«The whole system needs to be sifted by young people.» Bohdan Shumylovych about the Soviet heritage in Ukraine

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In a country that fights for identity, for culture, it is strange to see that some lack understanding of what they are fighting for, – Bohdan Shumylovych.

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Should Ukrainians choose between New Year and Christmas; why do we need to study the Russians and not cancel them; what made Galicians strange to Greater Ukraine; why are traditions almost impossible to restore from scratch; how and with whom to replace Ded Moroz (the Soviet Santa), and why should young people take up this task? Lviv Now spoke with Bohdan Shumylovych – historian, associate professor of the Department of Cultural Studies of the Ukrainian Catholic University, and employee of the Center for Urban History.

Before the war, President Zelenskyi was saying that we also were a bit of the Soviet Union and could claim this heritage. It was explained that a lot of good things were there, so why should we give it up?

My family, deeply Galician, had almost no chance of getting a place in Lviv. Before the Second World War, this city did not belong to us, though there were such towns as Snyatyn, Drohobych, Staryi Sambir, or Boryslav, where Ukrainians dominated. They had a Polish-Jewish-Ukrainian composition that coexisted in various forms. For the majority of Galician Ukrainians, Lviv was the capital, our ancestors dreamed that it would be our city. And it became ours thanks to the Soviet government. My grandfather and grandmother were expelled from their territories of residence and were not allowed to settle here. But my parents were the first in the family to get higher education at a university that was formally Soviet, but also Ukrainian. They studied Ukrainian, were taught various disciplines, but surprisingly, they were able to get a certain social lift.

Levandivka, all of Sykhiv district, whole quarters in Lviv were built by Soviet Ukraine, and it cannot be thrown away. We demonize the Soviet Union and forget that there was a Soviet Ukraine in it. A little different, but still a part of it.

Photos from the magazine «Architecture and Construction of the USSR» of the late 1980s and early 1990s

But we also have a city center almost entirely built by Austrians.

Lviv as a city had the greatest urban development, a revolution in the last third of the XIX century, when it received a certain form of autonomy, until the First World War. Then a construction boom took place, everything was built within the borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but the active agents in this development were quite different groups and peoples. Poles were the most active element in the city. It is always difficult for us to admit this. The ancestors of my family considered the Poles enemies, and now, according to the latest statistics, Ukrainians consider them the most fraternal and close people. History is changeable and cunning, it moves: what was bad can become good and vice versa.

We like to think that there is cause and effect. Stalin and a group of schizoid Western rulers decided that this part would become part of the Great Empire. They had no intention of rewarding Ukrainians. But we must not forget that Ukrainians are a very active and strong component of that schizoid group, and of the Union itself. It will look strange if we say: the empire came and gave us Lviv. No, our ancestors, belonging to the structure of the Soviet Union, «bit it off».

I don’t think that in 1945-1946, they planned to make a Ukrainian Piedmont here [in Lviv]. Our previous guest, Stepan Davymuka, said that when he entered the university, he discovered a network of teachers who spoke freely among themselves on any topic, sang songs, passed banned books, and quoted Bandera...

...and all this was well infiltrated by agents, KGBists, informants. Their tactics were different. For example, in 1955, it was decided that a large television studio would be here, and it would cover the entire Western region of Soviet Ukraine. 

Read also: «We were first among the Soviet countries to dismantle the monument to Lenin»

It was supposed to be a big new institution that needed specific personnel who knew how to shoot videos. They were brought from different territories. And those who created content, too. Those who knew how to do it already worked in the theater, university, and even the television paid little money. Thus, in the 1960s, people who were until recently imprisoned for Ukrainian nationalism in camps and returned during the «Thaw» [the period of Khrushchew’s rule during 1956-1963], appeared on television. Can you imagine it? In the Soviet system, full control of the party... However, this control was never complete, they wanted it but didn’t have it. Many institutions had a huge number of holes to crawl through. All of a sudden, in the 60s, there came those who started making Ukrainian-language musicals and programs about our folk songs. And Lviv turned out to be a «stronghold of nationalism.» The «Center» noticed this, commissions and investigations began, and they were dispersed, beaten, and punished a little. But this is a constant story: such groups appeared in various organizations, and even the most «believing» communists could not help themselves with this.

But in the 1990s, a generation of young Ukrainians and Galicians did not know Christmas carols. There was a thirst for revival, but it was done from scratch, because it was banned in the Soviet times. Is it necessary and possible to extend these traditions to larger areas? Does Galician missionaryism still have to exist?

This is a difficult question. I am from the small town of Yavoriv in the Lviv region. The «Iron Division» was stationed there all my childhood, so it was full of Soviet military personnel. My mother worked in the military trade, and father – in the chemical industry in Novoyavorivsk. We performed nativity scenes throughout the 1980s, though there was a formal ban. The teacher reported to the school that we went to church on Easter, parents were called, mother apologized, and we went on.

What I’m leading to: It’s impossible to imagine that you’d revive nativity scenes so easily if the practice didn’t exist in some form. Not as mainstream, but as grandma and grandpa’s memory. It was quite different in Lviv, it was monitored carefully, the police could detain you, as we know from the history of the «Tovarystvo Leva» (Lion Society). But even then, people started trying to restore it. Some searched it themselves and found from scratch, some, mainly from small towns, went to their grandmothers in the villages for Christmas. It was not officially celebrated, and in Soviet documents, it was written: Christian sectarians are celebrating some Christ there, it is necessary to carry out explanatory work. It was carried out, and it did not result in anything. Formally, they had a lot of power, forbade and closed churches, but if the practice does not exist latently, it will not be revived anywhere. Now, in carollings, there is a constructed history, and there is a remembered one. Every feast in my family ended with the mass singing of Ukrainian songs. And that was quite normal. But we never sang anything Soviet.

Is this what makes you Ukrainian?

I would say – a Galician. It is difficult for me to say whether we can generalize this practice of Galicians for the whole of Ukraine. When you get to other regions, people tell you: «No, we knew one carol and didn’t practice it at all.»

Is there such a narrow ethnic understanding of Ukrainianness? Left criticism of cultural expansion is based on the fact that there is resentment and an ethnic view of Ukrainianness.

It was like that somewhere in the Union. In Soviet times, our [Galician] area was usually «framed» as a little bit strange. They didn’t know much about us, even in Soviet Ukraine. From the perspective of Kyiv, we were called «Zapadnaya» [Western]. This broad concept can stretch from Volhyn to Zakarpattya regions, though we understand very well that there are very different codes, symbols, and carols. They look at us as something strange, and we are so folklore and ethnographic to them. There were stereotypes that this is the land of technical college graduates, there is no good education here, we do not know how to construct rockets, we are not technologically advanced. There were a lot of those stereotypes for Great Ukraine, and the same television influenced it, constantly talking about folk traditions that stand out against the background of all of Ukraine. The same Hutsul, Boyky costumes, mountains. It gave the image: «Oh, everything is real Ukrainian there.» And they came from Kyiv to see the real thing, because they already live a modern life like modern Soviet people, and we are still a little behind. We were to some extent a reservoir for them.

But it was watched by the special services, the KGBists. If suddenly a local intellectual decided to go to Kryvyi Rih for Christmas, they followed him and asked: «Why did you come here?» If you came from Donetsk, fine, but if you came from Lviv... Love for traditions was considered dangerous, a bunch of agents tried to track it down, hit you on the hands, scare you, and force you not to do it. Remember the story of the Kalynets family who were charged in the courts for going to the mountains to collect antiquities. This is wildness.

I don’t think those people in the KGB were that stupid. They clearly understood the danger of tradition.

Of course. But the Soviet Union could not ban the people. We are now transferring to Putin what did not exist in the Soviet Union. Putin is the Russian empire, what he articulates is sick, it’s hard to understand without a psychologist... We’re talking about the Kremlin leadership that brought it down. But everyone accepts it, because they do not really understand what is happening outside this empire. They constructed the opinion that the Soviet Union was somewhat mistaken, but correct in its imperial position. Why do they glorify Stalin? Because he is an emperor, he annexed new territories, he is strong, and people feared him. Such a story suits them.

What Putin is articulating now is not Soviet, because in Soviet times, no one forbade Ukrainianness – doing this was even dangerous. But it was relegated to the niche of dancing khokhols [derogatory name Russians use toward Ukrainians] and folklore. If you wanted to be modern, fashionable, and urban, you had to become Russian-speaking, universal, Soviet, not necessarily Russian. For my dissertation, I interviewed people from small towns in Galicia, and they said: «You could be Ukrainian-speaking, if you didn’t aspire to something more, you would live your life calmly. You would go to some processing plant, you would come home, you would sing some songs, no one would touch you. If you want to pursue an all-Ukrainian or all-Soviet career, then the Russian language is a must.» From my childhood, I remember many of our people from the Prykarpattia area, from the village, who give up the Ukrainian language voluntarily, send their children to Russian schools, want their children to make a career in Soviet times and do not really see a future in the Ukrainian project. There was such a conscious policy of suppressing everything national, and it was effective in many regions. Already in the 1970s, young people there did not understand why they needed the Ukrainian language, did not study it, refused, and did not use it. What to say about traditions. Why celebrate Christmas in Dnipropetrovsk [the name of today’s city of Dnipro, which was officially used before 2015 de-communization in Ukraine]? It was just pointless. Historians still debate why the Soviet project unfolded differently here, even though it had the same characteristics. It’s interesting to explore.

We have the wrong approach – to cancel everything. It’s not fashionable, but I think that our universities should have Russian studies, because we have to study the enemy. We think we know him, but in reality, it is not so. We only more or less understand, feel him. The famous professor Serhii Plokhy says that you need to understand how everything happened, otherwise you will never know it. It’s the same as saying, «Let’s not study Nazism, the Third Reich.»

Read also: «On the battlefield, we destroyed Russia’s narrative that Ukraine doesn’t exist as a state,» – Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy

We used to compare them with orcs. But in Russia, the literature about orcs is popular. They note their high spirituality and beauty, which is not understood by others.

We cannot even comprehend this, because Ukrainians think that striving for freedom and fighting for it, for dignity, is a universal trait. While considering why Russians cannot rebel, we do not fully realize the way they think, and it’s very important to understand it in order to understand the enemy. They are killing us, and we have to understand how they think. We believe that they will break down and won’t join the army. But they will go, all to the last, they will fight until everyone dies. They will not break just like that, their history shows that they are ready to die for the tsar, and they do not need dignity, this is a very macabre idea for them. To transfer our notions of freedom to them is universalization. But the tradition of the anarchic approach, that I «have» everything somewhere, the state and the tax system, is a very Ukrainian trait, common to all Ukrainians, regardless of whether you are Russian-speaking or Ukrainian-speaking. And this is a certain advantage because when we fight, we can do it more efficiently through autonomous solutions. But it is hard for me to imagine that the Ukrainians go to Bakhmut like the Russians: they climb endlessly, like those orcs.

They must be studied. Now, it goes on in Europe and America, not here. You must constantly study the enemy, you cannot underestimate him. We are all waiting for victory, but it seems that this is all for a long time. As Vakhtang Kebuladze said recently, it is better to speak in a procedural outline: not «we will win», but «we are winning». This is a long sequence, because there will probably be a different victory than in the Second World War, where they came and took Berlin. I doubt that will happen. Ukrainians are winning – this is a better model, it means that we have to «wear our shoes» for a long time, because this struggle will not stop next year, even if they and we are exhausted. We must be prepared for a very long «race», our interest is to change the political class in this empire, and it is not so easy.

Putin recently called a girl from the Zaporizhzhia region by phone. They talked about what Ded Moroz [the Soviet version of Santa Claus] should give her as a gift, which connects us on both a childish and deep level. Is it important to place accents here?

It is important and possible if someone believes very fanatically. This should be a state policy, because from Sambir or Stryi, we will not make the liberated Melitopol the way we imagine. This should be a big gesture of change, there are many conditions for it to become possible.

Look at the 1930s and the Jewish people in Europe, the 1960s and the Jewish people in Israel. In the 1960s, the Jewish people were a «biting lion» who understood that there was no way out, and created a super-efficient, albeit problematic, country of their own. It did not have a state language, literature in school, or university – they did it all, worked actively and hard on it and are still continuing.

If there is at least a small group of visionaries who are ready to go to the end, then it is possible. Between the period when the Jews were supposed to disappear from the planet and the period where they have a state, as much time has passed as from the collapse of the Soviet Union to today. Where are we, and where are they! There is much to learn here about assertiveness and the desire to act.

Will the Ukrainians be able to do it? They will probably be, it’s always a question of desire. I can’t imagine what Kharkiv will be like in twenty years, but I really hope that it will be a city of warriors, education, a fortress that will set the tone. Or maybe everything will be different, suddenly it might become Ukrainian-speaking. Odesa, which had said it would always be an imperial city, took away Suvorov, Empress Catherine II, and I think that in twenty years it may become a completely different city, because it made a choice not in favor of the empire. Melitopol and Mariupol made the same choice. Then there is the question of bayonets, the power of persuasion, and the need to be able to fight back. Unfortunately, the political elite in Ukraine did very little to create such an army, a system that the Russians would be afraid to enter.

Dismantling of the monument to Catherine II in Odesa / Photo: UNIAN

If we had a solid identity, they would not have crawled here. They won’t crawl into Poland. In Putin’s text, it was stated that they do not even plan to occupy western Ukraine, we are strangers to them. Our assertive attitude sounds like «don’t move, because I will bite you, we are not you». This was not the case in other regions, so they became hostages in that situation. Their symbols must be cleaned. The Pushkins are thrown out even during the war, it will be a painful process, but it is necessary to purge them until they understand that they are not and won’t be wanted here, that any attempt to enter here will end in the cutting off of arms and legs, because we are not going to negotiate. And when they understand this, then we will have peace and tranquillity.

We cannot leave Pushkin, have a Conservatory named after Tchaikovsky in our capital, which says to itself: «There is a war, but it doesn’t matter for us.» No, this is the wrong approach, they should all be kicked out of that conservatory, or maybe even closed and reopened, if there are such idiots who do not understand what is happening in the country, and for them «The Nutcracker» [ballet of Tshaikovsky] is more important than those raped and killed in Bucha. Why do we need such a cultural institution? We need those who understand where we are going and what we are doing. This is not about renaming and not about Tchaikovsky – it is about a gesture of liberation from what marks me as theirs. We must clearly understand that Tchaikovsky is an enemy for us, just like all the others who may be super-class writers, poets, composers, but are enemies as long as the stigma of «we are brothers» is imposed on us and they want to take us over.

I was in Israel, in the family of Vadym, whose parents are Ukrainized Jews who fled from Kyiv because the KGBists told them that the Union would collapse and the Ukrainians would kill them. Vadym had little chance of becoming a properly integrated Jew, even if he had wanted to. He says that the main tool of his transformation from a Soviet man into a modern Jew was the story of the Holocaust: if you do not protect yourself, no one will, even the army. In the army, they were kicked by feet for speaking the Russian language. You go there and leave as a Jew, this is the main state-building institution. Both men and women go through the army there. It has many disadvantages, it is the militarization of society, nothing pleasant... After Israel, I came to my native Galicia and said: «My God, we live in such a beautiful country!» Because we lived in a town from which going to Jerusalem took the same time as from Novoyavorivsk to Lviv. It was necessary to drive on two autobahns, one of which runs through areas where you can be killed. It’s scary, but they live, build, and fight.

I think that now, you and I are entering into two such plots. Because the stories about the Cossacks are already very far away. And we have a history «here and now», it is much more important than the struggle for Yaroslav the Wise. Although the Muscovites really want him, and we join this struggle, but in general, it’s like dividing the Roman Empire between the Germans and the Italians.

We have more important challenges – Ukrainianization through the army and an attempt to build a system in which dignity, will, and strength will be the main characteristics. If this can be done, then it will be a frontier country that will look to the future, will bite off this future. Then we will succeed. If we slip back into some kind of resentment, regret, the past, «Oh, Ded Moroz»... What kind of conversations can there be? There are no Ded Moroz’s. But this does not mean that you can replace the New Year with Christmas. So why did the communists come up with that Ded Moroz? Because they couldn’t help themselves with religious holidays, that’s why they invented new ones. And so is here: you have to come up with something new, in parallel. Poland and Italy are super conservative countries, but they celebrate the New Year, and there is no conflict between them.

Which Ded Moroz?! All this is thrown away and some new construction is built. So Poroshenko managed to make this big, strong gesture – tomos, to legalize the Ukrainian Church. It is important to get rid of the Moscow Church, legalize and make the Ukrainian Church strong. Now, the presidents speak on the background of Sofia Church in Kyiv. These are symbolic gestures. On the side – Khmelnytskyi, whose monument was erected by fans of Moscow, the imperialists. But, you see, the monument could be «twisted», and now it works for us. Likewise with the New Year.

But if we change the calendar, the Malanka holiday will coincide with the New Year. Here is the way out.

Absolutely, and it’s very simple. The communists «stole» Ded Moroz from Coca-Cola, which invented him from scratch. The bearded little man in the red suit is not Santa, but something like pure marketing. He will save the situation here too, you just need to come up with some new plot. It doesn’t have to be military, it has to be «light». Enough of a group of people sitting at the state level, inventing a new ritual and having fun. But we see how armless and crooked our Minister of Culture is with these fabrications and the rebranding they arrange. It just doesn’t go anywhere, there has to be something wiser. And currently, the most creative institute in Ukraine is ZSU (The Armed Forces of Ukraine). This is the most creative institution that everyone trusts, because the Presidential Office cannot be trusted, the decisions that come from there, except for those that do not contradict the needs of defence, are often abnormal. We do not trust the Parliament. It’s hard to imagine where those who come up with it will start. But it is like in chess: a party does not add up a little, but surely it will be possible to compose it in such a way that it will be composed.

Perhaps the problem of this minister and creators is that they are too firmly rooted in the Soviet system. So it is difficult for them to give birth to something, there is no other ground from which to draw it.

That’s why I always say that we need young people. The whole system needs to be sifted by young people who simply do not know what it is, have not watched the Soviet films and have not eaten Olivier salad. They must be caught, lured to this country, because, unfortunately, we are losing a huge number of young and progressive people who, due to the war and other factors, will not return if they get an education there. Many were given the opportunity to get a fashion education in Cambridge, Oxford, in Italy – everyone was given the opportunity to enter. I say that I am not accepted for a scholarship, but everyone to whom I wrote a recommendation was accepted somewhere. And it will not be easy for them to return, because they will want to make a career in normal conditions, and here they will have to work hard. But you have to look for it, because if you catch young people, then immediately take the leadership, even if they are not completely competent, their incompetence will not be worse than Tkachenko’s. Here you take a 25-year-old male or even better a 25-year-old woman. I would put them in all the top positions. Their main test should be: «What’s about Russian? It’s the end for them», and then let them have fun and try to do it. This is their country, it is for them, not for Tkachenko and Zelenskyi, it is all old rubbish. Anyone cannot manage nuclear energy... We understand that if it were hipsters with coffee, no one would restore our energy after such strikes. These are holy people who save the country by gluing these wires together. There is expertise, and that is very important. But those ministries dealing with humanitarian issues should be filled with young people, and there is already a normal rule of rotation. But no aunts with «babettes» [haircuts from the Soviet films], terrible Soviet leaders, whose faces I recognize. No matter how they talk about carols – these are scary people, they are «plastic», although they also have to be put somewhere.

Andrii Saichuk spoke 

Text: Marichka Ilyina, translated by Vitalii Holich

Photo: Tvoe Misto/ Ivan Stanislavskyi

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