They were Jews and, in those days, ethnicity equalled nationality. No one ever thought of them as Ukrainians while they lived in Kyiv. The same was true when when they and other Ukrainian Jews settled in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other Russian cities in the 1920s. They never thought of themselves as Russians.
The concept of nationality has changed over the past century.
Nationality today has less to do with ethnicity than with a range of factors, including citizenship, place of birth, cultural affiliation, etc. A typical Frenchman today is no longer a slightly built white man with a blonde mustache – which was always an abstraction, anyway – but, increasingly, someone like the guys who play on the French national soccer team – of African, Arab or Eastern European origin, with an admixture of other countries and continents. Today’s concept of nationality assumes assimilation into the new nation along with the retention of a number of cultural traits.
And so my American-born son identifies himself as part-Ukrainian and part-Kazakh, even though ethnically his grandparents who came to Moscow from Ukraine and Kazakhstan were Jews and Russians.
Under communism, nationality was always a tricky subject. On the one hand, the communist dogma downplayed nationality as a quaint relic of the capitalist past. As Karl Marx put it, the proletariat had no country and workers were supposed to feel class solidarity that transcended national borders and ethnic and religious divisions. On the other hand, Russia was a giant colonial empire, both inside and outside its borders, and it needed to develop policy with regard to subject nations.
The Soviet Union was a giant melting pot, where people of different cultures and languages mingled while remaining Armenians, Tatars, Uzbeks, etc., on the basis of their parentage or last names. The internal passport always spelled out the bearer’s nationality, including, notoriously, Jewish. In the end, the communists never found a successful solution to the nationalities question and were unable to create a true Soviet identity. In the end, when the Soviet Union collapsed, it split into 15 ethnic republics which became nation states – some for the first time in their history.
The Ukrainian diaspora in Russia was by far the largest. Ukraine was Russia’s most populous colony and Ukrainians were closest to Russians in language and culture, especially in the eastern and cossack-populated territories. Ukrainians began settling in Siberia in large numbers in the late 19th and 20th century, but after the Bolshevik takeover the migration accelerated. Many moved from Ukraine to Russia voluntarily, to seek employment or, in the case of Moscow, better living conditions in the capital. Others – an overwhelming majority – were relocated forcibly during never-ending Stalinist purges, collectivization and post-war “cleansing” of the territories that had been under German occupation.
In fact, scratch a typical Muscovite and you’ll find a Ukrainian somewhere in the background. This is especially true of the intelligentsia families – artists, writers, musicians, etc.
My half-brother’s maternal grandfather was poet Pavel Shleyman (Karaban), born in Shcherbinivka of Donetsk Oblast, until recently known as Dzerzhinsk and, after its brief occupation by Kremlin-backed terrorists, renamed Toretsk. In the 1920s he lived in Kharkiv, at the time Ukraine’s capital. He was part of a vibrant cultural and literary scene in the city, working also as a translator and rendering a number of Ukrainian poets into Russian.
Having moved to Moscow, Shleyman was arrested in 1936 and accused of plotting to set up a Ukrainian nationalist cell, whose goal was to promote works of Ukrainian writers. As was typical of the NKVD trials of the period, the cell was mostly a figment of the prosecutor’s imagination. Luckily, this happened just before Stalin’s Great Terror really got going, and the five “co-conspirators” got only five years of hard labor each. They were released after serving out their sentences – except for Vladimir Norbut, a Russian writer who was also born in Ukraine, to a noble family of Lithuanian origin. Norbut was the most prominent writer of the five “plotters.” He was tried for the second time at a Kolyma camp and executed in 1938.
As an aside, Norbut’s older brother Georgy, an artist who trained in St. Petersburg with Ivan Bilibin, designed the Ukrainian emblem, its first hryvnia banknotes and Ukrainian postage stamps during the brief rule of hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky.
It is extraordinary how much if the early Soviet literature in Russian was created by people who were born, grew up and developed their literary styles in Ukraine, especially in Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odesa. They were interconnected personally as well as artistically, forming life-long friendships and intermarrying. The contribution of Ukrainian-born or educated writers, painters and musicians to the Russian culture is impossible to overestimate, and it continues to this day.
Ukrainian influence extends also to politics. It is a known fact that the government in Russia is dominated by the “St. Petersburg Mafia” – men with whom Vladimir Putin grew up, learned judo, served in the KGB or was part of the dacha cooperative “Ozero” – The Lake. However, it is equally impressive how many in the positions of power or influence haul from Ukraine or have Ukrainian roots. Putin’s immediate entourage include men named Tymchenko, Kovalchuk and Chayka.
A key loyalist, Valentina Matviyenko, was born in Ukraine. She was brought to Moscow and made President of the Council of the Federation in 2012, when Putin was still toying with the idea of leaving politics and bestowing real power on Dmitry Medvedev. Matviyenko was replaced as Governor of St. Petersburg by another person with Ukrainian roots, Georgy Poltavchenko. Meanwhile, Ukrainian-born Irina Yarovaya, a hugely visible presence in the Russian Duma, has been entrusted by the Kremlin with the task of introducing some of the craziest legislation of the past two years.
The present-day Western concept of nationality remains controversial, especially in the ex-colonial powers. In France and the Netherlands anti-immigrant rhetoric is on the rise. In Britain, Brexit was in a large measure born of the dissatisfaction with a number of people of color who claim that they are now British.
While in the West the nationalists want to expel various alien citizens and restore ethnic purity, in Russia the post-colonial syndrome has received a very strange twist. Many Russians have become determined to deny Ukrainians their national identity, history and even language. They claim that Ukrainians are basically Russians who speak a dialect and that Ukraine is an integral part of historic Russia. One Russian nationalist I have talked to pointed to the example of Italy, claiming that the fact that Neapolitans speak a dialect doesn’t make Campania any less a part of Italy.
To me, however, such Russian claims sound more as if the English would decide that, since London was founded by the Romans, there is no such nation as Italians and the Italian language is but a corrupted version of English.
Perhaps this preposterous concept owes a great deal to the fact that people of Ukrainian origin play such an important role all aspects of Russian life. It is notable how many people with Ukrainian roots or last names have been virulently critical of the Maidan revolution and vociferously opposed to the Ukrainian government’s goal to join Europe. Writer Eduard Limonov (Savenko), who was raised in Kharkiv, has long been denying the existence of a separate Ukrainian nation while crooner Iosif Kobzon, who was born in the Donbas, provides material support to the terrorists destroying his native region.
There is a myriad of such people, both in the public eye and not. I have a cousin, a son of a Ukrainian father, who spent the first year after the annexation of Crimea posting supposedly witty memes about Ukrainian leaders and Ukraine in general.
While personal motivations in such cases are best left to the medical science, Russia’s policy of trying to hold on to Ukraine and to hitch it permanently to the rump of the collapsing Russian empire is insane not only for Ukraine but for Russia, as well.
The reason Ukrainian-born and educated people have been so influential for Russia is because Ukraine has always been a conduit for Western ideas. It acted as a window to Europe, along with St. Petersburg.
Keeping Ukraine underdeveloped and backward would exacerbate Russia’s own backwardness and keep it deeply provincial. The best thing Russia could now do is to help Ukraine to rise and achieve its potential as a leading economic and political power in Eastern Europe. In the long run, that would undoubtedly benefit Russia as well.
