Can We have Our Nation State and Eat it Too?

Author(s): Yuri Slezkine

Source: Slavic Review, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 717-719
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2501746
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Can We Have Our Nation State and Eat It Too?

Yuri Slezkine replies:

Mark von Hagen answers his "seemingly simple" question with an ap-
parently deliberate paradox: Ukrainian history is consistently discon-
tinuous; consistent discontinuity is a symptom of postmodernity; hence,
Ukrainian history is postmodern and thus "intrinsically interesting."
Postmodernism is intrinsically non-national. The difficulty lies in de-
fending the paradox by using the logic that it defies. For if postmodern
("new," "modern") history is about the "fluidity of frontiers," "perme-
ability of cultures," "discontinuity" of institutions and multiplicity of
"transitional and unstable" identities, then postmodern historians must
persevere in their assault on the various "paragons of 'nation-state-
hood' "-not apply themselves to "the integration of ... competing
pasts into a more or less coherent narrative of national history." If
fluidity and discontinuity are indeed the stuff of Ukrainian history,
and if fluidity and discontinuity are "strengths" to be pursued, then
there should be no such thing as Ukrainian history because "Ukrain-
ian" is an ethnonym that, like all ethnonyms, presupposes a parallel
continuity of disparate elements (language, clothing and territory, for
example). Either we put together a Ukrainian history after the fashion
of other national histories (on the basis of more or less fictitious con-
tinuities), or we take the nation state (and, presumably, the nation)
"back out" and work to abolish a great many historiographic "fields"
along with the "cliches of the nation-state paradigm" that they perpet-
uate. In the case of Ukraine this would seem an altogether easy task.
Or would it? Is Ukrainian history really more fluid and discontin-
uous than other national histories? Mark von Hagen is not entirely
sure because, according to the historiographic stance he seems to en-
dorse, all histories are fluid and discontinuous, all nations are relatively
modern, all (natural) narratives are outdated and therefore the para-
gons of nation-statehood are "not all they seemed to be." Indeed, the
briefest deconstructive glance at the two evil geniuses of eastern Euro-
pean history would reveal the "constructed" nature of their cultural
and institutional continuities, while any attempt to prove that some
pasts are more fragmented than others would be inherently "essen-
tialist" and thus unacceptable to the "new" historian. The view that
transforms Ukraine's weaknesses into strengths has no means of dis-
tinguishing strengths from weaknesses.
Mark von Hagen is not fully committed to this view, however. Else-
where in the essay he suggests that "all of us" possess a lived past that
may or may not be "distorted" in the retelling, that there is a Ukrainian
national continuity worthy of a "more or less coherent narrative," and
that Ukrainian history is essentially and measurably different from
other national histories. Different for two reasons. One is the way
things "really happened," for better or worse: modern Ukrainian state-

Slavic Review 54, no. 3 (Fall 1995)

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 718 Slavic Review

hood has no real historical precedent, most Ukrainian elites never

thought of themselves as Ukrainian, various Ukrainian churches have
failed to forge truly national institutions, nineteenth-century Ukrain-
ian culture suffered a real decline (as demonstrated by the "low levels
of popular literacy"), and Ukrainian national identity is unusually po-
rous and multiethnic because of the very real experience of "centuries
of foreign occupation." The other reason for Ukrainian exceptional-
ism is the discursive hegemony of German and Russian/Soviet histo-
riographic traditions. Ukrainian history in the sense of lived experi-
ence may not be essentially different from that of other nations; what
really matters (according to the first half of the essay) is that Ukrainian
history, in the sense of the written record of that experience, has been
deliberately obscured by imperial myth-makers from other shores.
The problem with the two reasons is that they are not fully con-
sistent with each other. The problem with the second reason in par-
ticular is that the symmetry is perhaps too neat. The "one and indi-
visible" never included Prague or Budapest, the "socialist com-
monwealth" included Cuba and Vietnam and neither one was quite
coterminous with Mitteleuropa. More to the point, Poland-itself mar-
ginal by the author's standards-is probably more central to Ukraine's
marginality than is Germany; both Poland and Germany are remark-
able for having spent long periods of their nationally aware lives with
the state "taken out"; and neither German nor Russian bureaucratic
elites are famous for regarding an ability to "sustain stable democra-
cies" as a major reason for respect or recognition. Moreover, the "vested
interests" of bureaucratic elites are not always those of historians, while
political and historiographical forms of hegemony are not necessarily
parallel or interchangeable (the Ottoman and Russian Empires were
much more successful at shaping events in eastern Europe than at
shaping western-or indeed eastern European-perceptions of those
events). Finally, Ukraine does not quite fit in the general eastern Euro-
pean scenario as outlined in the essay. In the days of the "one and
indivisible," Ukrainians were more invisible than, say, Poles or Jews
(let alone Czechs or Hungarians) because their nationhood-and not
merely their right to statehood-was routinely assumed by most Rus-
sians to be non-existent (or rather, secondary, on a par with that of
"Sibiriaki" or "Pomory"). In the Soviet period, on the other hand, the
regime defied (though apparently never changed) the dominant Rus-
sian assumption by promoting the concept of a fraternal and subser-
vient, but unequivocally separate Ukrainian identity. It is true that
Kiev-based Ukrainian historiography was seen by Moscow snobs as
provincial and by Moscow politicians as suspect. The fact remains,
however, that it was a national historiography based on the assumption
of a national autonomy and produced, typically enough, by a specially
trained national elite for a specially trained national audience. What
was less typical was the imperial "center's" cheerful and sometimes
eager complicity (indeed, to fault the regime for not producing Ukrain-

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 Our Nation State 719

ian history in Moscow is to suggest a much less whimsical, less Soviet,

imperialism).
It seems to me, therefore, that if we really want to "take the nation-
state back out," we will do better to focus on such places as the Crimea,
Galicia and Novorossia, irrespective of whether "Ukraine" has a his-
tory. But if we do not mind an occasional nation state, we will most
certainly benefit from a lot more histories of "Ukraine," understood
in terms of particular (though fluid and perhaps arbitrarily defined)
territories, vernaculars, ideologies, institutions, cultural traditions or
some provisional combinations thereof. Whatever has a name has a
past. Ukraine has a history. Why leave it to "lacrimogenesis"?

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