Publications · 17 July 2014
The Ukrainian Search for Premodern Identities among the East Slavs
Review prepared by Aliaksandr Kazakou.
The title of the book by Harvard University professor Serhii Plokhy evokes an association with another foreign study devoted to Eastern Europe: Timothy Snyder’s The Reconstruction of Nations (Snyder, 2010). While Snyder traces the formation of nations in the territory of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from 1569 to 1999, Plokhy attempts to show the evolution of the forms and content of identities in East Slavic communities over 800 years, stopping at the beginning of the eighteenth century, that is, before the emergence of modern nations.
At times the author had to be concise in presenting his argument, and in certain places even superficial (perhaps for this reason, as he himself notes in the preface, he was discouraged from writing this book?). Specialists in different fields will certainly find things to add and clarify. Nevertheless, Plokhy has produced a study that has no analogue in historiography.
One of the aims of the work is to deconstruct the modern “nation-centred” narrative of the history of the three Slavic peoples. Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian historiographies have developed concepts of the “linear” development of ethnic groups into nations, the origins of which are sought in the Middle Ages. Arguing with Anthony Smith, who maintained that modern nations were formed on the basis of premodern ethnic communities (Smith, 1986), Plokhy, following the so-called modernists, treats identity as a construct created by political and intellectual elites in order to consolidate society, and destroyed under the pressure of external forces or rejected by its creators when it loses relevance. This approach determines both the choice of terminology and the specific way it is used.
The author most often uses the concepts “ethnonational” and “nation” / “national”. Moreover, the latter term is often used to characterise identity in premodern times, since the division of community history into the stages of “nationality” and “nation” appears unproductive to the author. He does not seek to answer the question of how strong the influence of one or another “identity-building project” was on collective consciousness (indeed, for certain periods and territories this is hardly possible), and therefore some parts of the book read as essays in intellectual history.
The monograph consists of an introduction, eight chapters, each of which contains several subsections, conclusions, an index of authors and a general index. There is no list of sources and literature, which makes the book inconvenient to use for scholarly purposes.
The author consistently examines the content, spread and specific uses of the concept of “Rus’”, first in the pre-Mongol period and then during the formation of the Lithuanian and Muscovite grand duchies, showing the evolution of “Ruthenian” identity under the influence of state-building processes and the religious factor. The latter’s influence on the identity of the Ruthenians of the Commonwealth was especially strong during the intense polemics around the church union.
The author then shows how Muscovite identity was constructed in the second half of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, linking it with the concept of “Russia” and imperial discourse. He also locates the origins of Ukrainian identity in the Cossack movement and in the circle of Kyiv church intellectuals of the seventeenth century.
A reader looking in the book for an analysis of a corresponding process in relation to Belarus will be disappointed. From the mid-seventeenth century onward, the Belarusian lands, already far from the centre of attention, finally recede into the background. Perhaps this is because “the Belarusian national project was based on the Ruthenian identity earlier developed in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, but it failed to lead to the emergence of a distinct identity in the early modern period because of the absence of a proto-Belarusian state comparable to the Hetmanate in left-bank Ukraine” (282).
Be that as it may, the author is not interested in the history of the name “White Rus’” even in the most general terms, although he notes that the term “Belarusians” was used in Moscow for Orthodox Ruthenians of the Commonwealth, with the exception of the Zaporozhian Cossacks (192). How this term arose and how it entered Muscovite discourse remains outside the author’s attention, even though in Moscow the language of Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s letters was called “Belarusian script” (200). This silence contrasts with the detailed treatment of the names “Russia”, “Little Russia”, “Ukraine” and even “Ukrainian Little Russia”.
With the exception of this shortcoming, Plokhy’s study, based on a wide range of sources and literature, deserves attention. The book is written clearly, is well structured and offers an important attempt to look at the history of East Slavic identities outside the framework of later national mythologies.