Unmaking Imperial Russia. Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the Writing of Ukrainian History

Serhii Plokhy. Unmaking Imperial Russia. Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the Writing of Ukrainian History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. xii, 614 pp. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. Maps. $95.00, cloth.Ukraine's recent Orange Revolution was the high-water mark of Ukrainian nation building. For Mykhailo Hrushevsky [Hrushevs'kyi] (1866-1934), the protagonist of Serhii Plokhy's exhaustive study, the origins of Ukrainian national identity lay in the years before the formation of Kyivan Rus' and developed in an essentially unbroken process through the Mongol invasion, the Lithuanian and Polish incursions, the Cossack ascendancy in the seventeenth century and later subjection to the Empire. In numerous deeply researched historical and literary studies, Hrushevsky spearheaded an assault on the all-Russian historical narrative that supported imperial pretensions and privileged the history of Great Russians and their state over those of their Belarusian and Ukrainian cousins. Although Hrushevsky's interpretation of the past changed over the years, he never wavered on the fundamental point that Ukrainian history proceeded independently of the history of Russia.Hrushevsky already has his biographers, and biography is not Plokhy's purpose. Although he provides an outline of Hrushevsky's life and his activities as historian and politician in Chapter 1, his is a study of Ukrainian historiography and its politics in the late Imperial and early Soviet periods, in which Hrushevsky occupied a central position. In Chapter 2, Plokhy explores the all-Russian historical narrative that claimed Kyivan Rus' as the first Russian state, asserted a transfer of political power from Kyiv to Vladimir-Suzdal' under pressure from invading nomadic groups, posited the massive depopulation of the Kyivan region thanks to Mongol depredations, and implied that Ukrainians later settled the region from the west. On the basis of extensive research, Hrushevsky challenged nearly every detail of the all-Russian narrative. In Chapter 3, Plokhy details Hrushevsky's construction of a Ukrainian narrative as an alternative to the all-Russian story. Hrushevsky delineated the various Slavic tribes in the region into ancestors of the Great Russians and the Ukrainians and asserted the role of the Ukrainian ethnos in the formation of the Kyivan polity, rejected the Varangian theory of the origins of the state, claimed the Principality of Galicia-Volhynia as the true successor of Kyivan Rus' and not VladimirSuzdal', and questioned the idea that the region was depopulated as a result of the Mongol assault. Although largely ignored by the all-Russian narrative, the Ukrainian ethnos, Hrushevsky believed, continued to reside in the places of its origin.In Chapter 4, Plokhy scrutinizes Hrushevsky's decision to return to the Soviet Union in 1924. Although financial considerations may have played some part, Hrushevsky also believed that conditions in Ukraine in the 1920s were favourable to his historical and cultural research, which in its turn would further the development of a Ukrainian national consciousness. The GPU thought so, too, and kept a wary eye on Hrushevsky and his many readers. As chair of the department of Ukrainian history in the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and head of a network of related historical institutions, Hrushevsky's achievement in the 1920s was enormous, both in historical research and writing and in the training of a generation of historians. …

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