Class 2: The Genesis of Nations (4)
of what about the other people?
And then here comes the interesting part.
It's not that nobody noticed this at the time.
The people who came up with the ethnic notion of the nation,
this is a little logical point here,
but ethnicity didn't exist, it was being created.
So the people who came up
with the ethnic notion of the nation
were not ethnic themselves.
They couldn't have been
because the idea was just kind of coming into being.
And even if you don't buy that and you believe, okay,
there was a thing called ethnicity at the time,
they were very often themselves coming from
what we would think of as a minority position.
So Hrushevs'kyi,
as the Ukrainian historians might not tell you,
had a Polish mom and that is very typical.
Very typical.
If you look at the people who invented the populism,
the social history,
and sometimes later the ethnic nationalism,
all across Eastern Europe,
it is very often people who were from a Jewish minority
or a German minority, or some kind of minority
who themselves adopt the ethnic position
or create the ethnic position.
I say that not because it's like a clever paradox,
but I say that to alert you to the fact that the very thing
which is supposed to be the most eternal and unchanging
is not, right?
The very notion of the eternity and the unchangingness,
is created by people who are very often
changing themselves in some way.
Not that they dropped all the sophistication
that came from the background that they had.
Being multicultural and multilingual
certainly helps you as a historian to write history books.
But they're keeping that
and they're saying history is really about
the people who are in this one language.
So that leads us to a debate.
That's a position, that's a debate.
And on the other side of this debate is a character,
Okay, I really should have made a sheet for today, I guess.
Is a character called Viacheslav Lypyn'skyi.
And Lypyn'skyi says basically,
hey, Hrushevs'kyi, look at Ukraine.
The cities are full of Russian speakers,
lots of Jews, lots of Polish nobles.
How are you gonna make your state out of that?
You're not just gonna be able to say
the Ukrainian people, the masses and the peasants.
You need this very commonsensical point.
We need the cities and we need the taxpayers
and those traditional historical,
going back to these traditional stories,
the people who are from the traditional stories,
what are we gonna do with them?
Are we just gonna eliminate them?
Or maybe we should give them a different role.
So Lypyn'skyi answers Hrushevs'kyi by saying fine,
the people are coming into politics,
but if we're going to have a nation,
the nation itself is going to have to be
politically savvy enough to say, okay,
there's a place for the Polish nobility.
Maybe they don't get to own the land anymore,
but they get something.
There has to be a place for the Jews.
There has to be a place for the people
who used to own the land.
We can't just imagine them away.
It's beautiful to say that the essence of the nation
is in the countryside and the people who tilled the soil
and look at the sunset and the beautiful mounds of hay.
You've seen the art that arises from all this.
Look at that beautiful image.
There's a beautiful woman and there's her beautiful daughter
and look, they've have a scythe
and that's the nation, right?
It's beautiful, it's very persuasive.
But what are you gonna do about
the people who live in the cities?
What do you do about all the other people
and you can't have a nation without the cities.
So what do you do? So Lypyn'skyi has an answer to this.
Lypyn'skyi has an answer.
Lypyn'skyi in his turn, and don't worry,
we're gonna do all this history many, many times over.
Lypyn'skyi in turn--
Oh, did I mention he was from a Polish noble family?
He was from a Polish noble family.
Lypyn'skyi in turn is answered by a guy called Dontsov.
Now we're getting into the 1920s and 1930s
and Dontsov is the most important ideologist
of Ukrainian far right wing politics.
In fact, fascism.
And Dontsov is very much inspired by the Italians.
Dontsov says no, no, it is really all about the people
and the people really should be homogenous.
And the people really should rebel
against all these other traditions.
Dontsov...
I'm gonna let you guess. Okay, I won't let you guess.
He had a brother who was a Bolshevik
and that Bolshevik brother was a Russian, right?
So it's an example of how the people
who are maybe even the most radical
on the ethnic side of things,
they're not coming from the ethnicity.
They're choosing something,
at the beginning you have to choose.
Because at the beginning,
the nation is still coming into being,
so you have to choose.
So Dontsov is answering Lypyn'skyi.
These guys are enemies
and the Dontsov tradition of what we call ethnic nationalism
is important.
It matters in Ukrainian political life.
And it matters in Ukrainian diaspora,
it continues in North America.
But Dontsov in turn was answered
by this guy that we're supposed to be reading.
Now, I'm aware that his book turns out
not to be in the bookstore.
I put the first essay up online
and we will keep putting the essays up online.
And we're reading Ivan Rudnyts'kyi
because he is a foundational political historian of Ukraine
and he lays out some of the major issues.
But in context, Ivan Rudnyts'kyi
is trying to handle this argument
which says that the Ukrainian nation
is only about people who speak Ukrainian.
And that somewhere out there, at least aspirationally,
there's a homogenous Ukrainian nation.
Ivan Rudnyts'kyi is trying to handle that.
What he's arguing, and as you read him,
I want you to read him
to learn about Ukrainian history, obviously.
He's good at setting up the major questions,
but he's also coming into this debate
about what the nation actually is supposed to be.
And Ivan Rudnyts'kyi takes the position
that the nation is fundamentally a political act.
It's fundamentally about political commitment.
So modernization matters,
modernization matters, sure.
The traditional landowning classes, they matter, sure.
The presence of the Jews matters.
This all matters,
but the nation is fundamentally a political act
directed towards the future.
That doesn't mean it's voluntarist and you can do anything.
You can't make it up.
You can only act on the basis of what really is
and he mostly wrote about the past.
But the nation itself was a political act
directed towards the future,
which means that in principle, anyone can take part in it.
Anyone can take part.
So I'm now just gonna say one word
about who Ivan Rudnyts'kyi was.
So, oh, very important.
He wins.
He wins the argument, which is kind of fascinating.
If there's any person who wins the argument,
I mean, maybe in the 22nd century it will look different,
but looking at it from the point of 2022,
he wins the argument in North America
and he also wins the argument in Ukraine.
Although as we'll see, there are many reasons in Ukraine
why his arguments are gonna seem plausible.
But he wins the argument about what Ukraine should be like.
And that in turn has very important implications
for what Ukraine is like,
because theorizing the nation is not an abstract action.
It's also about how you form the nation.
So 30 seconds and I'll tell you who Ivan Rudnyts'kyi is
and we'll return to that.
So Ivan Rudnyts'kyi was Halachically Jewish.
His grandmother was born Ida Spiegel
in the Habsburg monarchy.
She married a Ukrainian and they had five children.
He died early, the husband,
and Ida Spiegel, who was alienated from her family
and took the name Olga, raised the children to be Ukrainian.
The common language in the family was...
Anybody wanna take a shot at that?
Common language?
We're in the Habsburg monarchy.
Not bad.
We're in Galicia in the Habsburg monarchy.
- Polish? - Polish.
Polish, Polish. Common language between--
I mean, her mother tongue was Yiddish
and his mother tongue was Ukrainian.
Although he had Polish grandparents,
but their language between themselves was Polish.
The kids' best language for a long time was also Polish.
So there were five kids with this Jewish mother.
All five of them became very important figures
in Ukrainian national movement, we'll talk about that.
But there was one daughter, Milena.
Milena was a feminist and a very prominent parliamentarian
in the Polish parliament.
She did some extraordinary things
that we'll talk about later on,
but Milena Rudnyts'ka was the mother of the Ivan Rudnyts'kyi.
So his mother's mother was self-identifying Jewish.
Everybody who's taking part in these conversations,
regardless of their position,
is coming from all over the place.
But there's a conversation where Rudnyts'kyi
ends up being the most influential figure
and that conversation shapes not only this class,
it very much shapes the way
that Ukrainians are talking about nationality now.
I'll leave you with that
and I'll see you again in a week's time,
map quiz on Thursday.
Thanks.
(upbeat rhythmic chime)