Читать книгу Borotbism: A Chapter in the History of the Ukrainian Revolution - Ivan Maistrenko - Страница 11

Ivan Maistrenko’s Borotbism compels us to return to this ‘rebirth of a nation’ not merely to mark the 100th anniversary of the Ukrainian Revolution but also in recognition that a review of the past is essential to grasp the challenges of the present. This can be seen in the changed circumstances in which Maistrenko’s book is presented in contrast to when it first appeared in 1954.4 Since the Euromaidan in 2014 and the Russo-Ukraine war there has been a surge of interest in Ukraine; this is a progressive development it is however coupled with new depths of retrogression as regards attitudes to the Ukrainian question.

Recent years have demonstrated how Russia’s imperial past continues to echo into what was presumed to be the “post-imperial” present; we have witnessed a revival of a narrative advanced by the White movement during the Civil War. Its advocates base their interpretation of the Ukrainian question on a set of key principles:

1 “Great Russia, “Little Russia” and “Belarus” are three branches of the one Russian people,

2 Russian language and culture is the common achievement of one, leading Russian people;

3 “Little Russia”, i.e. Ukraine, is an inseparable part of a unitary Russia;

4 ; the idea of a separate Ukrainian nation is manufactured by foreign powers for the dismemberment and weakening of Russia.5

Interpretations of the Ukrainian question by contemporary Russian leaders are essentially the same; they have equipped the current form of the Russian state power with ideas inherited from their Tsarist ancestors. The reburial of General Denikin in 2005 with full military honors at Moscow’s Donskoi monastery was an apt symbol of this reconnection with Empire.

That Denikin secured Western sponsors for the Russian nationalist cause is understandable; that Vladimir Putin can harness support of the contemporary European far-right is no surprise.6 What is significant, and perhaps surprising to some, is the support by sections of the left for restoring the Tsarist colony in Ukraine of Novorossiya (New Russia).7 Stalinism was imbued with the Russian nationalist tradition, and whilst current neo-Stalinism assists Kremlin foreign policy with its veneer of an “anti-fascist struggle in Ukraine”, the Russian oligarchic elite make no pretense of a communist camouflage in acting as heir and guardian of the imperialist policies of the Tsars.8

Maistrenko’s Borotbism challenges this retrogression; it repudiates the falsification and revision of the array of self-appointed experts on Ukraine that have surfaced, and who reduce the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–21 to a series of failed states sponsored by foreign powers.9 It reasserts the history of the revolution as a struggle for social and national emancipation by the Ukrainian people themselves.

Such conflicts over the history of Ukraine are not new and often become focal points for the greater conflict between Ukrainian nationalism and Russian chauvinism; the contemporary controversies are themselves intimately linked to the recurrence of the Ukrainian question with it domestic and international considerations. The current context in which the Ukrainian question is posed is one that Maistrenko foresaw with remarkable accuracy in the 1950’s.10 That imperialist expansion was generating a future challenge to Moscow’s hegemony, where each national bureaucracy would one day come into conflict with the Russian bureaucracy. In addition he foresaw that the Soviet bureaucracy would welcome the restoration of private-capitalism, provided it ensured their continued privilege. It was this re-composition of a nouveau nomenklatura that emerged after the Ukrainian resurgence of 1989–1991 attained formal independence.11

This is the root of the current complexities in which the big business power of the oligarchs has been the dominant influence on the politics and economy of Ukraine. Whilst in the face of western rivalry, Russia has continued to seek to protect its business interests and influence in Ukraine, which is viewed from the strategic perspective as part of the “greater Russian world” within the “near abroad” of post-USSR space.12 Maistrenko considered “Stalinism, the Modern Form of Russian Imperialism”; under Putin this has taken on a new form of appearance.13 Motivated by what it views as its national security interests Russia’s rulers continue to adopt methods of encroachment to protect their regime from destabilizing influences and have revived the old “gendarme of European reaction”.14 This role of policing of the territory of empire was deployed following the Euromaidan in 2014.

Euromaidan saw the mobilization of wide sections of society aspiring to greater democracy, equality and human rights. This political revolution toppled President Yanukovych, driving a wedge into the neo-colonial power relations Russia exercised in Ukraine. In response, the deposed Donetsk clan of oligarchs and those connected to them; concerned for their vested interests instigated the separatist movement. This revanchist movement converged with the interests of Russia’s elite, the Kremlin organizing, arming and directly reinforcing its proxy forces.15 The ensuing war in Donbas in 2014 has echoes of the 1914 occupation of eastern Galicia by the Russian Imperial Army. Viewed as the piedmont of the Ukrainian movement, the Tsar declared it “a Russian land from time immemorial”. With support of the small groups of local Russian nationalists they set about forcibly Russifying the populace and persecuting Jews. Putin has proved no more attractive to Ukrainians than the Tsar, and the reach of Russian ultra-nationalists has suffered a long historical retreat from Lviv to Luhansk.

The Russian intervention in 2014 posed an existential threat to Ukraine. It generated a surge in national consciousness with the mass self-activity flowing from Euromaidan into a resistance that checked and isolated the aggression. But whilst the occupants of 1914 contributed to the fermenting of the 1917 revolution, the 2014 aggression assisted in the subverting of the original ideals of the Euromaidan revolution. Hopes for social and democratic change have been inhibited by the failure to dislodge the oligarchic elite, who have used the cover of the necessities of war to safeguard their own position and mold policies that serve their needs.

This situation has also flowed into the history of the Ukrainian Revolution, which is refracted through the prism of current politics. In this context Maistrenko’s Borotbism is more than just an historical document. The debates during and after the revolution of 1917–1921 about the relative importance of national and/or social emancipation are of great importance in contemporary Ukraine. As a consequence of recent events Ukraine has veered further from Moscow’s orbit, naturally posing new considerations of how the nation defines itself, which in turn have become enmeshed with how history is understood.

A new turn in the approach to history has taken place since 2014, which poses such choices as between “two models of historical memory—the patriotic nation-building and the communist-imperialist”.16 After many years in which the history of Ukraine has faced severe constraints, during which Stalinist and Russophile political forces have fiercely resisted a Ukrainian alternative. In this context the recognition now afforded the Ukrainian Revolution can be considered a progressive development. Nevertheless this decolonization of history whilst seeking to escape past constraints is simultaneously fostering new ones set out in an official state historical narrative overseen by the group of publicists who run the Ukrainian Institute for National Remembrance (UINR).17

In the new state narrative the revolution of 1917–1921 is placed within a unilineal historical development towards statehood. Instead of a fetishized Lenin and Stalin we are presented with Petlyura, Skoropadsky and above all Bandera, as if they alone represent the Ukrainian movement and almost Ukraine itself.18

In this new narrative, movements such as the Borotbisty are outsiders from a revolution of which they were a vital element. The continuity and similarity of approach by the current nationalist and former Stalinist narratives is striking. This is illustrated by their treatment of the national cultural revival of the 1920s, driven forward by former Borotbisty and other Ukrainian left-wing socialists. In the USSR the Borotbisty were concealed for decades and only ever cited in the pejorative. Today their role is demeaned again with Volodymyr Viatrovych Director of UINR crassly comparing the 1920s “blossoming of Ukrainian culture” to the “successes in Hitler’s economic policies” asking “should this blossoming, which eventually grew into an executed renaissance in the subsequent decade, serve to justify a regime guilty in the intentional murder of millions of Ukrainians?”.19 (One can only speculate how long the memorial to Oleksander Shumsky, the Borotbist leader, will stand in Zhytomyr.)

The current official history seeks to sanitize the revolution of radical socialist content, and places conservatives centre stage. None more so than the wartime era integral nationalists notably the Stepan Bandera led Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.20 The latter are presented as heirs to 1917–1921 revolution. The glorification and paradoxes of Bandera in contemporary Ukraine deserve a study in its own right. But in relation to approaches to the revolution of 1917–1921 it brings to the fore a clash of conceptions of Ukraine which are not new, and were already posed when Bandera re-emerged after the war seeking to influence the Ukrainian emigrants in displaced persons camps in Europe.

Maistrenko, the former Borotbist, castigated the Bandе́rivsti in an article in the left-wing paper Vpered, “Considering the Ukrainian National Revolution and Nationalist Reaction”, branding Bandera as “the ideological mummy from Galicia in the 1930s” and “a nationalist, but of an old, reactionary school”.21 The revolution envisaged by the Bandе́rivsti tradition diverges from the revolution of 1917, whose leadership belonged to the Ukrainian socialist parties.22

This retrogression we see today was already being challenged by no less a figure than Volodymyr Vynnychenko, one of the most popular figures of the revolution and leader of the first independent Ukrainian State. After meeting with him in France Maistrenko and his comrades of the Ukrainian Revolutionary Democratic Party, published a pamphlet by Vynnychenko which speaks to our current controversies.23 Recalling that their “Ukrainian spring” had faced numerous enemies, Vynnychenko argued their defeat was not only due to physical power but their political disorder. The Bolsheviks had an “intense fear of losing the colony” but also “raised the banner of the most decisive social and economic revolution which was the cry of the Ukrainian worker-peasant masses.”24 The question was posed as: “either national liberation, or social, or ‘Ukraine’, or ‘land and factories”. The central body of the revolution, the “Central Rada did not try to combine these two slogans”, believing “the enthusiasm of the national rebirth would be above all other interests.” And in the Central Rada, there was a lack of sufficient understanding of the moment, unanimity, and the determination to become the vanguard of the masses, to act as an expression not only of their national but also their social and economic interests.25

Vynnychenko saw this as a recurrent problem, the followers of Bandera taking an even more dogmatic approach and refusal to learn from history:

The Bandero-UHVRist youth, teaching me how to fight for Ukraine, categorically told me that only idiots and traitors raise the question of what Ukraine should be. For them, this question has no weight, only Ukraine.26

Vynnychenko saw a different historical tendency of the revolution than the uniform one set forth in today’s official historical narrative in Ukraine. In contrast Vynnychenko emphasized they did not all think the same way, the revolution created a current of “one-sided liberation” (odnobichnoho vyzvolennya) focused on national-statehood—and the “Universal current” that sought a “comprehensive liberation” (vsebichnoho vyzvolennya) both social and national.27 The members of the “Universal current” comprised the left-wing Ukrainian Socialist-Revolutionaries (Borotbisty) and left-wing Ukrainian Social Democrats (Ukapisty).28 Maistrenko was active is both parties. One reviewer of Borotbism wrote: “It is almost impossible to speak accurately of Ukrainian nationalism; rather there are many factions of Ukrainian nationalists”.29

Maistrenko’s Borotbism presents a different view of the revolution than those which see to shroud it as a fight between an undifferentiated mass of Ukrainian people in struggle with the Russian Empire. It is a valuable record of events that were pivotal to the development, if not a foundation event of modern Ukraine.