The Near Abroad: Eastern Europe and Soviet Patriotism in Ukraine, 1956–1985 by Zbigniew Wojnowski (review)

Zbigniew Wojnowski's book provides an original investigation into the phenomenon of Soviet Ukrainian patriotism that he shows existed throughout the republic, including what is usually described as the "nationalist West." Wojnowski writes it is mistaken to view Soviet Ukraine only through the lens of an anti-Soviet identity versus the Communist Party. He argues that a Soviet identity was common. He admits that Soviet power was alien to western Ukrainians until the 1950s and even 1960s but then takes a major leap of faith to write that "anti-Soviet nationalism was a minority faith after the death of Stalin" (p. 13). Wojnowski's use of the term "minority faith" echoes the title of Andrew Wilson's 1997 book on Ukrainian nationalism, and in both cases it is misplaced. The definition of "nationalism" is complex from a theoretical and comparative perspective and was ever changing in the USSR. Wojnowski writes that "bourgeois nationalism" as a "term was fluid and open to interpretation" and usually was understood as somebody "who articulated an understanding of what it meant to be Ukrainian that differed from the official Soviet script" (p. 123).

In the 1950s–1960s, elites pushed the limits of the possible in language and culture. Ethnic Ukrainians became a majority in the Soviet Ukrainian Communist Party for the first time. Ukrainian history experienced a renaissance from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. "National history helped promote a neat, sanitised vision of Ukraine as a Ukrainian nation-space. Slowly but surely, the national paradigm overshadowed the international in Soviet Ukraine's politics of memory" (p. 84). This "teleological vision of history" (p. 84) was promoted by the newly established Ukrayinskyy Istorychnyy Zhurnal with western Ukrainian territories portrayed as always having been Ukrainian. Ukrainians as eastern Slavs were always striving to unite with Russians with whom they had close and good relations. Sovietness was understood as "unquestioned allegiance to a territorially defined homeland" (p. 121). Lviv was eastern Slavic from time immemorial and not Polish. Patriotism among the Ukrainian laity in the Russian Orthodox Church was acceptable if lip service was paid to the official view of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church as a product of Austrian and Polish intrigue and Ukrainians always wanting to return to the bosom of the Russian Orthodox Church.

A Soviet Ukrainian identity emerged that was negotiated through dialogue between Moscow and Kyiv. Eastern Slavic "nationalism" was a key component of Soviet culture and the USSR was a "nationalist state" (p. 16). This "Little Russian nationalism" was acceptable to the Soviet authorities because it made Ukrainians forever close allies of Russians with Sovietness "a composite East Slavic identity" at the heart of which were joint accomplishments such as victory in the Second World War (p. 16). Eastern Slavic identity was central to Soviet political culture and Ukrainian loyalty to the USSR "was tantamount to a close Ukrainian-Russian political union" (p. 115).

In western Ukraine, Soviet and Ukrainian identity fused after World War II. Anti-Polish sentiment was tapped into to show western Ukraine "as part of a wider East Slavic community" (p. 173). The Soviet regime had, after all, united Ukrainian territories and through repatriations in 1944–1946 made the west ethnically Ukrainian. Western Ukraine was a bulwark against eastern Europe for Russia and the USSR and Poles and Poland were the "Other." Wojnowski describes this Soviet Ukrainian identity as "deeply xenophobic" (p. 17). With memory of the brutal Polish-Ukrainian war in the 1940s and population exchanges, Poland was portrayed as a "mortal threat" to Ukraine and Ukrainians.

Wojnowski differentiates between two types of Soviet Ukrainian patriotism—conservative and reformist. Conservative patriotism was anti-reform, feared instability, war, and Western intrigue, and supported repression of dissent in Ukraine and eastern Europe. Reformist patriotism supported reforms in eastern Europe and within the Soviet Union and the concept of national roads to socialism, and therefore closely aligned with national communists in Ukraine...