Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor
Today, during the bloody war with the Russian aggressor, when, as in the period of the most significant trials of our nation, Ukrainians are united to defend their homeland, along with the most modern weapons, each of us has a particularly saving talisman: the historical memory of the Motherland!
It is the living thread that connects us with the traditions of our ancestors from the times of Rus, the Zaporizhzhya Cossacks, the national liberation struggle of 1917-1921 and the Second World War, the glorious Sixties, the Rukh movement during Gorbachev’s perestroika, and the modern heroism of the armed struggle against the Russian aggressor.
And our children master all these stages of the Ukrainian statehood in turn in a separate school course, which allows them to crystallize national consciousness and patriotic civic position.
After all, it is at the school desk that this process begins for each of us, because it is there that the request for the true history of our native land and people appears, which will constantly return to each of us as mature citizens in the new conditions of reality.
But as it turns out, our schools are planning to eliminate such a subject as “History of Ukraine” and combine it with “World History.”
This, they say, is the European experience, and we are going to Europe!
However, the special order of the Minister of Education and Science of Ukraine, Oksen Lisovyi, dated July 30 this year does not emphasize that such experience has been accumulating in European countries for a long time, and each country has had its own thorny path of national affirmation.
Our situation is completely different, because over the past millennium our territory has been torn apart from all sides, and someone has tried to impose alien ways of material existence and spiritual life on us.
However, as soon as our ancestors were able to accumulate a critical mass of revolutionary energy, they immediately tried to declare to the whole world the revival of their own self-sufficiency and self-government, as Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky did in February 1649 in Pereyaslav in front of the Poles: “I am a prince in my principality!”
And in his first station wagons, this historical link is seen precisely from the times of Rus.
A similar thing happened in 1917, when the historical memory of the Cossack victory called Ukrainians to the blue and yellow flags in all settlements in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires.
Didn’t the same thing happen in 1991, when pride in the military victories of the Ruthenians, Cossacks, and Petliurists was supplemented by the self-sacrifice of the Banderites during and after World War II?
But where is the certainty that without preserving the historical memory of today’s schoolchildren, which should accompany them throughout their lives, we will be able to keep Ukraine?
Should we again adjust the school history of our native country to the ideological needs of everyone around us and away from us? Doesn’t the bitter experience with the erosion of Ukraine’s history in the country’s higher education teach us anything?
Unfortunately, we have already forgotten about this, even though the events took place before our eyes, as this process has been quietly making its way since the 1990s.
And it began with Gorbachev’s perestroika, when our thirsty for truth society was extremely has been saturated with information about Ukraine’s past.
This was facilitated not only by the first attempts to open secret archival repositories to cover the so-called white spots, but, above all, by the lifting of the ban on the importation of the works of our diaspora into Ukraine, which covered events and figures in the history of Ukraine in a completely different way than was required by the guidelines of the short course “History of the CPSU (b),” which was adjusted to the decisions of the twentieth Congress of the Communist Party and the ideological reforms of Gorbachev’s team.
The works of Mykhailo Hrushevsky became available to the masses, The works of Dmytro Doroshenko, Natalia Polonska-Vasylenko, and Orest Subtelny, as well as many other authors from the diaspora, were completely different in their content from what was taught in secondary and higher education.
Therefore, such works became a source of historical truth for the perestroika generation, which was already accumulating revolutionary energy for a new shift at the end of the twentieth century.
This knowledge, especially about the armed victory of the Ukrainian Cossacks, fascinated millions of Ukrainians, bringing them to crowded squares where the will of the descendants of their glorious ancestors was forged.
Thousands and thousands of Ukrainians crowded the places of majestic victories and bitter defeats, where they not only honored the memory of the heroes but also were inspired by their feats and sacrifice for their own progress in world history.
For example, to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, more than half a million descendants of that glorious armed force of our people came to Khortytsia from all over Ukraine.
Of course, this all-Ukrainian spiritual revival, which was nourished by sources of historical truth, could not escape the attention of Russian chauvinists from among the liberal democrats who at that time were trying to seize power in Moscow from the Bolsheviks there.
But the fierceness of that internal struggle diverted both their attention and efforts from confronting the national movements that were developing in the USSR.
Moreover, the so-called Russian democrats benefited from the Ukrainian national liberation movement distracting the Communist Party forces from the struggle for power in the Moscow Kremlin.
But immediately after Ukraine’s declaration of independence, Moscow came to its senses, realizing that Ukrainians had already breathed in the air of historical truth about themselves.
However, they could not immediately stop the process of realization.
So they began to develop plans to erode Ukrainian history itself, quietly returning it to the usual Russian narratives.
And the first thing they did was to write joint history textbooks.
This meant that in the course of preparing them, it would be necessary to look for some sort of compromise, presenting a common interpretation of certain events.
As a result, the Ukrainian truth would gradually be leveled, since the authors on the Ukrainian side were usually those who had previously written the History of the Ukrainian SSR.
This process seemed to be stopped by the Revolution of Dignity.
However, immediately afterwards, the Law on Higher Education in Ukraine was irreversibly amended to remove the mandatory study of such Ukrainian-centered disciplines as business Ukrainian, history of Ukraine, and history of Ukrainian culture from the higher education process.
This meant that students of engineering, construction, agricultural, medical, and transport universities would not be able to study, say, the history of Ukraine at this level, because they were already taught this subject at school.
It was explained to the then Minister of Education and Science of Ukraine Serhiy Kvit that such an approach threatens, in the context of Russian aggression, which began on February 20, 2014, with significant ideological losses, as Moscow’s powerful imperial propaganda about the “single nation” can negatively affect national consciousness, distorting it in a way that is favorable to the enemy.
I remember well how Serhiy Myronovych promised at a meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Vyacheslav Kyrylenko to issue an accompanying order to the law recommending that all universities introduce the three Ukrainian studies into the educational process.
Someone in the know may have seen this order – I did not.
But “History of Ukraine,” which was introduced to replace “History of the CPSU” in all our universities after Ukraine’s independence, has since disappeared not only from the natural sciences, engineering, medical, agricultural, or transport faculties, but also from many humanities ones.
It turned out that the future Ukrainian elite, which was supposed to take on the responsibility of protecting the territorial integrity and sovereignty of our country, was deprived of the opportunity to be armed with historical knowledge for the ideological struggle against the enemy.
Another aspect of the erosion of historical truth from Ukraine’s past can be seen in the context of the war in the way our scientists’ research is being adapted to international standards.
While articles about the discoveries of Ukrainian scientists in the natural sciences are readily published by foreign journals because our authors share their discoveries and inventions for free, which are immediately translated into industrial developments that we will have to buy later, historical publications are selectively accepted abroad.
Only the content that fits the ideological concepts of a particular country.
Therefore, in pursuit of Scopus publications, for which they must also pay, Ukrainian scholars must take into account the political line of each country, especially with regard to problematic issues in relations with Ukraine in the distant or recent past.
Thus, through the higher education system of Ukraine, which trains personnel for secondary schools, it is possible to curtail genuine research and thus pass it on to students who will be teaching the younger generation tomorrow.
Attempts to copy Western approaches to the study of history, including history, while avoiding the centuries of experience of national pedagogy, have led to an excessive fascination with foreign narratives in American studies, European studies, and Oriental studies.
And this is to the detriment of a detailed mastery of the existing knowledge of our own history, as well as the search for new evidence in its field.
And such students become uninterested in the deep processes of the emergence and creation of their own nation – they are only interested in the all-encompassing.
And unfortunately, they leave university walls like this, ready to implement a well-thought-out external project to erode the Ukrainian national history itself, which should affirm the identity of the owner of this land.
Because now, even for our children, Ukrainian history is supposedly becoming a part of the global history.
So that tomorrow it will be remembered as something peculiar and separate in the world only in the event of extraordinary cataclysms and disasters like the Chernobyl disaster, another revolutionary shift in our squares, or bloody events brought by “brothers” from the east and north…
Unless the “History of Ukraine” remains in the Saturday and Sunday schools of the Ukrainian diaspora, which are not subordinate to the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine.
At the very least, the century-old tradition of teaching this subject has preserved both spirituality and their own national dignity for our emigrants.