History as a Battleground

With headlines focusing on tensions over the future of the Commonwealth of Independent States, economic integration, nuclear disarmament, the fate of the Black Sea fleet, and border disputes, it may seem strange to address such a seemingly esoteric problem in Ukrainian-Russian relations as the perception of history. Yet it is my contention that the current disputes are symptomatic of a much more fundamental set of problems. Foremost among them is the question of “deimperialization”—the adjustment of structures and intellectual concepts to the dissolution of an empire. In the case of Russian-Ukrainian relations the problem is even deeper than what Ukraine’s president Leonid Kravchuk has labeled “Russia’s imperial disease” or “imperial thinking.” After all, even some staunch Russian nationalists, for example, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, are willing to let go of most of the former Soviet Union for a reconstituted Russia. Their “Russia,” however, also includes Ukraine. ¹ Ukrainian independence, therefore, raises not only the problem of deconstructing an empire but also such fundamental questions as, What is Russia? What is Ukraine? And what is the historical relationship between them? It raises the question of the shaping and reshaping of identities, and the perception of history has been and continues to be a chief battleground in the struggle over identity.