The Role of the Ukraine in Modern History By Ivan L. Rudnytsky

Wikipedia:

Ivan Pavlovych Lysiak Rudnytsky (27 October 1919 – 25 April 1984) was a historian of Ukrainian socio-political thought, political scientist and scholar publicist. He significantly influenced Ukrainian historical and political thought by writing over 200 historical essays, commentaries, and reviews, and also serving as editor of several book publications. He has been praised as one of the most influential Ukrainian historians of the twentieth century. He is sometimes referred to as Ivan Łysiak-Rudnytsky, but the surname he used was his mother’s name Rudnytsky.

According to Eastern Europe historian Timothy Snyder, Rudnytsky decisively argued against the proposition that Ukraine ought to be a homogeneous nation – that it should be exclusively for and about people who spoke Ukrainian and shared Ukrainian culture. Rudnytsky believed, as Mykhailo Hrushevsky did, in Ukraine’s social historical continuity of development towards an independent democratic nation, and also believed, as Vyacheslav Lypynsky did, that its destiny was to be pluralistic. The opposing view in Ukraine was championed by Dmytro Dontsov who took his cues from Italian fascism and became the far right conservative voice of Ukrainian ethnic nationalism. According to Snyder, Rudnytsky’s response to ethnic nationalism won the argument, both in Ukraine and among North American Ukrainian expatriates, about what the Ukrainian nation should be. Instead of the nation looking for legitimacy in dubious historical claims or assertions of a homogeneous culture, Rudnytsky’s view was that a nation is fundamentally the result of political acts of commitment directed at a common future, which means that in principle, anyone can take part in it.

An excerpt from, “The Role of the Ukraine in Modern History” By Ivan L. Rudnytsky, Slavic Review, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Jun., 1963):

A striking difference between the historical development of the countries of Western Europe and that of those of the eastern half of the continent has been often observed. The former, particularly France and England, have enjoyed, in spite of some periods of revolutionary upheaval, a millennium of continuous growth. Germany’s fate has been much less favorable, and farther to the east it is impossible to find any country which has not experienced, at one time or another, a tragic breakdown and an epoch of a national capitis deminutio, sometimes extending for centuries. Here one will think of the subjugation of the Balkanic peoples and Hungary by the Turks, of the crushing of Bohemia by Habsburg absolutism, of the partitions of Poland.

The Ukraine is a typically East European nation in that its history is marked by a high degree of discontinuity. The country suffered two major eclipses in the course of its development. The medieval Rus’ received a crippling blow from the hands of the Mongols, was subsequently absorbed by Lithuania, and finally annexed to Poland. In the middle of the seventeenth century the Ukraine rose against Polish domination, and a new body politic, the Cossack State, came into existence. By the second half of the eighteenth century, however, the autonomy of the Cossack Ukraine was destroyed by the Russian Empire. A new upward cycle started in the nineteenth century. The movement of national regeneration culminated in the 1917 Revolution, when a Ukrainian independent state emerged, to succumb soon to Communist Russian control. This third, last great division of Ukrainian history, which lasts from the 1780′s to the Revolution, and in a sense even to the present, forms what may be defined as “modern Ukrainian history.”