Subtelny's Imaginary Ukraine

 Orest Subtelny's efforts to present Ukrainian history as separate from Russia's were, sadly,  an exercise in futility.

Back in the 1970's, the West was mired in stagflation. By the end of the decade, however, a new Polish pope arrived in the Vatican and Margaret Thatcher took over as prime minister in the United Kingdom. To reverse the economic decline, a new doctrine - neoliberalism - was adopted, first in the countries of the Anglosphere and in subsequent years all over the Western world. The main tenet of the new economic philosophy consisted in the wholesale privatisation of state-owned enterprises, a measure deemed to make them leaner and more profitable. 

Moving forward to the 80's, the problem was that of finding new markets for the consumer goods that Western industries still produced in abundance. The natural choice was Central and Eastern Europe which, however, was still part of the Soviet sphere of influence. Taking advantage of a leadership vacuum until the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev at the helm in Moscow, the Vatican and the CIA fatally undermined the communist regime in Poland. The new Soviet leadership was caught - by the events which continued to unfold in Central Europe - in the middle of a series of economic and political reforms that ultimately failed. Accordingly, Gorbachev agreed to end the USSR's domination of Central and Eastern Europe, which culminated in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

While Western politicians were cultivating Gorbachev and his wife assiduously, behind closed doors the British and American services were busy plotting the demise of the USSR. Thus, in 1988 two books were published practically simultaneously, authored by Jacques Rupnik, a Czech, and a Ukrainian-American historian, Orest Subtelny. 

Rupnik's book, The Other Europe, was aiming to sell in the West the necessity of doing away with the Iron Curtain, and the acceptance of Soviet satellite countries from Central and Eastern Europe as full members in the European family of nations.

Subtelny's book, Ukraine: A History, was published in an effort to offer Ukrainians - who never had a history separate from that of the Russian or Soviet states - a history of their own. The objective was clearly geopolitical.The book was aimed squarely at Moscow's leadership over the Ukrainian territory.

For British and American intelligence officials, Ukraine was considered "the linchpin of the Soviet Union", which would collapse without it. This is the reason why Subtelny's history book was the main propaganda tool in these efforts, although from a scientific point of view its value is highly questionable. Indeed, no other nation in Europe was born only on the basis of two disparate events, a brief independence spell in 1919 and the Stalin-engineered Holodomor (the famine that affected Ukraine between 1932-1933). The book was nevertheless hailed as the best history of Ukraine and was published in Ukrainian as early as 1990, before the country declared independence from the USSR (August 24, 1991).

For the neutral historian, the difficulty of presenting Ukrainian history as separate from that of Russia is simply enormous. For centuries, Ukraine was part of the Russian state and later of the Soviet Union. Ukrainians were not in any way disadvantaged by their association with the Russian state, on the contrary. Quite a few Ukrainians achieved positions of great responsibility within Russia and subsequently in the Soviet Union, one of their own, Nikita Khrushchev, becoming head of state. A history like Subtelny's, therefore, could only artificially claim that Ukrainians developed a separate national consciousness and that they would be better off founding a state of their own, to be integrated within the West. 

And herein lies the key as to why Subtelny's book was commissioned, written and aggressively promoted in the first place. The 130 million inhabitants of Central and Eastern European countries, former Soviet satellites, had become attractive enough for Western economic interests, but the addition of another 44 million Ukrainians and a very large territory would be even better. At any rate, for those involved in the planning, if this artificial nationhood were to take off, and it would then lead to the dissolution of the USSR, so much the better.

In later years, Subtelny himself became very unhappy with the nation-building efforts his history book helped ignite in Ukraine. He died in 2016, disillusioned with the way things turned out in the end. His is a cautionary tale for all other historians eager for recognition who agree to participate in secret service-sponsored nation-building efforts in foreign lands, allowing for their considerable skill and scholarship to be misused in this way.