To love one’s motherland is no crime.

From Zalyvakha’s letter to Svitlychnyi, Chornovil, and Lukho.

Whoever in hunger eats the grass of the motherland is no criminal.

Andrei Platonov, “The Sand Teacher”

Perhaps one of the most astounding phenomena in modern Ukrainian thought is the radical reassessment of the Jew. Though the revision of Jewish issues began earlier in the 20th century, if not in the late 19th, it became particularly salient as part of the new political narrative after the “velvet revolution” of 1991 that led to the demise of the USSR and the establishment of an independent Ukraine. The new Ukrainian perception of the Jew boldly challenged the received bias and created a new social and political environment fostering the renaissance of Jewish culture in Ukraine, let alone Ukrainian-Jewish dialogue. There were a number of ways to explain what had happened. For some, the sudden Ukrainian-Jewish rapprochement was a by-product of the new western-oriented post-1991 Ukrainian foreign policy. It crystallized out of Ukraine’s alleged tendency to appease western public opinion, being highly sensitive towards the notorious state-sponsored antisemitism in the FSU that on the grass roots level was far more palpable in Kyiv than in Moscow. For others, it probably emerged as the temporary whim of an insignificant group of national-minded intellectuals who apparently had no serious impact on modern Ukrainian political decision-making. However, in order to fully comprehend this phenomenon and assess its proportionate significance in modern Ukrainian politics, one should take into account the previous century-long attempts of Ukrainians and Jews to come to common terms with one another.^[1] By and large, scholarship has neglected these efforts.^[2] This paper demonstrates that long before the proclamation of Ukrainian independence these attempts had become an indispensable element of modern Ukrainian thought that considerably reshaped the image of Ukrainian-Jewish relations. To elucidate some aspects of the early history of this dialogue that precedes the post-1991 developments, this paper traces the transformation of the Jew in Ukrainian political and social discourse during the second half of the 20th century dating it back to major figures that shaped Ukrainian thought at the beginning of the twentieth century.^[3] It emphasizes the significance of Jewish issues for the rise of Ukrainian national thought and provides a historical backdrop for the utopian Ukrainian-Jewish encounter depicted elsewhere.^[4]
Methodologically, this paper is an essay in the history of ideas with some questions and concerns articulated by a “cultural” historian. It continues and develops methodological precepts of analysis of Ukrainian philosophy and politics vis-а-vis the Jews put forward by Ivan Rudnyts’kyi [Rudnytsky].^[5] It treats a variety of texts created in pre- and post-1991 Ukraine, in the Ukrainian Diaspora, and in the Soviet GULAG – their length, genre, and authorship notwithstanding – as manifestation of major political tendencies characteristic of 20th century Ukrainian politics. It focuses on the meaning of these texts in a broader cultural context and their ramifications in regard to social behavioral patterns. It assesses political journalism in its variety – pamphlets, letters of protest, essays, and speeches – from the perspective of their potential impact on subsequent political decision-making and the creation of an all-embracing national narrative. It brings together a wide range of persons, including leading Ukrainian and Jewish poets and dissidents, communists and nationalists, Diaspora thinkers and literary critics, rational skeptics and religious philosophers, country leaders and rank-and-file GULAG inmates, who in this or that way contributed to the maturity and fruition of the Ukrainian-Jewish encounter. Part of a larger project entitled “The Ukrainian-Jewish Utopia”, this paper traces the roots of the modern reconceptualization of the Jew back to the political ideas of Ukrainian human rights activists and national-minded dissidents.^[6]

TWO PATTERNS: LYPYNS’KYI AND DONTSOV

Two paradigmatic attitudes shaped the 20th century Ukrainian policies toward Jews. Be it the Ukrainian Peoples Republic in 1918, the Ukrainian Soviet republic in the 1920s, part of the Soviet empire in the 1970s, or the independent Ukraine after 1991, Ukrainian political thought perceived Jews either through a national-chauvinistic or national-democratic lens. Accordingly, Jews were either excluded from political parlance, among Poles, Rumanians, and other ethnic minorities, or accepted. Colonial or post-colonial realities did not change this dichotomy: in the 1920s, Jews were prominently featured in political thought in the Soviet Ukraine but in the 1970s, they were excluded from it. Likewise, in the 1920s Diaspora Ukrainian thinkers tended to exclude Jews from any positive discourse, whereas in the 1970s, they began extensively to draw on 20th century Jewish historical experience. For Ukraine these two attitudes were much more than merely the inherited patterns common to western political discourse. They were successfully appropriated by two major thinkers who throughout the 20th century dominated the Ukrainian political and philosophical landscape: namely, Lypyns’kyi [Lypynsky], who saw Ukraine as a poly-national monarchy, and Dontsov, who argued for an ethnically homogeneous totalitarian Ukraine. Though V’iacheslav Lypyns’kyi (1882-1931) and Dmytro Dontsov (1883-1973) have rarely appeared under the same rubric in the annals of Ukrainian political thought, drawing comparison between them might help understand their long-lasting impact on the Ukrainian-Jewish encounter.
Both Lypyns’kyi and Dontsov came from ethnically mixed backgrounds. Dontsov was born to a family deeply integrated into a Russified cultural milieu that resided in the profoundly assimilated Southern Ukraine, whereas Lypyns’kyi, nйe Władysław [Wacław] Lipiński, was born to a family of Polish-Ukrainian szlachta. Both thinkers studied and obtained their degrees outside Ukraine, Lypyns’kyi in Krakow and Geneva, Dontsov in St. Petersburg and Vienna. Professionally, both were products of late 19th century positivism: Lypyns’kyi received his diploma in agronomy and sociology, Dontsov, in law. Both were active journalists and Kulturtreggers, who perceived journalism as their most important contribution to the Ukrainian cause: Lypyns’kyi founded and edited a journal-almanac (Przegląd Krajowy, 1912) and a non-periodical edition Khliborobs’ka Ukraina (1920-1925), Dontsov edited Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk (starting in 1922; after 1933 appearing as Vistnyk). Lypyns’kyi and Dontsov became prominent party organizers, and both claimed to have been fathers-founders of the Union of Liberation of Ukraine (1914) and to have actively participated in establishing the Ukrainian Democratic Agrarian Party (khliborobiv-demokrativ, 1918). Both were involved in a Ukrainian state-building experiment: under hetman Skoropads’kyi [Skoropandsky], Lypyns’kyi was Ukrainian ambassador to Austria while Dontsov was the director of the Ukrainian Telegraph Agency. Later Lypyns’kyi and Dontsov became disenchanted with the Ukrainian state-building praxis, left Ukraine, and abandoned their political careers for good.
The fallacious policies of Ukrainian rulers made Dontsov and Lypyns’kyi flatly reject the then most influential Ukrainian political thinkers: Dontsov argued against Drahomanov’s “democracy,” whereas Lypyns’kyi fought against Hrushevskyi’s concept of “peoplehood”. In elaborating their own political philosophies, both thinkers blatantly criticized the federalists and social-democrats, who envisioned Ukraine not as an independent country but as part of a greater political entity of the Slavic people. Both Dontsov and Lypyns’kyi developed the idea of a strong and independent Ukraine with powerful all-embracing governmental control, drawing heavily on the concept of a ruling йlite (providna verstva) that seemed to have been inspired by Ortega y Gasset rather than Nietzsche.^[7] Finally, both philosophers almost simultaneously (and not without explicit rivalry) claimed that Ukrainian nation-building is inseparable from Ukrainian national independence.
Affinities notwithstanding, the images of Ukraine projected by both thinkers were (and are) incompatible. Lypyn’skyi, with his consistent legalism, was the late heir of the Age of Enlightenment.^[8] On the contrary, Dontsov wholeheartedly hated the French revolution, Enlightenment and rationalitи: Rousseau was no less a criminal for him than Lenin, Trotsky, and Skrypnyk. Dontsov worshipped Nietzsche – even more so, all those who claimed to have implemented his political program in the 1930s. Not the spiritual enthusiasm moderated by religious ethics and moral authority (as in Lypyns’kyi), but an immoral will cemented Dontsov’s Ukrainian tradition. Dontsov did not allow any other nationality but Ukrainians to represent Ukraine: he insisted on cleansing Ukrainian politics of any alien influence, and perceived tolerance and democracy as foreign to the Ukrainian cause. Dontsov mistrusted and rejected patriotic feelings of national minorities inhabiting Ukraine – Russian, Polish, or Jewish Ukrainian patriotism signified nothing to him. Looking for the best examples of what could become a model for a Ukrainian political system, Dontsov pointed to Germany of the 1930s: a national stronghold ruled by German political йlite that successfully wiped out or eliminated any alien participation in state- and nation-building. According to Dontsov, not federalist-democrats like Petliura, and not national-communists like Skrypnyk, but a Ukrainian Hitler would bring Ukraine to what Ortega y Gasset called la rebellion de las masas (the uprising of the masses) and subsequently to a long-awaited national independence. It goes without saying that Dontsov’s stance on Ukrainian politics made him not only the person who “shaped the worldview of an entire generation”^[9] but also among the most vociferous anti-Jewish polemicists of the 1930s.^[10]
Nothing could have been farther from Lypyns’kyi’s precepts. Lypyns’kyi believed that people’s patriotic feelings were fundamental for any state-building in Ukraine. He argued that whoever supported Ukrainian independence deserved being incorporated into the Ukrainian political decision-making process. Lypyns’kyi dubbed Dontsov’s classic “Nationalism” (1926) “the most brilliant manifestation of mishugism”,^[11] implying by “mishuga” not so much the evident Hebrew/Yiddish for “crazy” (perhaps known to Ukrainians) but rather the name of Mishuga, a third-rank nationalist-minded Ukrainian thinker. Neither nationality nor blood, but “territorial consciousness” (territorial’na svidomis’t) of the country’s subjects is a basis for state-building. Unlike nationalistically-biased Dontsov, Lypyns’kyi acknowledged that several centuries of colonialism did not allow Ukraine to raise a political йlite of its own. Therefore, it would be pragmatically plausible to allow non-Ukrainian йlites, such as Polish, to run and rule Ukraine, provided their full-fledged patriotism and unconditional commitment to the Ukrainian cause.^[12] Unlike Dontsov, who claimed that Ukrainians first need to become a nation and only then proceed to build their own state, Lypyns’kyi argued that a Ukrainian nation would be built through and due to the Ukrainian state, which will precede the birth of the nation. He claimed that only a true idealist like a Ukrainian Don Quijote would be able to redeem the Sancho Panza nation from its shallow materialism and provinciality that had so far prevented the implementation of any state-building scenarios.^[13] Lypyns’kyi, whatever self-definitions he preferred, was a democrat to boot who disliked Dontsov’s cheap, attractive, and dangerous populism. Having made almost the same type of analysis as Dontsov, Lypyns’kyi chose for his future Ukraine above-all the US ethno-political model based on the Anglo-Saxon type of national democracy, and not the mono-ethnic French, German, or Austrian.^[14] As if replying to Dontsov’s xenophobic anti-Russian accusations, Lypyns’kyi observed that independent Ukraine would become a possibility through love of its subjects not through hatred of its enemies.^[15]
Comparing Lypyns’kyi’s stance on national minorities to that of Dontsov’s, one cannot over-exaggerate the tolerance of the former versus the xenophobia of the latter. Lypyns’kyi also shared the prejudice of his time and milieu. His references to contemporary Jews, albeit few and random, demonstrate that he, like Dontsov, equated the Jews with Bolsheviks and Bolsheviks with the Jews.^[16] Therefore it would not be accurate to prematurely place Lypyns’kyi among the most prominent Ukrainian Judeophiles, such as Mykhailo Drahomanov [Dragomanov] and Ivan Franko.^[17] When discussing minorities, Lypyns’kyi implied the йlite of the Polish szlachta or of the Russian Soviet bureaucracy, and not the demos of Rumanians or Jews inhabiting Ukraine. Moreover, his groundbreaking definition of “the Ukrainian” as “everybody that settled on our land (and does not remain nomadic!)” eloquently excludes Jews, apparently the only “nomadic” minority in Ukraine.^[18] Yet, his bias and minor remarks notwithstanding, Lypyns’kyi’s overall political theory might have quite positive and constructive implications regarding Jews.^[19] His Ukrainian constitutional monarchy, though utopian, would integrate any national minority that supports Ukrainian independence and invests its efforts in Ukrainian state-building. His understanding of the Ukrainian nation as territory gave ample opportunity for all who dwell in Ukraine to become part of a multifaceted nation-state. His attitude toward minorities was consistently that of tolerance and could tentatively be called national-democratic.^[20] This tolerance and rational approach to historical reality was exactly the portion of Lypyns’kyi’s program that Dontsov hated most of all and that he made the focus of his murderous critique.^[21] Before Lypyns’kyi’s stance became dominant in Ukrainian political thought and before, in the late 1980s, it shaped the national minority program of major socio-political organizations such as the Ukrainian Popular Movement (Narodnyi Rukh Ukrainy), it underwent profound changes that had serious repercussions for Ukrainian Jews.

THE CRISIS OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY AND THE ERA OF DONTSOV

The 1917 establishment of the Central Rada after the demise of the Russian Empire legalized a social-democratic pattern of Ukrainian-Jewish rapprochement, which was closer to the national-democratic pattern articulated in the 1920s by Lypyns’kyi rather than to the nationalistic pattern of Dontsov. Yet, sensu strictu, it was neither. The leading figures of the Ukrainian government such as Mykhailo Hrushevs’ky (1866-1934), Volodymyr Vynnychenko (1880-1951) and Symon Petliura (1879-1926), the first representing the socialist-federalist and the second and third, the social democratic parties, flagged their dedication to the ideals of social, not national democracy.^[22] In the realm of national policy these ideals informed the concept of a national-personal autonomy that the Central Rada introduced for all national minorities, including the 2.5 million Jews inhabiting Ukraine. As Henry Abramson has demonstrated, the decisions of the Central Rada were far-reaching and well grounded, however short-lived. The national-personal autonomy granted to Jews enabled them to revive their traditional self-governing organizations, participate in policy-making activities of the first Ukrainian government, and partake in the revival of urban cultural life.^[23] The Central Rada introduced the position of a general secretary of nationalities (later, a minister) that was occupied by a Jew. It established Yiddish as one of the four national languages of the Ukrainian republic, printed currency with a Yiddish inscription, and allowed Jews to form national units within Ukrainian troops. When anti-Jewish riots and pogroms swept through Ukraine, Petliura demonstrated his will and resolution to put an end to the ignominious attacks upon Jews.^[24]
The documents of this period eloquently demonstrate the Ukrainian government’s sympathetic attitudes toward the problems of Jewish security and wellbeing. The language of the documents betrays the social-democratic agenda of its authors, who speak of Jews as part of the “working masses”, not as a separate people. Even if the Jewish delegates, as well as the representatives of all other national minorities of Ukraine, did not support the January 1918 Fourth Universal that ushered in the political independence of Ukraine, Petliura’s Main Staff remained firmly on philosemitic ground. Petliura outright accused the Bolsheviks of destroying Ukrainians “from within… bribing those criminals who provoke our Cossacks to various riots and to pogroms against the innocent Jewish population, attempting to cast the stamp of a pogromist on the face of the chevaliers who bring liberty to all the peoples of Ukraine.” Petliura continued:

“In this way our enemies are trying to separate Ukrainian and Jewish working masses, the routes of which are in fact intertwined and comprise 300 years of oppression under Russian tsarism. Our Peoples Army must bring equality, brotherhood, and liberty to Ukrainian and Jewish citizens since the latter support the Government of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. All its parties such as Bund, Fareinikte, Po’alei-Tsion, and Folkspartai have firmly established themselves on the grounds of Ukrainian independence and have partaken in the building of the Republic.”^[25]

Taras Hunchak and Volodymyr Serhiichuk have argued that Petliura established a strong philosemitic stance even before 1917,^[26] and after 1917 consistently albeit not successfully fought against the manifestations of any anti-Jewish sensibilities among Directory troops.^[27] Yet, previous research has ignored that Petliura’s thinking turned much more restrained towards Jews when he learnt about Bolshevik attempts to establish Jewish agricultural colonies in south Ukraine.^[28] At that point, new sensibilities replaced his straightforward social democratic convictions.
Paradoxically, it was only after the military and political crisis from which it could never recover that the Ukrainian government adopted a national democratic pattern in relations with the Jews. The shift from federalism to independence and consequently from social to national democracy did not find support or understanding among the new emerging Ukrainian leadership. But for the leaders of the Ukrainian People’s Republic in exile, especially Petliura, the drift towards national democratic principles was significant. “Jews as people” came to replace the concept of “Jewish working class”. Petliura was perhaps the first to attempt to transform the Ukrainian-Jewish encounter into a politically charged issue touching the interests of both people. Already in exile, he wrote to one of the cabinet ministers, Pinkhas Krasny:

“I mean the necessity to create the literature that analyzes and deepens the cause of Ukrainian-Jewish relations in the people’s mentality. Like some other mottoes that the national revolution in Ukraine put forward, the motto to satisfy the national needs of the Jewish people, their relations with and obligations towards the Ukrainian statehood, neither the Ukrainians nor the Jews have yet acquired appropriately. Therefore we have to do our best to imbue the declaratory statements of this issue with genuine content. Evidently, when we return to Ukraine, life itself will expedite the implementation of this matter. Yet I think that even under today’s complicated circumstances some preparatory work can and should be carried out. It would be proper if you engage the authoritative colleagues to compile a publication list of books and brochures analyzing the situation of Jews in Ukraine and their attitude both to the Ukrainian people and to the state. Especially urgent, to my mind, is the analysis of the cooperation of Jews in the creative state-building activity. As far as I know, those themes were raised in the press only. Except for the book by Goldelman and the forthcoming book by Margolin, they were not covered in a scholarly book format. But there is a great and pressing need for this kind of literature as well as the popular one, since only with its ideological assistance would the harbingers of the idea of Ukrainian statehood be able to inoculate the Ukrainian and Jewish masses with their views. Only this literature will enable local cultural elements and personalities to fight and neutralize animal instincts and chauvinistic tendencies as well as mutual prejudice emanating from a complicated historical heritage.”^[29]

Petliura’s letter demonstrates the high level of awareness among Ukrainian leaders in regard to the Ukrainian-Jewish encounter. Perhaps unknown to later harbingers of the trans-national dialogue, the urgent measures depicted in this letter could not fill the widening gap between Ukrainians and Jews. The failure to engage national minorities in aggressive building of an independent Ukraine to withstand the military advance of the Bolsheviks and Germans, as well as to implement its consistent anti-pogromist policies, signified an abrupt end of both Ukrainian statehood and an ambitious Ukrainian-Jewish experiment of rapprochement. The revival of the national-democratic principles of interaction between Ukrainians and national minorities had to wait until the 1960s when the most courageous among Ukrainian dissidents realized that the Soviet power became a staunch enemy of its own people, Ukrainian in the first place, and that the future of Ukraine could and should not be linked with any socialist foundation. Not before the 1960s, could Petliura’s voice be plugged into the tradition of Ukrainian philosemitism and heard. In the 1920s, it was stifled and, for the leaders of Bolshevik Ukraine, irrelevant.
In the early 1920s, following the failure of the first experiment of Ukrainian political independence, the Ukrainian Socialist Republic offered a new image of Ukrainian Jewry perceived through the lens of national communism. In a certain sense the Socialist government brought to maturity the principles established by the Directory in 1917, while banishing any reference to the Directory that stained itself with a “corrupt bourgeois nationalism”. The government welcomed and encouraged the nationalization of all “workers and peasants” residing in Ukraine. It required the establishment of cultural and educational institutions not only for 30 million Ukrainians in Ukraine and 7 million Ukrainians living in other Soviet republics but also for 2.7 million Ukrainian Jews. National communism of the 1920s offered a wide range of opportunities for the nation-building of any minority, above all Jews.^[30] Ukrainian leaders consistently argued in favor of this policy, simultaneously opposing the assimilationist scenarios for the Jews proclaimed by orthodox Marxists. For instance, Mykola Skrypnyk (1872–1933) claimed that the Ukrainian republic had to endorse the development of a Jewish workers’ class and sponsor its national revival, understood in strictly proletarian terms. Skrypnyk argued that Ukraine had accomplished an enormous task by establishing Jewish schools, institutions of higher learning with the centrality of Yiddish, the language of the Jewish proletariat, as well as the Chair (later the Cabinet) of the Jewish culture at the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (VUAN).^[31] Praising the activities of Jewish Yiddish writers who proportionately outnumbered Ukrainian literati, Skrypnyk perhaps for the first time coined the word combination “Ukrainian Jewish culture”.^[32] By “Jewish” Skrypnyk implied the Yiddish culture of the formerly oppressed Jewish workers and peasants, and not the “petty-bourgeois” Hebrew culture of Zionists or clerics that he by no means could accept or tolerate.^[33]
Generally speaking, national communism split Jewish culture in two, declaring its Yiddish-socialist half appropriate, but its religious and traditional half unacceptable. Yiddish language children books published in Ukraine exhibiting Jewish teenagers running away from their decrepit shtetl-looking and traditional-minded parents and joining detachments of cheerful pioneers passing by, manifested only too well the Jewish substance of the nationalization process in Ukraine proclaimed by Soviet power. Yet, even this relatively philosemitic tendency was partially curtailed in the late 1920s and mid-1930s with the closure of some Jewish institutions and dismantling of the fanatically Bolshevik-minded Jewish section of the party.^[34] In the late 1940s, in the wake of Stalin’s campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans” and the execution of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Ukrainian Jewish culture was completely eliminated and the language of “Ukrainian-Jewish cultural revival” was forever banished from party discourse. The “national” ingredient of national communism was dropped, and the remaining communist framework did not require the presence of any separate Jewish entity in the political discourse. USSR leaders claimed there were Jews in the USSR but no Jewish question. Only at the end of the 1980s, already in the wake of perestroika, did Ukrainian authorities undertake some clumsy attempts to revive the concept of a Jewish entity “from above,” endorsing the establishment of Shalom Aleychem Societies of Jewish Culture along the lines of the Yiddish-centered and democratically-oriented national communism, but these attempts were transient, subservient, and populist – and the Jewish intelligentsia squarely ignored them.
While national communism was on the rise and the idea of Ukrainian political independence in decline, in the 1920s and 1930s Ukrainian thinkers in the Diaspora were desperately looking for those to blame for the failure of the Ukrainian state-building experiment of 1917-1920. They did not hesitate to accuse the Jews. Thus the latter who previously constituted a minor issue of secondary importance, suddenly became the focus of Ukrainian political journalism. For those Ukrainians from Western Ukrainian borderlands who after World War I found themselves under Poland and were free to critically assess the Soviet experiment, the Jews performed a disproportionately large role in the establishment of Bolshevism in Ukraine. Having meticulously analyzed major Ukrainian periodicals in inter-war Poland, Shimon Redlich demonstrated that the mainstream nationalist Ukrainian press adopted a most vociferous antisemitic stance and embarked on staunchly anti-Jewish accusations, minor differences among periodicals notwithstanding. In keeping with anti-Jewish Nazi propaganda, it perceived the Jews as inborn communists and perpetrators of innumerable anti-Ukrainian crimes: servile boot-lickers of the Polish szlachta and, under Bolsheviks, bloodsuckers that destroyed the Ukrainian peasantry. Zionist-minded Jews were traitors, too, for they shamelessly sought support of the antisemitic Poles, the long-lasting enemies of Ukrainian independence. Events such as the French court’s acquittal of Shalom Schwartzbard, who assassinated Simon Petliura, could not but further ignite anti-Jewish sentiments. Closer to World War II, the liberal democratic voices arguing for some sort of Ukrainian-Jewish rapprochement were increasingly stifled and Lypyns’kyi’s stance seemed to have become the issue of the past, whereas nationalist voices identifying with the pro-Nazi stance on Jewish issues became even more pronounced.^[35] It came as no surprise that the far right Dmytro Dontsov with his pro-German sympathies, his “integral” Ukrainian nationalism, and his merciless anti-Jewish denunciations moved from the periphery to the center of Ukrainian political discourse.^[36]
During the early years of World War II, the support by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) for the New Order of the Nazis and its unabashed antisemitic attacks was overwhelming. The OUN, which heavily drew its inspiration from Dontsov’s ardent journalism wholeheartedly believed that Nazi Germany would help Ukrainians in their struggle against Russian imperialism and Jewish Bolshevism – two evils that represented the immediate danger to the much-sought for independence of Ukraine.^[37] In 1941, the OUN reaffirmed its unrestricted support of the German cause, articulated the principles of Ukrainian-German friendship, and petitioned Hitler personally to foster the development of Ukrainian statehood. The political blinkers apparently did not allow OUN to realize that Germany had no desire whatsoever to replace the “Russian prison of peoples” with a new network of national-liberal states.^[38] Yet Ukrainian thought had to make its long way from the enthusiasm over German occupation of Ukraine that, as it were, would promote the establishment of an independent Ukraine, towards the disillusion and frustration with German occupation when hopes for independence turned out to be groundless. But the continuous repressions against Ukrainian nationalists and the encounter with those Ukrainians who before 1941 lived under Bolsheviks and who did not share the xenophobic, above-all anti-Russian slogans, brought about some changes in Ukrainian thought, such as some moderate statements of tolerance toward national minorities. In September 1943, the Third Extraordinary Meeting of OUN named the fascist national-socialist New Order no less an enemy of the Ukrainians than Moscow Bolshevism. Simultaneously, the program acknowledged the rights of national minorities in the future independent Ukraine to develop their own cultures.^[39] It was a timid yet significant departure from the narrow nationalist vision of the national minorities’ policy formulated in the 1930s.^[40]
After World War II, explicit anti-Jewish sentiments and clichйs did not disappear from nationalist thought in exile. Dmytro Dontsov, by far the most popular post-war Ukrainian political thinker (and the only visible authority on the Ukrainian political horizon in the Diaspora) was still very much engaged in his pre-war anti-Jewish rhetoric.^[41] Jews were not the only ones Dontsov disliked: his treatment of his Ukrainian colleagues from the nationalist camp was no better. For Dontsov, such personalities as Mykhailo Drahomanov (1841-1895), V’iacheslav Lypyns’kyi, Volodymyr Vynnychenko (1980-1951), Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi (1866-1934), and Ivan Bahrianyi (1907-1963), the most prominent Ukrainian national-minded thinkers, were mere collaborationists and traitors to the national cause. He dubbed them “the servile national hermaphrodites”. Real fighters for the Ukrainian cause had to fit Dontsov’s quasi-Nietzchean myth of the relentless Ukrainian super-hero.^[42] It is in this context that one should place Dontsov’s negation of the Jews. Yet even Dontsov could not afford to ignore the rise of new philosemitic post-Holocaust sentiments in the West and the impact of a new geopolitical entity, namely, the State of Israel. To tackle with them, he cast new realities such as Judeo-Christian rapprochement in his far-right mold. First, he disassociated himself from the post-Holocaust and pre-Vatican-II tendency that viewed the Judaic and Christian legacy as fundamental to western civilization. Second, he made clumsy attempts to prove that Christianity historically had nothing to do with Judaism. Christianity was born in the midst of “Hellenized Arians,” not of Jews. Jesus came from Arian Galilee, not from Jewish Judea. Messianic pretensions of the “Lilliputian petty-state of Israel” (liliputnoi derzhavky Izrailia) were baseless. Ben Gurion’s spirit, as well the spirit of his people, was of the Old Testament, which, Dontsov claimed he had proved, was not a Christian text.^[43] Ten years after the establishment of Ukrainian state independence, Dontsov’s type of anti-Judaism and antisemitism found its way into a number of such post-1991 aggressively anti-Jewish periodicals as Personal, Idealist, as well as the less sophisticated Vechirnii Kyiv, Za vil’nu Ukrainu, and Neskorena natsia.^[44] Nowadays, too, one could hardly find any difference in the perception of the Jews by such far-right nationalists as Anatolii Shcherbatiuk or of such a dinosaur of communist-forged antisemitism as Grigorii Shchekin.^[45]
However, by the late 1950s, the era of Dontsov was past its prime. The new generation of Ukrainian intellectuals, both in Ukraine and in Diaspora, realized that previous patterns of Ukrainian-Jewish rapprochement had to be abandoned and new approaches sought. Steadily but slowly, Lypyns’kyi was re-emerging on the Ukrainian ideological horizon capturing the minds of many, including the staunch nationalists, disciples and followers of Donstov.

UKRAINIAN DIASPORA: FROM DONTSOV TO LYPYNS’KY

After World War II Jews began acquiring a unique status in the Ukrainian political parlance as the most persecuted nation in the USSR, second only to the Ukrainians. Paradoxically, Ukrainians both in the Diaspora and in the Soviet Ukraine undertook this reassessment. Ardent disciples and sympathizers of Dontsov started to dramatically drift away from his shallow xenophobic mottoes.
Before reconsidering the Jewish issues – or instead of reconsidering them – the post-war Ukrainian thinkers began revising their approach to antisemitism. Apparently not so much the issue of Jews as a nation, but rather Nazi and Soviet anti-Jewish policies moved into the focus of many Western Ukrainian thinkers. As if not yet ready to discuss affinities between the tragic destinies of Ukrainians and Jews, Ukrainian thinkers attempted to discover parallels between imperial Russian (or Soviet) attitudes towards and treatment of each of them. Among other things, Ukrainians realized that the chauvinistic Soviet empire (as they depicted it) shared with Nazi Germany both Ukrainophobia and Judeophobia. That fascism and Bolshevism scorned and oppressed Ukrainians and Jews alike became for Ukrainian thinkers a shocking discovery. Russia remained the object of xenophobia, but Jews were placed in a different cluster. Ivan Bahrianyi [Bagriany], the leader of the Ukrainian Revolutionary Democratic Party in exile, who actively contributed to Dontsov’s Vistnyk, was among the first to transform this discovery into the scathing accusation of his polemical essays in which he tended to at least partially rehabilitate the national-democratic discourse, if not to begin revising Dontsov’s schemes.
Arrested and sentenced for his nationalist convictions in the 1930s, Bahrianyi was lucky to leave the prison in western Ukraine that was invaded by Germany and later escaped to the west. In the post-war period, Bahrianyi, according to Ivan Dziuba, “displayed a great creative energy in a broad intellectual and social diapason – as a poet, novelist, journalist, political thinker and leader, and the organizer of political life”.^[46] A faithful supporter of the “democratic-populist trend which attempted to incorporate the experience of the Soviet era of the 1920s and 1930s”,^[47] Bahrianyi professed the ideals close to the Ukrainian renaissance brutally suppressed in the 1930s as a result of Stalin’s shift toward old-fashioned Russian chauvinism intolerant of any national-cultural revivalism. Bahrianyi directed his passionate criticism against the supporters of Russian chauvinism, be they “red” journalists from the Soviet Ukraine or “white” journalists of the Russian emigration. In his essays published regularly in Ukrains’ki visti, Bahrianyi traced the amazing degeneration of Russian emigrant thinkers who had fled the blatant chauvinism of the tsarist regime but were trapped in the nets of the chauvinistic Soviet empire.^[48] Bahrianyi tirelessly emphasized that once liberal-democratic Russian journalists turned to the issues of Ukrainian anti-Soviet resistance during and after World War II, they resorted to slogans such as “beat the Yids and save Russia,” expediently substituting “yids” for “Ukrainians.” Bahrianyi noted:

“Let us call a spade a spade. Antisemitism in the policy of the “Soviet authority” is the antisemitism of nobody else but of Russian imperialism, antisemitism of the Russian empire. Modern antisemitism in the USSR is the product of Russian messianic chauvinism. It is the device of the internal and external policy of the Russian empire. And this antisemitism is not a new Soviet one, but the traditional Russian chauvinistic method of running the empire and securing its integrity. This antisemitism will remain as long as Russia remains the empire – that prison of peoples which the tsars and nowadays the CPSU secretaries keep together by brutal force, terror, oppression of all its subjects, and by mottoes like “beat the yids and save Russia.”^[49]

For Bahrianyi, Judeophobia and Ukrainophobia became synonymous and mutually complementary elements of Russian imperial policy.^[50] Paradoxically, Bahrianyi identified antisemitism as a Russian, not Ukrainian phenomenon. This approach might appear bordering on shallow reductionism and historical inaccuracy. Had it been so, there would have been no serious reason to discuss this or any other of Bahrianyi’s insights. Obviously, Bahrianyi’s innovation was not in exculpating Ukraine and incriminating Russia. By placing antisemitism in the imperial Russian realm, Bahrianyi was at pains to stress that antisemitism was alien to the genuine Ukrainian national worldview. Even if it could sound self-indulgent, this implication demonstrated a new tendency in Ukrainian thought, namely, to disassociate from anti-Jewish sensibilities and thus purify Ukrainian nationalist logic. In a sense, it was an attempt to disassociate genuine Ukrainian nationalism from the ignominious traces of Dontsov’s antisemitism. And the importance of this shift for further Ukrainian-Jewish encounter is difficult to overestimate – especially given the fact that Bahrianyi was not the only one who moved in that direction. Kwitkows’ky represents another good example.
Denys Kwitkows’kyi [Kwitkows’ky] (1909-1979), one of the Diaspora’s most active journalists and the Head of the Movement of Ukrainian Nationalists (PUN, stands for Provid Ukrains’kykh Natsionalistiv), who was born in a village near Sadigora, nowadays a suburb of Chernivtsi, became a professional lawyer in what was Romanian Bukovina, later in Germany, and finally North America. For his pro-Ukrainian nationalist sympathies and enthusiastic journalistic and organization work, he was arrested by Romanian and later by Nazi authorities, spending some five years in prison. Among the many projects he conceived and brought to life were several leading Diaspora periodicals. Himself a passionate journalist and political thinker of strong legalistic convictions, Kwitkows’kyi was sensitive to national issues, Jewish in particular. Even before the State of Israel was created, he emphasized the emerging centrality of the future Jewish State in the post World War II geopolitical context. In his amazingly sober and mature analytical essay “A Horrible Issue,” published with Ukraiins’kyi Biuleten Informatsii (no. 4, 1946), he highlighted the complexity of the state-building problem, especially focusing on an unprecedented challenge of the Jews to the British Empire.^[51] Reacting to the emergent Jewish state, Kwitkows’kyi seemed to have been deeply impressed by the courage of Jewish national ambitions. He perceived it as proof of his notion that not so much the strategic interests of the new superpowers, such as the USSR and the USA, but rather the two competing national ideas (Jewish and Arab) would positively inform the political future of the Middle Eastern region and world politics. Amazingly, Kwitkows’kyi did not hesitate to apply the motto put forward by the Israeli Jewish leaders to his understanding of the ways of achieving independence for the people enslaved in the USSR.^[52]
As is known, the 1962 Adolph Eichman case demonstrated the strength of the Israeli legal system, the effectiveness of its intelligence service, and the implemented will of the Jewish people to bring to justice the perpetrators of crimes committed against Jews. Kwitkows’kyi, a professional lawyer, could not leave this event unnoticed. Using as a point of reference a clumsy comparison between Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi [Chmelnicky] and “Bogey Man” that he found in a Jewish newspaper, Kwitkows’kyi came out with the program article “Jews and Us”.^[53] In it, he tended to disassociate Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi from his entirely fictional if not insulting image deeply embedded in Jewish national consciousness.^[54] Subsequently, Kwitkows’ky disassociated Ukraine from any anti-Jewish perceptions: “So let it be clear: Ukraine has never known any antisemitic movement or premeditated pogroms against the Jewish population. Neither our history nor anyone else’s has recorded any antisemitic philosophy or ideology similar, for instance, to Hitler’s philosophy or ideology.” He underscored the historical context of national revolutions in Ukraine that generated a merciless civil war climate, against which backdrop one must balance any Jewish population losses. He indicated the importance of the colonial factor in Ukrainian history that Jews neglect while assessing alleged Ukrainian antisemitism.
Indeed, Kwitkows’kyi did not want to see such Ukrainian national heroes as Stepan Bandera, Simon Petliura, or Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi prosecuted by the imaginary court of Jewish national memory. Nor did he claim that it would have been legitimate to judge the Jews for their anti-Ukrainian bias on the basis of Lazar Kaganovich’s crimes against the Ukrainian people during the Great Hunger of the 1930s.^[55] Though not entirely unbiased in regard to Jewish feelings towards Ukraine and Ukrainians, Kwitkows’kyi suggested a brand new agenda for the Ukrainian-Jewish encounter. It was national but not nationalistic. As in the case of Bahrianyi, it bordered on a somewhat indecisive national-democratic worldview yet not altogether liberated from Dontsovesque rhetoric. Jews, he claimed, should respect a nation of Ukrainians as Ukrainians respect a nation of Jews. Ukrainians have never attacked great Jewish leaders. Therefore, Jews should understand that great Ukrainian leaders emerged to liberate Ukraine, not to beat down Jews. Nobody should blame an entire people for the misdeeds of their representatives, either in the historical past or in modern times. Jews and Ukrainians should extend a hand to one another to fight the common enemy – “communist Moscow” – the only entity that benefits from Ukrainian-Jewish discord. The Ukrainians should purify themselves from the sense of guilt for crimes they have not perpetrated, or at least not initiated. Cooperation and genuine encounter were possible only if Jews and Ukrainians saw themselves as equal partners in dialogue. If Ukrainians were to fight antisemitism, Jews should fight their own Ukrainophobic bias.
In the late 1960s, Kwitkows’ky closely followed the persecution of Ukrainian dissidents in the Soviet Ukraine. That the Ukrainian dissidents became victims for being too Ukrainian suddenly revealed for him a pivotal common feature between the two people. As Jews were persecuted during the Holocaust for being Jews, Ukrainians were persecuted in the pre- and post-war USSR for being Ukrainians. This affinity made possible the appropriation of concepts elaborated in the realm of Jewish polity and their utilization for the Ukrainian cause. The Zionist apostle-like leaders became examples for the emerging Ukrainian national leadership. In his “To Be Oneself Whatever the Price” presented at the Conference of the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement, Kwitkows’kyi brought the example of Theodor Herzl as an йmigrй who, due to his obsession with the idea of national revival, managed to stir the Jewish Diaspora, bring together all strata of Jews, and trigger the establishment of the State which he, like the Biblical Moses before him, did not merit to see.^[56] Deliberately or not deliberately, overcoming a bitter feeling of suppressed envy, Kwitkows’kyi resorted to the images and themes in Ukrainian literature (Ivan Franko) that equated Israeli Jews and Ukrainians. But what about the Jews in Ukraine?

FOUNDATIONS FOR A DIALOGUE

In the 1960s, liberal-minded Ukrainian scholars considered the legacy of Lypyns’kyi a paramount and indispensable alternative to the shallow xenophobia of Dontsov, whose attitude to national minorities began to be an embarrassment even for his worshippers in the nationalist camp. Though the rise and institutionalization of the Ukrainian-Jewish dialogue deserve a separate discussion, it is worthwhile briefly to trace some major events in the 1960s-1970s that for the first time after the 1910s brought together Ukrainians and Jews, fostering a productive exchange of ideas between them. The first round table discussions between Ukrainian and Jewish scholars in Canada and the United States were organized by ardent followers of Lypyns’kyi. One of the most instrumental among them was Ivan Lysiak-Rudnyts’kyi (Rudnytsky), a prominent Ukrainian Diaspora political historian who published a number of pioneering essays on the Ukrainian-Jewish encounter in philosophy, politics, and literature, calling for “a new Ukrainian-Jewish entente cordiale”,^[57] and thus creating a brand-new field in East European humanities that fifty years later Marten Feller from Drohobych dubbed ukraino-iudaika.^[58] Another one was Omelian [Omeljan] Pritsak, the founder of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University and subsequently the director of the Oriental Institute at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, who came out with a new ethno-genetic concept of Ukraine (to be more precise, of Kievan Rus) that suggested the key role of what was known as the legally Judaic Khazarian state in the establishment of the first settlement on the territory of what later became Kiev. Due to Rudnyts’kyi, the revival of Lypyns’kyi’s theoretical framework shaped the endeavors of such prominent Canadian Ukrainian scholars as Orest Subtelny from York University, Paul Robert Magocsi from the University of Toronto, and Zenon Kohut from University of Alberta, who insightfully contextualized Ukrainian history against the multi-ethnic backdrop of Ukrainian society and culture and embraced East European Jewish issues (along with Russian and Polish) as part of Ukrainian history. Noteworthy, under Rudnyts’kyi’s impact two scholars, a Ukrainian and a Jew, published an unparalleled book on Jewish and Ukrainian historical narratives providing it with a telling subtitle “Two Solitudes”.^[59]
In the 1960s-1970s, the Ukrainian Diaspora brought a paramount contribution to the rapprochement between Ukrainians and Jews, enabling them to compare their historical narratives and speak to one another. Initiated by prominent Ukrainian and Jewish scholars, Ukrainian-Jewish conferences and round-table discussions became an indispensable part of modern Ukrainian thought, and the post-1991 events promoted their institutionalization in such society as Ukraine-Israel and such undertakings as Ukrainian-Jewish conventions.^[60] Munich-based (now Kyiv-based) Suchasnist, by far the best Ukrainian literary journal in the second half of the 20th century, was established in 1961 as if to revive Lypyns’kyi’s ideals and bring them to life.^[61] Suchasnist consistently published materials on a variety of national minorities that contributed to Ukraine culture. Among those nationalities, judged by the amount of the journal publications, Jews featured prominently.^[62] Later in the 1980s, Israeli-based Ukrainian-language Dialohy journal and even more so the Kiev-based Yehupets in the 1990s successfully adapted Lypyns’kyi’s poly-ethnic concept of Ukraine as an operational framework, if not an unwritten program, for Jewish-Ukrainian encounter.
The reassessment of Jewish issues along Lypyns’kyi’s lines by major Ukrainian Diaspora thinkers followed suit. The case of Roman Rakhmannyi [Rakhmanny] is particularly illuminating. According to Yuri Shcherbak, Rakhmannyi was

“a unique phenomenon in Ukrainian politics, literature, and journalism. His works comprise a monumental and tragic encyclopedia of the Ukrainian struggle for independence – a dazzling collection of ideas, hypotheses, predictions, facts, and names. Roman Olynyk-Rakhmanny was a figure of the Ukrainian Renaissance and will remain so in our history. But in contrast to the writers of the executed Renaissance, Roman Rakhmanny refused to become a victim of the Communist regime. He entered the battle against the red “horsemen of the Apocalypse.”” ^[63]

Perhaps Rakhmannyi’s commitment to and participation in OUN in the 1930s cast his nationalistic convictions in Dontsov’s mold.^[64] Even in 1973 he dubbed Dontsov “the guardian of Ukrainian dignity” along with Franko, Hrushevs’kyi, Bahrianyi, and Lypyns’kyi.^[65] However, Dontsov’s ideas retained for Rakhmannyi symbolic rather than practical significance. When the discussion focused on the present and future of the Ukrainian state, Rakhmannyi explicitly resorted to Lypyns’kyi.^[66]
The Jewish theme was not a random choice for Rakhmannyi. In his impassioned articles about Ukrainian dissent, Jewish motifs are sali-ent.^[67] Rakhmannyi closely followed the rise of the new Jewish State and consistently traced a parallel between Zionism and the Ukrainian national revival. On the eve of one of the key Arab-Israeli military conflicts he boldly defended Israel’s case against Moscow-based anti-Zionist and pro-Arabic propaganda.^[68] In his essay “Ukraine and Israel: 37 years ago and today” (Natsional’na trybuna, December 11, 1983) he compared the struggle of Menahem Begin’s revisionist Irgun Tsevai Leumi struggling against the British and the Arabs to Ukrainian patriots from the OUN who fought against the Nazis and the Bolsheviks. Rakhmannyi emphasized the primordial importance of the military and political experience of Israel for those who sought Ukrainian national liberation. Surprisingly, Rakhmannyi identified with the uncompromising Zionists of Zhabotinsky’s ilk rather than with the moderate Ben Gurion. It was the desperate courage of the Irgun members on issues of national liberation that Rakhmannyi believed should instruct Ukrainians on how to tackle the Soviet oppression of Ukraine.
In his journalism, Rakhmannyi was looking for and was able to find positive evidence of the Ukrainian-Jewish encounter. In his essay entitled “Aliens on the ‘dreadful shadows’ of Ukraine” (Natsional’na trybuna, October 7, 1984), Rakhmannyi presented a surprising portrayal of Osip Mandelshtam, one of the most outstanding Russian poets of Jewish descent, as sympathetic to Ukrainians, pointing out that back in 1933 they fed three Ukrainian children and their father who had abandoned their village devastated by famine and had come to the Crimea in search of food. Tracing parallels between Soviet realities and Mandelshtam’s poetry, Rakhmanny suggested that Mandelshtam’s poetic line about “dreadful shadows of Ukraine and Kuban” was perhaps the reflection of the notorious 1931–1933 hunger that had a devastating effect on the Ukraine. Moreover, according to Rakhmannyi, it was the only reflection of the Ukrainian holodomor in the entire Soviet literature of that time. “Both Mandelshtams managed to understand the tragedy of the Ukrainians under Moscow domain and having understood it, they did not remain silent.”^[69] Noteworthy, Rakhmannyi did not write an angry essay reflecting upon the ignominious role that, for example, Lazar Kaganovich purportedly played in artificially arranging the famine in Ukraine (as did Dontsov). Instead, he chose a different topic for his essay. Rakhmannyi managed to identify the reference in Mandelshtam’s poem, compared it to the episode depicted in Nadezhda Mandelshtam’s memoirs, and having realized the source of the reference, wrote an essay about the one courageous word of protest articulated by a doomed Russian-Jewish poet against the Moscow-orchestrated famine in Ukraine. Rachmannyi’s point is obvious: while the rest of the Soviet people praised the collectivization aloud or cursed it tacitly, the Jews were the only ones who reflected upon its dreadful consequences, bemoaning the victims of the famine in Ukraine.
In his profound pamphlet “On the Babylonian Rivers of Ukraine” (America, 1986) Rakhmannyi once again indicated how instructive for Ukrainians was the example of the route the Jews had to take before they managed to convince the western world that they were a nation deserving a state, and not merely another religious sect. Only due to their ability to reshape their self-perception as a distinct political nation, noted Rakhmannyi, did the Jews succeed in reviving their ancestral Biblical land and their Hebrew language. Here lay the lesson that by no means should be lost on Ukrainians.^[70]
Not only similarities in the historical past and perhaps imaginary future, but also present day Jews deserved the respect and gratitude of the Ukrainians. In his essay “Their Honest Word Will Never be Forgotten,” Rakhmannyi praised eighteen Israelis, former Soviet “prisoners of Zion,” who publicly addressed Israeli society and called upon it finally to acknowledge the Metropolitan Andrii Sheptyts’kyi (1865-1944) “a righteous Gentile”. They boldly challenged the dominant opinion of those influential Israeli and western politicians who rejected this privilege to Sheptyts’kyi on the grounds of his alleged collaboration with the Nazis. Rakhmannyi soundly underscored that figures such as Raoul Wallenberg (1912-?) or Oscar Schindler (1908-1974) did not have any choice but to collaborate with the Nazis in order to redeem the Jews. But neither the complexity of the issue nor the threat of harsh criticism of their action from the side of the Israeli establishment intimidated the Jewish defenders of Sheptyts’kyi’s posthumous honor. Rakhmannyi concluded, again emphasizing the ethical example of the Jews: “Eighteen former prisoners, champions of the cause of Zion, honestly defended the Metropolitan Andrii Sheptyts’kyi. The Ukrainian society will never forget their words. No doubt, we, Ukrainians, have no right to be ungrateful”.^[71]
Amazingly, liberal-minded literati and dissidents in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic echoed Rakhmannyi – along with Rudnyts’kyi – almost at the same time and almost with the same words.