{"id":2245,"date":"2023-01-10T13:37:31","date_gmt":"2023-01-10T11:37:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/isc.lviv.ua\/?p=2245"},"modified":"2023-02-06T12:29:32","modified_gmt":"2023-02-06T10:29:32","slug":"ryabchuk-ukrzriz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/isc.lviv.ua\/en\/ryabchuk-ukrzriz\/","title":{"rendered":"Mykola Riabchuk. Mapping a \u2018Nowhere Nation\u2019 | Ukraine! Unmuted"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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1.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

 \u2018The Nowhere Nation\u2019 was the title of the featured article published in 2000 in the reputable New York Review of Books by a reputable author, the former US ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock. The disparaging title was typical rather than unique; other titles, throughout the 1990s, referred with similar wit (and analytical depth) to \u2018Nasty Ukraine\u2019, the \u2018Cleft Country\u2019 or, whimsically, to the \u2018Unwanted Stepchild of Soviet Perestroika\u2019. It was the time when anybody who spent a few years in Moscow, learnt some Russian and read Riasanovsky\u2019s antiquated Russian history textbook could boldly comment on all things Ukrainian \u2013 either in politics, history, culture, religion or language. Unintentionally, they became custodians and promotors of the empire that supposedly rested in peace in 1991 but still retained its discursive power and rhetorical dominance.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Imperial knowledge\u2019 \u2013 as the major empire\u2019s legacy \u2013 remained largely intact. Ewa Thompson defined it (after Edward Said) as a system of imperial narratives aimed at silencing, undermining and provincializing subjugated nations, making them voiceless and almost invisible on the international scene, insofar as the empire monopolized the authority to speak and act on their behalf. That peculiar \u2018knowledge\u2019, produced and disseminated by powerful imperial institutions over the centuries, became international. It strongly influenced Western academia, media, mass culture and common wisdom. The world both adopted and normalized it; the international public tuned its sensors habitually to imperial messages as presumably the most comprehensive, \u2018important\u2019 and authoritative \u2013 rather than to the marginal voices of minor, subaltern and \u2018less important\u2019 nations. Common wisdom doesn\u2019t require any proof; it is something that everybody knows. There is no need to question or problematize it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nobody doubts that: Russia\u2019s status can be elevated to a \u2018thousand-year-old\u2019 empire rather than Peter the Great\u2019s eighteenth century invention; Russia can be equated with Ru\u015b, their names used interchangeably rather than strictly attached to profoundly different historical entities; Crimea \u2018has always been Russian\u2019 rather than being the homeland and state of its native people (Crimean Tatars); and Ukrainians and Russians are very proximate, an intertwined people, rather than very dissimilar and distinctly informed politically in very different societies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Imperial knowledge\u2019 pops-up in myriad falsehoods, mostly minor and seemingly innocent when taken separately yet accumulatively producing a highly distorted view of reality, harmful to Kyiv, beneficial to Moscow. Day by day, decade by decade, Ukrainians have had to bother with very dull things like explaining that: the Ukrainian language doesn\u2019t \u2018derive from Russian in the sixteenth century\u2019; Taras Bulba wasn\u2019t a \u2018popular Russian ataman\u2019 and hopak<\/em> wasn\u2019t a \u2018Russian folk dance\u2019 (as leading Western newspapers occasionally contend); Ivan Franko wasn\u2019t a subject of the Russian Empire (as introduced by the Nobel Prize Committee\u2019s official website); Kyivan princess Olga couldn\u2019t possibly represent any kind of \u2018Russia\u2019 in the tenth century (as organizers of the Davos Forum averred last year); and the trident officially blacklisted by the British police isn\u2019t a terrorist symbol but Ukraine\u2019s national coat of arms. All these anecdotes, which otherwise may have looked funny, became highly sinister within the context of Putin\u2019s obsessive claims that: \u2018Ukraine is not even a country\u2019; Ukrainians and Russians are \u2018the same people\u2019; and Russia, after (and because of) Ukraine\u2019s secession, became \u2018the largest divided nation\u2019 in the world. All of them as part and parcel of \u2018imperial knowledge\u2019 have paved the way to Russian military aggression, facilitating the denial of Ukraine existence and, ultimately, contributing, though unintentionally, to genocidal policies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My personal encounter with this \u2018imperial knowledge\u2019 occurred in my early teens when I started asking some unusual questions, first to myself and then to parents and friends, such as: why Ukraine, however communist, can\u2019t be independent like Poland and Czechoslovakia; why no movies and virtually no TV programmes are screened in Ukrainian; and why all Ukrainians switch to Russian when conversing with Russian-speakers and never vice versa. I questioned the social reality that was supposed to be \u2018normal\u2019 and, therefore, unquestionable. I hadn\u2019t yet read Michel Foucault or even heard of him; I merely tried to grasp why large chunks of social \u2018normality\u2019 were manifestly unjust and, hence, abnormal. My infantile curiosity led me deeper to the roots of the problem: while unfair social relations, I figured out, were normalized \u2013<\/s> just because the dominant group had enough power to promote that view and suppress alternatives, the subaltern group had neither the coercive nor discursive power to fight back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Much later, Foucault helped me to verbalize all those feelings in a more coherent and articulate form. But my earlier intuitions were basically correct and they set me on an increasingly divergent trajectory vis-\u00e0-vis the Soviet system, ideology and way of life. By the end of high school, I felt my views sufficiently incompatible with officialdom. I didn\u2019t even try to continue my education in the liberal arts, overwhelmed as it was at the time by Marxism-Leninism and ideological brainwashing. Instead, I opted for something seemingly neutral and apolitical \u2013 electric engineering, which allowed me to spend three years in relative freedom at Lviv Polytechnic University, until the KGB came along and expelled me for producing unauthorized publications, having improper contact with \u2018nationalistic elements\u2019 and, as stated in their official inditement, for \u2018insincere behavior during interrogations\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They couldn\u2019t bar me, however, from self-education, and from further writing unauthorized material and communicating with dubious elements. Luckily, there were plenty of these elements in the late Soviet years, especially in big cities like Kyiv and Lviv. Informal literary readings, art exhibitions, film screenings and even overnight jam sessions in some remote community centres were recurrent parts of a vivid and versatile \u2018countercultural\u2019 life in the 1970s and 1980s. Later, as perestroika advanced and censorship loosened, that picturesque underground scene resurfaced in cultural journals and publishing houses, concert halls and theatre stages, open-air exhibitions and festivals. \u2018Imperial knowledge\u2019 implies that: Ukrainian culture is provincial and ethnographic; the Ukrainian language is unsuitable for high topics and diverse matters; and the only channel of regional communication with the external world runs via Moscow, as if it were the only place for a professional career and international recognition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We have challenged that \u2018knowledge\u2019 with not only our work but also other activity that pursues two major strategies. One reclaims the powerful legacy of Ukrainian modernism, banned and buried under the Soviets alongside its extinguished authors. The second develops direct ties with the world, unmediated by Moscow, cutting the mythical umbilical cord that pumped \u2018imperial knowledge\u2019 to the brains of our co-citizens and those of foreigners who had simply never heard of an alternative. The task has been Herculean, both at home and abroad. At home, independent Ukraine inherited twenty percent of colonial settlers indifferent (at best) to all things Ukrainian, and many more heavily Russified Ukrainians (including all the ruling post-Soviet elite) who internalized a profound inferiority complex vis-\u00e0-vis all things Russian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remember the candid confession of my Russophone colleague in Kyiv when, in 1992, I offered to read to her from the newly published Andrukhovych novel, Recreations<\/em>. \u2018You know,\u2019 she ultimately exclaimed, \u2018I didn\u2019t believe that something like this was even possible in Ukrainian!\u2019 Not all Russophones were so open minded. The more typical attitude was one that I observed in an Odesa bookstore in the late 1990s. An intelligent lady looked with apparent interest through the Ukrainian translation of Patricia Herligy\u2019s History of Odesa<\/em> and put it back on the shelf with a bitter sigh: \u2018They\u2019ve spoilt such a nice book!\u2019 (the \u2018spoiling\u2019 meant translating it into Ukrainian instead of Russian).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

International challenges were even more problematic since their only reference point to the new independent country (the \u2018nowhere nation\u2019) was either Russia or the Soviet Union. And, as they entailed all of the stereotypes, distortions and lies embedded in \u2018imperial knowledge\u2019, complete ignorance of Ukraine was in most cases better than the dubious \u2018expertise\u2019 provided by the self-styled specialists on everything (and, of course, on Ukraine). As a colleague of mine recently joked: \u2018A history of Ukraine provided by [imperial] Russians is like a history of Jews provided by Nazis.\u2019 The same goes for Ukrainian culture, language and, of course, politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

International scholars who pioneered Ukrainian studies in the West in the 1980s and 1990s recollect how they encountered a biased, often hostile environment when presenting their allegedly \u2018odd\u2019 topic in Western academia. Professor Orest Subtelny, an eminent Canadian historian, contends that \u2018well into the 1980s, Ukrainian history was considered not only a peripheral but even intellectually suspect area of specialization by many North American historians.\u2019 The assumption prevailed, he says, that \u2018a historian of Ukraine was, almost by definition, a Ukrainian nationalist\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Putin has gone further by defining any Ukrainian who refuses to be Russian, a \u2018nationalist\u2019 or, worse still, a \u2018Nazi\u2019. The connection between these two approaches is not really close and obvious, but it does exist and deserves to be scrutinized. And, hopefully, repented.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The view of Ukraine in international academia has notably changed in the past three decades, but popular wisdom still lags behind. Mass media still report nonsensically about: \u2018Kievan Russia\u2019 (instead of Ru\u015b); Ukraine\u2019s \u2018nationalistic West\u2019 versus its \u2018pro-Russian East\u2019; and the primordial \u2018affinity\u2019 of the allegedly \u2018brotherly\u2019 nations \u2013 as if rapists and murderers can be the \u2018brothers\u2019 of anybody, and a freedom-loving, democracy-leaning Ukraine can feel any \u2018affinity\u2019 with a fascistoid, totalitarian Russia. Two Ukrainian revolutions and the pending horrific war with its former colonial master have made the country discernable on both mental and physical maps, and put the notorious \u2018imperial knowledge\u2019 on hold if not into the dustbin. At least, it is being questioned and problematized; the Russo-Ukrainian war is increasingly being understood as a postponed war of national liberation, essentially anticolonial. This may provide a good antidote to yet another kind of \u2018imperial knowledge\u2019 \u2013 one that now emanates not from Moscow but from Western capitals, reflecting the old-fashion imperial view of the \u2018Orient\u2019 as lacking agency of its own and, therefore, managed by Western masters, peacekeepers and intermediaries within agreed spheres of influence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While Russian \u2018imperial knowledge\u2019 has been largely discredited (though not dismantled yet), Western supremacism remains strong-willed, especially in the voices of \u2018political realists\u2019 who press Ukraine for capitulation, for various concessions to its tormentors and for a negotiated settlement with a rogue state that has never observed any agreements, least of all with its colonies. Russian \u2018imperial knowledge\u2019 denies Ukraine\u2019s very existence and promotes its extinction; Western \u2018realist knowledge\u2019 denies \u2018only\u2019 Ukraine\u2019s agency and implies paternalistic guardianship. Within a few months of war, Ukrainians have proven they form a consolidated nation with strong civic identity, despite much talked of divides. They have also proven they can build a resilient state with functional institutions, in spite of alleged corruption and other deficiencies. Ukraine has firmly established itself as a viable nation-state with a vibrant civil society, strong armed forces, and a rich, dynamic and versatile European culture. It has taken months of war and thousands of deaths to prove the obvious \u2013 that Ukraine does exist and definitely deserves to be rediscovered, unmuted, and brought to the world from the shadow (and hopefully ruins) of the empire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

______
This text was created specifically for the essay book UKRAINE! UNMUTED, which was published as part of the 5th triennial of contemporary Ukrainian art \u00abUkrainian Cross-Section\u00bb<\/a> with the same-name UKRAINE! UNMUTED<\/strong><\/strong> theme. Compiled and edited by Oksana Forostyna. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The project was implemented by the Cultural Strategy Institute together with the NGO \u201cInstitute of Contemporary Art\u201d and \u201cVirmenska 35\u201d with the support of the Lviv City Council<\/a>, ZMIN Foundation<\/a>, the International Renaissance Fund<\/a> and Lithuanian partners Kaunas 2022<\/a>.<\/strong> Ukrainian Cross-Section <\/strong> was launched in 2010 and aims to present a cross-section of Ukrainian contemporary art and culture primarily abroad.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1.  \u2018The Nowhere Nation\u2019 was the title of the featured article published in 2000 in the reputable New York Review of Books by a reputable author, the former US ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock. The disparaging title was typical rather than unique; other titles, throughout the 1990s, referred with similar wit (and analytical […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/isc.lviv.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/isc.lviv.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/isc.lviv.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/isc.lviv.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/isc.lviv.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/isc.lviv.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2245\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/isc.lviv.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/isc.lviv.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/isc.lviv.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}