Ukrainian historians heading to Moscow

During a recent live broadcast on Era FM radio, when I was talking about Ukrainian history textbooks, an angry-sounding Russian-speaking woman went at me when I said that we need to engage in a dialogue with Russian historians. “So, are we supposed to renounce our heroes now and proclaim Ivan Mazepa and Stepan Bandera traitors?”

“Why should we?” I said. “We simply have to explain in a convincing manner who and what these figures and others have meant to us, as well as to make it clear why people like Peter the Great and Stalin are tyrants in our view, whereas for Russian historians and the general public in Russia this is not exactly so; in fact, it is exactly the opposite.”

We need to live peacefully with our neighbors and acknowledge that they (they’re people too!) have their own interests, including history, while we have our own interests that we champion. What would a quarrel lead to? Let’s take Zbigniew Brzezinski’s terms and call Russia a “fascistic oil power” and all moskals occupiers. In response, they will proclaim us “Nazi collaborators” and call our country an impotent state since 1917 with its constant domestic wrangles over power, money, land, and now, obsolete jets for its top leaders.

Let me reiterate my truism about peace with our neighbors – this is a matter of principle for me because I am convinced that scholarly arguments, rather than verbal barrages, should accompany the search for realistic approaches to the past and its unbiased interpretations.

It is with this conviction that the Ukrainian delegation to the joint Ukrainian-Russian history commission headed by Academician Valerii Smolii, the director of the Institute of History at Ukraine’s Academy of Sciences, are set to leave for Moscow in a couple of days.

We are going to be discussing various working questions and attending the launch of two extremely interesting books. In 2007 the Ukrainian-language version of Narysy istorii Rosii (Outline of Russian History) was published in Kyiv. It was written by our Russian colleagues for Ukrainian readers and scholars. The Ukrainian historians who belong to the joint commission wrote Narys istorii Ukrainy (Outline of Ukrainian History) for Russians, and its Russian-language translation recently came out in Moscow.

Aleksandr Chubarian, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the head of the Russian section of the joint commission, notes in his foreword: “In the past five years Russia and Ukraine have taken serious steps in cooperation and the discussion of approaches to the history of our peoples. Joint conferences of Russian and Ukrainian historians have been revived, and summer schools for young scholars from Russia and Ukraine have been organized on a regular basis. Finally, the joint Russian-Ukrainian history commission, which was set up by a decision of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Presidium of Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences, is working actively...In our shared history there have been numerous periods and problems that are now being interpreted differently in Russia and in Ukraine...We need to avoid politicizing history as much as possible.”

We shall try. There is simply no other way. I will keep readers of The Day, a newspaper with a non-opportunistic interest in history, posted on the developments in Moscow.