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Strangers to Themselves

By Vitali Vitaliev

Olexander Hryb has written an extremely topical book, the main subject of which is national identity.

Let’s face it: nationalism—in all its different guises and manifestations—remains one of the main divisive factors on the global, read federal, scale and, at the same time, one of the main uniting ideologies on the local, read provincial, level. There’s no need to give examples—suffice it is to open a daily newspaper, turn on radio or TV, or do a quick browse of the Internet—and you will be showered with them.

But what exactly is nationalism, often wrongly confused with hooray patriotism of the type which Dr. Samuel Johnson famously (and rather categorically) branded “the last refuge of a scoundrel”? My online dictionary defines it (nationalism) as identification with one's own nation and support for its interests, especially to the exclusion or detriment of the interests of other nations. If so, then nationalism and national (or cultural) identity are very close relations, and one cannot exist without the other. In the words of the former US President Bill Clinton, “If you don’t remember anything else I say, remember this: every single fundamental problem of the independent world is rooted in an imperfect sense of identity.” And in a stubborn and often violent search for it, I would add.

“Cultural identities . . . were never monolithic and are becoming much less so,”—in the words of Professor Paul Gifford, Director of the Institute of European Cultural Identity Studies at St. Andrews University. It important to remember that nationalism often appears first as a result of a repressed, or otherwise weak (non-monolithic) cultural identity. To me, that explains why Julia Kristeva, a Bulgarian-born and Sorbonne-educated French writer and scholar, once referred to herself and her fellow Europeans as “strangers to ourselves”.

Olexander Hryb—a British Ukrainian scholar, who also speaks fluent Russian, Polish and English, is the right person to compare Russian and Ukrainian forms of nationalism, with all their striking similarities and differences. The main difference between the two has always been the fact that Ukrainian nationalism, in most instances, was directed again the oppressor (read Russia, or the USSR), whereas Russian nationalism was mostly of the imperialist nature and was aimed at dissolving national identities of the oppressed.

Hryb is the native of Lviv, where Ukrainian nationalism was kept alive (if not particularly well) all through the darkest Soviet times. It was the only major city in the whole of Ukraine where Ukrainian was routinely spoken in the streets. As for my own native city of Kharkiv, it was russified to the extreme: out of 200 secondary schools in city, only 1 (one) was Ukrainian, and even that one was not a complete school but a curtailed ‘vos’miletka’ (with 8-year course of studies as opposed to a normal secondary school course of ten). In the belief system of the Kharkiv Communist Party rulers, anything Ukrainian was nationalism. At my University, founded by the great Ukrainian philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda and then (in the 1970s) bearing the name the Russian proletarian writer Maxim Gorky (!), all disciplines were taught in Russian, and speaking Ukrainian during classes and the intervals was actively discouraged. The point came when (in the mid-1970s) two of my fellow students at the foreign languages faculty were expelled from the University for” stubbornly and despite several warnings” carrying on speaking Ukrainian to the lecturers and to each other. They were accused of (wait for it) “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism” and expelled! What was so nationalistic, let alone “bourgeois”, about speaking their own language in their own country, only God (and perhaps Brezhnev too) knew… That was my first direct encounter not with nationalism per se, but with a normal human behaviour branded as such—the attitude that kept transforming ‘nationalism’ into a kind of a swear word (often preceded with the meaningless adjective ‘bourgeois’) for all the seventy odd years of the Soviet regime. No wonder that in the perception of many of those who had lived in the USSR, that word still carries a kind of negative connotation…

Hryb’s choice of Cossacks, both Russian and Ukrainian—a peculiar paramilitary movement which, at different times of their history, served both the oppressors and the oppressed—as the main object of the study is very well justified.

What most Russian and Ukrainian people would know about early Cossacks is that they were effectively bands of young men fleeing from serfdom: criminals, deserters and Old Believers who rejected the reformed Orthodox church. This mixed bunch of misfits established a kind of wandering, militarised democracy of self-rule under their chieftain, the Ataman. They lived by hunting, fishing, fighting and plundering—whatever served their needs. Sometimes they supported the Tsars, sometimes not… Driven out of central Russia to the remote provinces, they ended up both in the North and South of the Russian Empire. As for the Cossack state of the Zaporozhian Sich on the territory of modern Central Ukraine, it was formed in the 15th century from serfs fleeing the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. With time, the Sich became a fiercely independent political and military force in its own right…

In his research, Hryb goes far and wide. He starts with pointing out the growing “insecurities” of identities (national, cultural and ethnic) and their role in the nationalist revival. He then closely examines the concepts of ethnic and national consciousness before delving into the history of nationalism, Soviet attitudes to the eternal ‘natsionalniy vopros’ (issues of nationalities), Putin’s ethnogeopolitics and the ongoing Cossack revival in both Russia and Ukraine. The final chapter is devoted to defining nationalism as a fast-growing belief system of modern times and its role in the post-Communist world.

The book completes with the impressive case study of the Black Sea Cossack revival which involved extensive and thorough fieldwork by the author who comes to the conclusion that by continuing to ignore the threatened people’s identities at the lowest level, modern powers that be (including present-day Ukrainian and Russian authorities) keep undermining their societies’ security. The case study was completed long before the Maidan and the recent political changes in Ukraine, so I would like to hope that, with the new and extremely popular Ukrainian President in power, the situation will soon change for the better and the citizens of both Russia and Ukraine will stop being “Strangers to themselves”.