at odds with the real Ukraine I finally experienced for the first time in the early 1990s.

It was my good fortune to have been given the opportunity to explore Ukraine in some detail since it became independent, and what I have learned has given me a much more realistic appreciation for my ancestral country, its people and its history.  Aside from the insight gained by having seen most of Ukraine first-hand, I have benefited from the veritable explosion of unfettered scholarly and popular publications that have emerged in the wake of the new freedom of the press and media following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Although the majority of current publications in Ukraine are still in Russian, there has been no shortage of books and research in Ukrainian, and, to some extent in English, that have taken advantage of freer access to archives and historical materials without the constraints of ideological considerations and state censorship.  I can still recall the sensation that Canadian author Orest Subtelny’s Ukraine: A History made when it was first released in translation in the Ukrainian language in Ukraine some 15 years ago.  It was the first opportunity in over 50 years that most Ukrainians had had to learn the real history of their country. 

I must also add that it made a deep impression on a Canadian-born Ukrainian like me as well, since it was the first comprehensive, unbiased history of Ukraine that I had ever been exposed to.  The publication not long after of Paul Magocsi’s A History of Ukraine added to my gaining a more balanced and genuine understanding and appreciation of my roots.  In the decade following, numerous non-Ukrainian historians, such as Andrew Wilson, Anna Reid, Dominique Arel and Norman Davies, began to delve into Ukraine’s place in history in the context of not only the Slavic world, but Europe as a whole. This recognition of Ukraine by non-Ukrainian scholars was seminal in Ukraine finally being viewed seriously on the world political stage.  It also brought a much-needed external perspective to Ukrainian affairs that had been sadly missing from the closed and insular world of Ukrainian scholarship.

Since then, of course, numerous new histories have been written by native Ukrainian scholars that delve honestly and in detail with Ukraine’s rich historical past.  It is a past that was greatly distorted and suppressed during Soviet times when the powers-that-be sought to impose a Russified slant to the history of Eastern Europe and deny the very existence of a Ukrainian people and a Ukrainian national identity.  Of course, any Ukrainian efforts at self-determination were viewed in the strongest possible negative light, as witness, for example, the massive defamatory and slanderous campaigns waged by the communists to paint the Ukrainian underground during the 1940s and 1950s as fascist bandits, murderers and criminals.  It is interesting, and somewhat sad, to note that though the truth is now coming out and widely being recognized as such, there are still significant groups of Ukrainian as well as Russian imperial sympathizers that still cling to the now discredited propaganda and still propound the old lies, the most notorious being the denial of the Ukrainian Holodomor. This is why it is absolutely crucial that the younger generations of Ukrainians going through the school system be exposed to the real history of their country.  Knowledge of history is an absolute precondition to Ukraine having an independent future.

This “real” history has many dimensions that transcend simply political considerations, important though they may be.  The Ukrainian history that most of us know is full of myths, and though they can be an important cultural tool for the preservation of a culture or ethos, we must be careful in distinguishing between them and reality if we are to truly understand the dynamics of our past.  In a pre-literate society, myths and legends were often the only means to pass on history and values between generations.  In our day and age, we need to understand the facts and the reality behind the myths.  The foundations of Ukraine’s future must be built not only of the pillars of mythology and tradition, but also the concrete walls of fact and historical understanding.