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

Zbigniew Wojnowski’s monograph on post-Stalinist Soviet Ukraine begins and ends with scenes of Ukraine’s 2013–2014 Maidan protest movement and the ongoing war in the Donbass. It would be difficult, it seems, to publish a book on Ukraine these days without referencing these events and their aftermath, no matter how relevant or irrelevant current events might be to the subject at hand. Wojnowski’s decision to bookend his story with tales of the Ukrainian present, however, does not feel shoehorned but a natural addition to an argument that aims to explain the Ukrainian present just as much as the Ukrainian past.

Wojnowski’s book focuses on the distinctive experience of Soviet Ukraine in the decades after the death of Stalin, covering the eras of “the thaw” and “late socialism.” The experience was distinctive, Wojnowski argues, because of Ukraine’s proximity to the socialist states of Eastern Europe as well as Ukraine’s self-proclaimed role as a core East Slavic republic within the USSR. Rather than see Ukrainian ethnic identities as a problem for the Soviet state, Wojnowski argues that beginning in 1956 Ukrainian senses of belonging “were a key source of legitimacy for the post-Stalinist Soviet state” (P. 11). Mobilizing acceptable forms of Ukrainian national expression without challenging the Soviet system proved advantageous to citizens of Soviet Ukraine in this era, helping them advance as Soviet citizens. This was a strategy of advancement deployed all over Soviet Ukraine, including in the western borderlands that had become Soviet more recently during World War II.

Part of this mobilization, and what made it distinctive to Ukraine, involved emphasizing differences between Soviet Ukraine and what Wojnowski refers to as its “near abroad,” namely, the socialist states of Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia that bordered Ukraine. As Wojnowski argues, Soviet Ukrainians saw themselves as part of a USSR, which itself was “an embodiment of geographically specific, East Slavic interests that differed from other socialist countries” (P. 24). This led to a worldview that “contrast[ed] the core ethnic groups of the USSR with foreigners in the near abroad” and “defined Sovietness as a composite East Slavic identity” (P. 17).

These two simultaneous processes, a post-Stalin, postwar USSR that defined itself more and more through an East Slavic history and culture and the reconsecration of an expanded Ukrainian socialist republic with a role as both a center and borderland bulwark, led to the inculcation of a distinctively Ukrainian Soviet patriotism that allowed Ukrainian citizens to “cultivate social capital” (P. 20) through their Ukrainianness. In an important intervention, Wojnowski argues that this patriotism was a distinctive part of what Vera Dunham has called “the big deal.”¹ As Wojnowski puts it, “The establishment of Soviet hegemony in the near abroad shaped the mechanics governing the big deal after the death of Stalin. There was now a large and growing group of citizens who publicly claimed that they made a special contribution to strengthening Soviet influences in the near abroad” (P. 19).

Instead of trying to gauge popular opinion on the sincerity of this new Soviet Ukrainian patriotism, Wojnowski analyzes how these ideas were deployed, both in official and unofficial settings, and concludes that mobilization of this patriotism was as common in the eastern regions of Ukraine as in the west. In focusing on reactions to events in Eastern Europe, Wojnowski argues:

Residents used various public forums to suggest not only that Ukrainian identities were an important part of what it meant to be Soviet, but also that culture and history from the western borderlands around Lviv (traditionally seen as the “least Soviet” part of Ukraine) were an important part of what it was to be Soviet Ukrainian. Therefore, popular reactions to events and development in the near abroad do not fit in into the stereotypical divide into “pro-Soviet” east and “anti-Soviet...