By Taras Kuzio
As predicted in an issue of Eurasia Daily Monitor earlier this week, a new director has been appointed at the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, established by President Viktor Yushchenko in 2005. As has become standard practice, the position was given to an individual from Donetsk: historian Valeriy Soldatenko. His formative career from 1976 to 1984 was as a senior research fellow at the Institute of the History of the Communist Party under the guidance of the central committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine. This was a branch of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism attached to the central committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
The appointment follows in the general ideological direction of the Viktor Yanukovych administration towards returning to a Soviet-Ukrainian national identity. In his annual appeal on the anniversary of the July 16, 1990 declaration of sovereignty, President Yanukovych argued that the Soviet period created the basis for Ukrainian statehood. “Twenty years ago, in adopting the Declaration on State Sovereignty of Ukraine, our state made a decisive step towards independence. It was not an easy decision… And yet they voted for a document that essentially opened a new page in the history of Ukraine,” Yanukovych’s appeal sought to convince Ukrainians.
Yanukovych reminded Ukrainians, “Do not forget that all previous attempts to obtain sovereignty ended in failure. It should be remembered that the Soviet Union, albeit with only limited sovereignty, laid the foundations for Ukraine’s economic and cultural power without which future independence would have been impossible.”
What he forgot to add is that states within the US have always possessed greater rights than the allegedly large amount of autonomy that Soviet republics possessed. In addition, although article 72 of the 1977 Soviet constitution stated that “Each Union Republic shall retain the right freely to secede from the USSR,” anybody seeking to exercise this right was punished by a long-term sentence in the Gulag camps.
Yanukovych’s appointment and appeal reveals much about the greater degree of Soviet and Russian influence in his administration. As a Ukrainian analyst pointed out, there are ten concrete differences between the Leonid Kuchma and Yanukovych political models, with the latter more closely resembling Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Kuchma’s system of playing different clans against each other while the president stands above the clan as an arbiter more closely resembled Boris Yeltsin’s Russia.
Political expert Vadym Karasiov explained that the appointment of Soldatenko will lead to the Institute “becoming less concerned with national memory and one that is more international or Soviet.” The authorities cannot close the Institute, as this would lead to a ‘scandal’, while they also could not appoint a historian with national democratic views, as this would have indicated that the Institute will continue to uphold the Ukrainophile historiography that is associated closely with Yushchenko.
Therefore, Soldatenko was chosen in order for there to be a ‘correction’ in the ideological line of the Institute. The only problem is that the Yanukovych administration does not have a coherent national identity to replace the Ukrainophile identity that has dominated Ukraine’s education policy under three presidents during the last two decades.
“They cannot be pro-Russian and they cannot be national. They cannot be democratic but cannot be anti-democratic. The current authorities are characterized by lack of clarity,” Karasiov said.
The authorities face the same dilemma as did Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka in rejecting both Russian and ‘nationalist’ (i.e. Belarusophile or Ukrainophile) historiographies. The only alternative for Lukashenka was to stress – like Yanukovych is now doing – the importance of Soviet rule in building the Belarusian and Ukrainian nations. Both presidents seek to inculcate Soviet Belarusian and Soviet Ukrainian ‘patriotism’.
In the case of Yanukovych this is made more pertinent by the origins of his administration in Donetsk, where he was governor from 1997-2002. Donetsk is a relatively new city that was originally called Yuzovka and then Stalino between 1924 and 1961. Donetsk did not have a university until the 1930s, in contrast to Kharkiv which has the oldest university in Ukraine, established in 1804, and was Soviet Ukraine’s capitol city until 1934. Donetsk is therefore far more a product of the Soviet era.
A survey by the Ukrainian Centre for Economic and Political Studies (Razumkov Centre) found that large majorities of the inhabitants of Donetsk and the Crimea hold their primary allegiance to Soviet identity (as compared to Russian or Ukrainian). Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts (together constituting the Donbas) have 430 streets named after Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin – the highest number in Ukraine. Thirty-three streets are even named after the Donetsk Bolshevik separatist leader Fedor Artem.
Education and Science Minister Dmytro Tabachnyk will have little difficulty working with the new national identity orientation of the Institute. In January 2003, then-Deputy Prime Minister for humanities Tabachnyk in the first Yanukovych government signed a government resolution to celebrate the 85th anniversary of the birth of Ukrainian Communist leader Volodymyr Shcherbytskyy. The celebrations consisted of nine separate events.
Parliament voted in 2004 and 2009 to celebrate the 85th and 90th anniversaries of the Ukrainian Komsomol, with 251 deputies voting for the latter. In addition to deputies from the Party of Regions, Communist Party and Volodymyr Lytvyn bloc, 53 Yulia Tymoshenko bloc deputies voted for the resolution. The legacy of Soviet rule still hangs over Ukraine in other ways.
In the 2004 presidential elections the heads of both the Yanukovych and Yushchenko campaigns were former senior Komsomol (Communist Youth League) functionaries: Sergei Tigipko and Oleksandr Zinchenko, respectively. Tigipko is now seen as a future leader of the Party of Regions to replace Yanukovych and Nikolai Azarov, who have jointly led the party since it was founded in 2001.
With the election of Yanukovych, history has come full circle in Ukraine.
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ReplyDeleteThe Belarus textbooks introduced by Lukashenka do represent the "Soviet Belorussian patriotism" perspective that is more popular with most people in that country. However, a much more appropriate comparison would be that between Moldova and Ukraine. In 2006, the Moldovan Communists introduced textbooks written in a Marxist and, for the period since 1917, Sovietophile manner. The newer Communist ancient and medieval history textbooks are passable/tolerable, in some parts even good, occasionally better than what had existed before. Obviously, this is true from a pedagogical point of view (arrangement on the page, pictures, not too much content, etc.) because the authors learned soemthing about the psychology of teaching and learning from the Georg Eckert Institute for Textbook Research in Germany. The modern history textbooks were worse than what existed before in terms of issues covering Moldova, but somewhat better than what had existed during the Soviet period. On the other hand, the textbooks dealing with period since 1914 are unmistakably bad. The parts dealing with world history were worse than in the Ceausescu era world history textbooks in Romania. The parts dealing with the history of Moldova, and indeed of Communism, were mostly Soviet Communist propaganda, with Soviet crimes hidden, and the Soviet occupation presented as liberation. And there were plenty of pictures of Voronin, meeting with Bush, Berlusconi, etc., and of Putin, etc. The contemporary history textbooks are "smarter" (less boring than Communist-era textbooks), but not really "better" than what had existed during the Soviet period.
ReplyDeleteTo be continued.
The problem is that the new textbooks will probably be evaluated by somebody from the Georg Eckert Institute, who will give them a "so-so" "bill of health", praising the pedagogy and criticizing the empiricism, but after some studies after the old textbooks will criticize them for their monoperspectivity and their deficiencies in terms of multiculturalism. They don't have to be criticized that much in terms of empiricism, because many in the younger generation of scholars think that empiricism is overrated anyway, and that post-modernism is the "wave of the future". After that, the Ukrainian government will push them into the classrooms. But while officially the teaching would be done from the new textbooks, one recalls that in Moldova, most of the teaching was really done from the old textbooks from 1991-2006 also in 2006-2009, until there was more or less of an official reversion to the old textbooks after the Communists lost power. Will it be the same in Ukraine?
ReplyDeleteAnother aspect is that a justification for the change in the textbooks will be the need to present world history and Ukrainian history in the same textbook (the integrated approach, from the local to the global), and the need to introduce more multiculturalism and multiperspectivity. My suggestion for the opponents of the plans to resovietize the textbooks is to actually read the literature on textbooks and pedagogy. They should also look at the Moldovan case in depth; the Russian-language versions of the recommunized Moldovan textbooks should not be too difficult to get. And, believe me, they are worth looking at. And, finally, they should realize that there are plenty of ethnic Romanian academics in the West who are willing to help. Finally, they should be mindful that some of those getting funding from the Soros Foundation in Ukraine will become the new authors of the history textbooks.
There will be plenty of people willing to write new textbooks for $ 30 thousand. And the experimenting on the teaching of the new course will be done before the new textbooks will be produced, with a blend between the content of the old textbooks and the new textbooks, and the Georg Eckert Institute will give this a "so-so" "bill of health".
All the best,
Ionas Aurelian Rus
Assistant Professor of Political Science.
Note: I have the above-mentioned position at a regional campus in Ohio, USA, whose name I will not mention because I do not wish to be accused of using my college's and university's names for political purposes. I may be reached at aurelianrus467@yahoo.com .