Archeologists Imagine Ukraine: Social Scientists and Nation Building in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Russia’s brutal invasion in February 2022 revitalized considerations about how Ukraine can contribute to historiographical issues related to the origins of nation-statehood. This essay contributes to that discussion by returning to the 19th century and exploring how the participants in multiple archeological congresses, nascent social scientists confident in the empirical objectivity of their evidence, envisioned Ukraine. Borrowing from Benedict Anderson’s commonplace about a nation as an “imagined community,” I highlight the contestation between nationalist and imperialist discourses in the emergent social sciences. Although the Versailles Peace Conference, which denied Ukraine the opportunity to “self-determine” as a modern political entity, revealed the limits of the Western political imagination in 1919, many of the ideas presented at these congresses continue to inform the cultural and geographical borders of Ukraine.

Writing in the first years of Ukraine's transition from Soviet republic to nation-statehood, Mark von Hagen argued that because of its centuries of frequently shifting borders and the claims made on it by competing empires, the country provided “a veritable laboratory for viewing several processes of state and nation building and for comparative history generally.”¹ Following the political crises of 2014 that resulted in the secessionist movement in the Donbas and the Russian annexation of Crimea, Tomasz Hen-Konarski characterized Ukraine's position as “liminal,” now “especially well-suited to serve as a testing ground for some received wisdoms about European nation building in general.”² Both authors understood the political implications encountered if Ukraine's historiography were to be essentialized according to “methodological nationalism,” which holds that the nation-state “is the natural social and political form of the modern world.”³ Justifying his invasion in February 2022, Vladimir Putin conjectured that “modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik, Communist Russia,” stretching credulity by insisting that Lenin “actually shoved” the Donbas into Ukraine.⁴

At the heart of this theorizing lies the ideology of nationalism, which although itself lies open to multiple interpretations, nonetheless supplies the bedrock for modern state-building.⁵ Benedict Anderson's by now commonplace that nations come about when people systematically begin to “imagine” themselves as communities of shared values and traditions offers an intuitively satisfying explanation of the drive for groups to self-determine their sovereignty.⁶ His evocative adverb “imagined” has particular resonance because it imparts creative agency to those who built nation-states out of crumbling empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, inventing in the process new traditions that facilitated political cohesion.⁷ As Frederick Cooper observed, the “most durable achievement” of Anderson's book is “the prominence he gave to the concept of political imagination.”⁸ My purpose in this essay is to discuss how imperial Russia's archeologists, members of an emergent discipline that, although lacking academic boundaries in the nineteenth century, experimented in the “laboratory” of building Ukraine into a nation.

Archeology has much to offer as a medium for exploring how it became possible to imagine national identities. Its practitioners, who considered themselves to be scientists, made a conscious commitment to repressing their subjective sentiments in order to produce results that could be accepted as “real,” that is, without either personal or philosophical prejudice.⁹ Their practices contributed to how archeologists grew their confidence that they could speak an unvarnished truth, as they excavated objects, authenticated and archived primary sources, and kept scrupulous notebooks of precise details that did not wander off into fanciful descriptions. Archeology also stimulated the establishment of science-oriented museums, which put the material past on display. My point here is hardly to validate the archeologists’ misplaced self-assurances, but rather to highlight the point of view from which they presented their data because this is the perspective from which they negotiated the leap between science and sovereignty. That they implicitly agreed that taking an empirical approach grounded them in objectivity proved pivotal to their professional relationships, fostering as it did a sharing of principles that kept them working together despite differential shifts in focus. Archeology, of course, can work equally effectively as a medium of imperialism.

“Ukraine” gave Russia's archeologists a plethora of places from which to mine scientific intelligence. First mentioned in the Hypatian Chronicle in 1187, it nonetheless lacked bordered territorial specificity. Its heart lay in Kyiv, sitting on the right bank of the Dnipro River, the riparian life blood of Ukraine. According to later Chronicles, the city itself provided what would become a center of controversy about its relationship to Great Russia, first as the capital from 882 of the state reputedly founded by Varangians upon the invitation of local Slavs, and then as site from which Rus΄ was baptized into Orthodoxy in 988. Following the Mongol conquest in 1240, much of the region had subsequently disappeared into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and became Malorossiia, “Little Russia,” in 1335 when Boleslaus George II of Lithuania signed himself “Lord of Russia Minor.”¹⁰ When in 1569 Lithuania joined Poland in the Rzeczpospolita, or Commonwealth, the Catholic Polish element intensified its presence to the right of the Dnipro's banks and brought with it an expanded Jewish population. This territory also boasted Cossack hetmanates, those military communities of mixed Slavic and Turkic ethnicities that were romanticized for their preference for rudimentary democracy over statecraft. Waves of pospolitye, or Orthodox agriculturalists fleeing the Commonwealth, began settling into the northeastern “Slobidska Ukraine,” a name that evokes both “settlements” and “borderlands,” that is, the border along the Great Russian Muscovite state that began annexing and colonizing these settlements in the seventeenth century. Catherine the Great's partitions of Poland and the annexations of southern “New Russia” and the Crimean Peninsula at the end of the eighteenth century fulfilled her predecessor Peter's proclamation of “empire,” and the southwestern territory with its multiples histories and cultures set up the “veritable laboratory” from which to forge an identity in the imperial context.

“Empire” never enjoyed the luxury of being uncontested terrain, however, and the Napoleonic wars ushered in notions of nationalism nurtured by romanticism. Even though Ukraine had identifiable cultural specificities, especially language, its territory and history had been appropriated by those powers with whom its fate had been intertwined. As Andriy Zayarnyuk and Ostap Sereda argue, Ukraine was born of the European Enlightenment and developed into a modern nation-state from “an idea, both the product of and a response to the transformation of modernity . . . that was developed to make sense of the land and its people.”¹¹ The backgrounds of the three public intellectuals who met in Kyiv and exercised the greatest influence in the first stages of cultural identity formation epitomized the collective: Taras Shevchenko was born on the Right Bank, Panteleimon Kulish hailed from the Hetmanate, and Mykola Kostomarov, Slobidska Ukraine. Founding members of the short-lived secret society Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood in 1846, they exposed the potential danger of “the idea” to empire, while in the process endowing it with substance for future generations.

The archeologists who populate this essay drew both inspirations and lessons from the Brotherhood. Although they themselves did not adhere fast and hard to the terminology that I use here, for purposes of convenience I am dividing these men and women into two camps: Ukrainophiles, or those who envisioned an independent nation, and Little Russians, those who considered these lands a constituent part of the Russian empire.¹² Despite apparent differences, I emphasize their collective persona and am by no means positioning them as binary opposites. They personify the “scholarly interest” in Miloslav Hroch's first phase in the development of national movements, that is, the intellectuals who researched the culture, language, history, and ethnography that laid the initial groundwork for a national sense of self.¹³ More than that, however: these archeologists were social scientists who both shaped and were shaped by the conception that nation-statehood was an indicator of modernity, the core of methodological nationalism. Although some spoke in the language of “race science,” neither camp can be essentialized as ethno-nationalist. Two of the leading members of the Ukrainophile faction, for example, declared themselves Ukrainians by personal choice. Moreover, “independent” Ukraine could also be considered as part of a federalist structure, a reimagining of empire rather than a demand for sovereignty. The Little Russians included ethnic Ukrainians who considered themselves not merely as subjects of the Russian empire, but among the most influential builders of it, co-ethnics and co-confessionals.¹⁴ Regardless, ethno-nationalism never embraced the entirety of Ukrainian identity.¹⁵ As late nineteenth-century social scientists, they experienced in common the modernization underway, underscored by the political challenges to both autocracy and imperialism, internal as well as external.

Archeology, Empire, and Nation

Archeology in Ukraine, as elsewhere, grew out of antiquarian fascination with ancient artifacts, which could then be assimilated into historical narratives. Oleksiy Tolochko has artfully demonstrated how in the eighteenth century drawing a topographical map of early Kyiv was “the result of reclaiming a lost history . . . the process [of which] was as much a creation of the past as it was a reconstruction of it.”¹⁶ This Kyiv, however, had been reconstructed to locate its place as the point of origin of Orthodoxy, which gave it overtones of empire. Serhiy Bilenky has pointed out that Kyiv's “‘rediscovery’ involved the complex politics of memory fueled by increasing competition among Ukrainians, Russians, and Poles for the appropriation of Kyiv's past and, no less important, its present.”¹⁷ In the first decades of the nineteenth century several antiquarians, on the brink of professionalizing into archeologists, began excavations around Kyiv, including Kondratii Lokhvits΄kii, best known for his discoveries of the Church of the Tithes and the Golden Gates;¹⁸ Evgenii Bolkhovitinov, metropolitan of the Kyiv and Galicia episcopates; and Mykhailo Maksymovych, rector of Kyiv's St. Vladimir University, newly founded to counter Polish intellectual influence following the 1830 rebellion. In 1835, Minister of Education Sergei Uvarov approved the formation of the Temporary Committee for the Investigation of Antiquities and a university museum to house the artifacts, which laid the foundation for preservation, restoration, and display.¹⁹

In search of material evidence of past imperial greatness, Tsar Alexander II chartered an official Imperial Archeological Commission (IAK) in 1859, designed to “the search for objects of antiquity, predominantly relating to the history of the fatherland and the lives of the peoples who at one time lived in the space currently occupied by Russia.”²⁰ Thus the IAK intentionally made archeology an instrument of imperialism. To counterbalance the official IAK, Sergei Uvarov's son Alexei, the “father of archeology,” with his wife Praskovia organized the Imperial Moscow Archeological Society (IMAO) in 1864. All the learned societies devoted to antiquities required official government approval of their charters, which made Russian archeology a fusion of the personal and political, given that it required the combination of individual desire and official accreditation. The Uvarovs insisted from the outset that “the Moscow Society will conduct its meetings publicly,” pledging to hold congresses throughout the empire.²¹ Keeping that promise, the fifteen archaeological congresses that met every three years from 1869 were the singular sustained academic and/or professional conferences held in tsarist Russia. The participants in these congresses, the main protagonists of this essay, reflected the state of the field: they included university professors from multiple fields, engaged amateurs, provincial schoolteachers, wives working alongside their husbands, Orthodox clergy, and occasionally professionals invited from other countries.

How can such a motley and diverse crowd be deemed “social scientists”? Significantly, these congresses depended upon the patina of objectivity to legitimize the profession, principles to which they adhered. Clergy, for example, had a distinctive role as archeologists collecting antique religious artifacts, but presented them through descriptive detail rather than theological interpretations. When a museum in Kraków, in Catholic Austrian Poland, refused to send artifacts that Uvarova had requested for an exhibit that highlighted Orthodoxy, she ably parried that “they did share the ideals of the IMAO,” that is, “the striving for serious, purely scientific (ital. hers) study of the antiquities of the region.”²²

Protestations of neutrality aside, the imperial imaginary infused the selection of cities in which to convene, and the six congresses that were held in Ukraine bespoke the relevance of the region. In fact the Uvarovs’ personal backgrounds integrated them into the lands: he was the great grandson of Kirill Razumovskii, the last hetman of the Zaporizhian Cossack Host; she was the granddaughter of a Polish officer and had grown up on the family estate in Kharkiv Province.²³ Acquainted personally with the two Romanovs who most severely personified the Russification of the empire, Tsar Alexander III and his younger brother Sergei, the Uvarovs and their IMAO self-consciously enriched the relationship between archeology and imperialism. As was reinforced to the delegates at the 7^th Archeological Congress in 1887:

Russian archeology studies the ancient monuments left by the peoples who first formed Rus΄ and then the Russian state. It follows the traces of all people who at some time lived on this territory, beginning with the long-ago biblical tale of Noah landing his ark on the summit of Mount Ararat to the nearest times, when the tsar-carpenter built his fortress in the Finnish swamps on the coast of the Baltic Sea.²⁴

If the organizers took empire for granted, nevertheless the congresses themselves initiated genuine forums to air conflicting visions of the past. After assembling the first congress in Moscow, the “first-throned capital,” the second moved logically to St. Petersburg. This made obvious the site for the third, Kyiv, the first capital of Rus΄ and “the cradle of the holy faith of our fathers, and the first witness to their civil independence.”²⁵ This one proved “the most successful of all.”²⁶ It was indeed the first one at which the presentations sparked discord, the various positions each claiming scientific neutrality. A newly added section on “Ethnography and Geography of Russia and the Slavic Lands” at first blush suggests a spotlight on ethno-imperialism, but in fact it reflected the rise of the social sciences that were encouraging new modes of analysis and representation. This section threw open the door and in walked Ukraine.

One objective of all the congresses was to showcase antiquities of the region in which they were held. The list of presenters in Kyiv in 1874 named a “who's who” of Ukrainophile activists, several of them members of the semi-clandestine Hromada (Community) society that promoted national consciousness. M. M. Levchenko, for example, had just published a foundational dictionary of Ukrainian. Two others would soon find themselves in political exile: M. P. Drahomanov, a folklorist and linguist of Cossack heritage would escape to Geneva, and Kh. K. Vovk would relocate to Paris. The most significant participant, though, was V. B. Antonovich, a prehistorical archeologist and historian who would become a fixture at these congresses and who collaborated regularly with the Uvarovs.²⁷ Polish and Catholic at birth, he broke openly with his compatriots in 1861 and declared himself Ukrainian by choice in “My Confession.”²⁸ Sympathizing with the ethnic Ukrainian peasant masses who toiled under Polish nobles, Antonovich infused populism into identity formation. I. A. Linnichenko, former student of his who became a colleague, though not a Ukrainophile, drew attention to Antonovich's personal costs: he had rejected his religion, his nationality, and even his social class.²⁹ Hen-Konarski has suggested that Antonovich's confession could present an innovative “point of departure” for a non-ethno-national history of Ukraine because “its main narrative did not necessarily treat national issues as the most important criteria of political alignment.”³⁰ (Figure 1)

Figure 1. Volodymyr Bonifatiiovich Antonovich (p. 10)

Source: Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine, Kyiv. F. 832, d. 112

Sponsored by the southwestern filial of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society (IRGO), Antonovich had prepared a “collection of materials for the historical topography of Kyiv and its environs,”³¹ the first of the archeological mappings for which he became renowned. But it was the folk tales that he had gathered with Drahomanov that set off the storm. Russian folklorist O. F. Miller superciliously devalued their compilation for its “misplaced pride, as one would have for a son or a godson”;³² the “godson” snipe was a pointed reference to Antonovich's confession. Miller's own paper contrasted Great Russian byliny, epic poems, with Little Russian dumy, poetries associated with Cossacks. Apologizing patronizingly for his faulty pronunciation of Little Russian words, Miller took great pains to detail how the two were ultimately two branches of the same tree, “and the name of this tree is the holy Russian land, our common sovereign mother.”³³ He emphasized the themes of love for the land and for freedom that characterized both, conceding to “our Little Russian brothers” their due by noting their contributions to “general Russian culture.” Miller's talk prompted immediate objections from another Ukrainophile present, P. I. Zhitetskii, who charged Miller with subjectivity in his methodology.³⁴ Drahomanov doubled down in a presentation on Little Russian songs about incest, insistent that his scientific objectivity had proven distinctions between Little and Great Russian traditions.³⁵

Ethnographer Vovk used the occasion to take umbrage with V. V. Stasov, one of the empire's most influential cultural critics, and whose recently published Russian Folk Ornamentation was sufficiently canonical to have been translated into French and English.³⁶ Deeming Stasov's analysis of Little Russian decorative arts “inadequate,” Vovk struck a decisive tone in specifying the design and color differences between Little and Great Russian folk art.³⁷ As he pointed out, greater use of red thread, more geometric patterns, and fewer images of either flora or fauna in the embroidery on clothing made Little Russian styles visibly different from their Great Russian counterparts. The distinctiveness of local culture could be heard when the bandurists, folk entertainers who played the stringed instruments unique to Ukraine, performed for the delegates.

The political notes echoing from the Congress reverberated swiftly. Alarmed by the overt Ukrainophilism, Alexander II issued his infamous Ems Ukaz in 1876, which ordered the closure of the southwestern filial of the IRGO and called for Drahomanov to be exiled as an “agitator.” The Ukaz pointedly reduced the Ukrainian language to a “dialect,” and took the extra step of forbidding most publications written in it. Ultimately, though, the congresses took advantage of the stipulation that “historical monuments, including oral traditions, such as songs and sayings” were permissible, although with the caveat that they be printed in “obshcherusskaia orthography,” which meant standardized Russian.³⁸ The caveat, though, was not enforced in the subsequent published Trudy (Proceedings). The Ukaz reminded of the autocracy's displeasure with Ukrainophilia and the tsar's punitive potential, but invoking “science” granted the congresses cover. Antonovich, for example, focused his finds in “South Russia,” depicting a territory with marked distinctions from that of the northeast, providing material evidence of its continuous past while not arguing specifically for political independence.³⁹ As his students recalled, it was his attention to the minutiae of the artifacts and their geographical context that endowed him with the expert credentials that essentially gave him a political pass.⁴⁰ Maintaining his professorship at St. Vladimir permitted him to extend his influence.

After Kyiv, the next two congresses, held in Kazan and Tiflis respectively, accentuated the heightened role of the congresses in asserting archeology as an instrument of imperialism. Holding the 6^th one in Odesa took the archeologists to New Russia, where a university had opened in 1865 from the former Richelieu Lyceum.⁴¹ This locale raised the issue of settler colonialism, that is, the process that normalizes the unceasing occupation of territory and exploitation of the natural resources by “settlers,” outsiders displacing the indigenous populations. It is noteworthy that Ukrainophiles and Little Russians alike were comfortable with colonization in Crimea and New Russia, and used this congress to show off their own “civilizing process.”⁴² Bessarabian G. I. Peretiatkovich defended Little Russians who had brought the refined agricultural skills that they had honed from colonizing Crimea into the Volga-Kama region, that is, Great Russian territory.⁴³ A. I. Markevich, in a piece on “Odessa in Popular Poetry,” pointed to Little Russians’ influence on the native Tatar culture as a result of their colonization of New Russia.⁴⁴

The next congress moved from the periphery back to the center of Great Russianness in Iaroslavl, “the purest Russian, Slavic region from time immemorial (iskonno).”⁴⁵ Tsar Alexander III, pushing his program of Russification, insisted on convening future congresses in the Baltic provinces. When Vilnius hosted the 9^th in 1893, Minister of Education I. D. Delianov mandated that “topics presented be exclusively those that research the origins of Russian life in the Northwest Region.”⁴⁶ However blunt these intentions, meeting in Vilnius meant including the archeology of the Rzeczpospolita that had absorbed a significant portion of Ukraine, which prompted possibilities for presenting on a history a Ukraine separated from Russia's. A new archeologist and one who shared Antonovich's Ukrainian populism, Olexandra Iefymenko, participated. Significantly, like Antonovich, she had made the political choice to identify as Ukrainian after having had met and married ethnic Ukrainian Petro Iefymenko when he was exiled to Arkhangelsk in 1870. She self-trained alongside him in ethnography before becoming one of the first historians of Ukraine when the couple was allowed to return.⁴⁷ In Vilnius she spoke on “kopnye courts,” a regional juridical system that had allowed locals in the area to mete out justice according to community norms, driving home the theme of greater personal independence enjoyed before the Russian conquest. From the corner opposite her came V. M. Ploshchanskii, who had been imprisoned briefly by Austrian authorities for his Russophilism. Born in Hapsburg L΄viv, but now a subject of the tsar, he spoke on the Kholmshchina, historically part of Galicia-Volhynia, which he countered had remained culturally Great Russian even after being absorbed into the Commonwealth.⁴⁸ Iefymenko made a next appearance at the 10^th Congress in Riga in 1896, on this occasion stressing the need to study early agricultural collectives, a source to highlight the destructiveness of serfdom imposed upon Ukraine by Catherine the Great late in the eighteenth century.⁴⁹ She was joined here by D. I. Bahalii of Kharkiv University, who had received the Uvarov Prize for his dissertation on the Muscovite colonization of Slobidska Ukraine in the seventeenth century.⁵⁰ Like Iefymenko, he emphasized the freer political situation under the Commonwealth than under Muscovy, when the Magdeburg Laws had endowed urban areas with relative autonomy.⁵¹

The imperial desire to convene the next congress in Warsaw met with immediate pushback, which resulted in the choice of Kyiv again to play host city.⁵² Uvarova rued the political undertones, the “external factors coloring this congress . . . as in Vilnius.” She sorted out four currents: “Ukrainians, heated up by the sermons of Mikhallo Hrushevs΄kyi; those on the Right Bank; those on the Left Bank; and Muscovites, that is, simple Russians.”⁵³ Hrushevs΄kyi, a former Antonovich student, was teaching Ukrainian history across the border in L΄viv, home to the Shevchenko Society and where Hapsburg authorities were significantly more tolerant of Ukrainian culture. Antonovich, chairing the local arrangements committee, had determined to bring attention to Volhynia, comprised of today's southeast Poland, southwest Belarus, and western Ukraine.⁵⁴ He produced an archeological map, where he and his common-law wife Katerina Mel΄nik had excavated a number of kurgans.⁵⁵ A major sticking point at the congress, however, was that although scholars from Galicia (Figure 2), the Austrian portion of what at been the Principality of Galicia–Volhynia, could attend, they would not be allowed to present in “Galician-Russian,” which meant Ukrainian.⁵⁶ This was especially galling because the Czech and Serbian scholars were authorized to speak in their native Slavic tongues.

Figure 2. Katerina Mel΄nik at the Beach

Source: Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine, Kyiv. F. 832, d. 112

The Kyiv congress also included several next-generation Ukrainophile archeologists. Bahalii student Elena Radakova presented on economic conditions in left-bank Ukraine in the eighteenth century.⁵⁷ Coincidentally, Radakova had also studied with Vovk in Paris, where the latter had added expertise in prehistorical archeology and anthropology, thus pioneering in paleoethnology.⁵⁸ In Kyiv, Radakova provided empirical details from the official revisions that examined how Malorossiia had declined in social and economic circumstances after being subsumed under Muscovy.⁵⁹ Another Antonovich protégé, V. I. Shcherbina, presented on both the last vestiges of Cossacks in right-bank Ukraine, as well as the removal of ethnic Ukrainian leaders (starostva) under Catherine.⁶⁰ The Cossacks, however, received paramount attention from D. I. Iavornits΄kii, yet another alumnus of Kharkiv University and one who had spent three years in exile in Central Asia for his Ukrainophilism in the 1890s. Now teaching history at Moscow University, he had set his path toward becoming the Zaporozhians’ most prolific historiographer.⁶¹

Bahalii finally achieved his ambition and brought the 12^th Congress to Kharkiv in 1902. He had compiled an archeological map, expertise that would later make him a consultant in drawing the borders of Soviet Ukraine.⁶² Ethnography again played an outsized role. Radakova helped to organize the impressive exhibition that showcased the peoples of Poltava and Ekaterinoslav provinces alongside those of Kharkiv. Tours were organized for local gymnasia students, and the exhibit proved so popular that police had to be called in to maintain order along the line of people trying to get in; more than 55,000 visitors toured the displays.⁶³ In a piece on “Little Russian Apparel,” B. S. Poznanskii traced colonization through the embroidered designs on men's clothing, shifting from the Little Russian patterns on the chest to the Great Russian preference for stitching along the sleeves of blouses.⁶⁴

(Figure 3)

Figure 3. Ethnographic Exhibit organized by Elena Radakova for the 12^th Archeological Congress (p. 18)

Source: Proceedings of the 12^th Archeological Congress in Kharkiv, vol. 1

Iefymenko returned to reconstruct social and cultural byt, or lifestyles, of those living in the historical territories that comprised Ukraine. In her first paper, she insisted on a reappraisal of the influence of Litovskaia Rus΄, the term she used to separate the Lithuanian part of Ukraine from both Russia and Poland. Looking at customs payments made by various social estates, she reiterated her refrain on the comparative freedoms the people had enjoyed before Muscovy intensified its colonization of the south.⁶⁵ She then tackled an issue raised at the 4^th congress, noting happily that the twenty-five years of subsequent research had allowed her to present on the hromady, the medieval Ukrainian collectives that had been precursors to artels and trade unions that had developed in southern, but not in northern Russia. Arguing that in the west these corporations had proved sufficiently powerful to challenge the state because of their function as intermediaries between government and commerce, she had no need to belabor conclusions with such potentially provocative implications.⁶⁶

The uniquely Ukrainian songs and instruments returned to the fore when folklorist N. F. Sumtsov of Kharkiv University pointed to the gradual disappearance of kobzary and lirniki. Wandering the streets playing for handouts from passers-by, by the late nineteenth century these musicians were primarily blind men, supporting themselves and their families by keeping alive a special source of regional identity and indigenous culture.⁶⁷ As Sumtsov publicized, however, many were being hounded by police for breaking the laws on beggary.⁶⁸ The Ukrainian professor persuaded Uvarova and the IMAO to appeal directly to Minister of Internal Affairs V. K. von Plehve for their protection, and when von Plehve's responded positively, folklorist A. N. Malinka compiled a directory of twenty-four names and addresses.⁶⁹

Revolution and Reaction: Ekaterinoslav and Chernihiv

Ekaterinoslav was the surprise choice for the next congress, an industrial center that lacked a university. Chairman of the Provincial Nobility M. I. Miklashevskii welcomed the delegates proudly because “this is the third time in a row that the archeological congress has taken place in the borders of Ukraine, so rich in historical memory.” For him, the ethnic variety of the population had blended into “a singular, great, and indivisible Russia.”⁷⁰ Uvarova credited Iavornits΄kii, “in love with the Cossacks,” as the driving force behind this congress.⁷¹ A second major impetus lay in the archeological collection of local industrialist-philanthropist A. N. Pohl΄, pioneer in the iron smelting in Kryvyi Rih that had industrialized Ekaterinoslav.⁷² An amateur archaeologist, Pohl΄ had contributed to previous congresses, and Iavornits΄kii was currently curating the museum Pohl΄ had built.

The decision made in 1902 to hold it in this industrial region had not anticipated the revolution already underway when the congress opened in mid-August 1905. However, tensions that had been building up around the empire well before 1905 also resonated in the IMAO. Uvarova had warned of the “enmity of the Ukrainophile party,” and thirty-five of the delegates petitioned the organizing committee to send a telegram to “scholars in Galicia and the Bukovina regretting their absence,” a none-too-subtle reference to the fact that they had been denied invitations to present their papers in “the Galician language.”⁷³ Not only Iefymenko signed, but also Iavornits΄kii.⁷⁴ Uvarova justified the decision on the basis of “the special circumstance of this year that rendered even the congress itself doubtful,” although according to rules worked out by the preliminary committee, scholars could present in any Slavic dialect, “including Galician.”⁷⁵ In a personal note to Sumtsov, Praskovia made clear her sentiments: “the scholars from Lvov distort and pervert their native language, just to conceal its kinship with Russian.”⁷⁶ Sumtsov excitedly began his own speech in Ukrainian.⁷⁷

Chairman of the Ekaterinoslav Provincial Zemstvo M. V. Rodzianko welcomed attendees by observing that barely ten days ago Tsar Nicholas II had issued a manifesto establishing a parliamentary chamber: “the Russian people has been summoned to new constructive work . . . legislation.” He connected this explicitly with the congress, exalting that “our closest ancestors—the glorious Zaporizhians, upon whose lives you, dear guests, are ordained to shed light” had demonstrated the same “powerful energy and civic courage for peaceful development.”⁷⁸ Iavornits΄kii had somewhat hastily put together an archeological map and organized a special session on Zaporizhzhia, with Rodzianko as keynote speaker. Iavornits΄kii did not “invent the traditions” of the Cossacks, but his romanticization of them strengthened their image in Ukrainian national identity.⁷⁹

Another medium for imagining Cossack Ukraine came from Ia. I. Smirnov, curator of the medieval department in the state Hermitage Museum. He contributed a set of reproductions made of prints of the ruins of Kyiv in 1651, when the former capital of Rus΄ was occupied by Lithuanian Prince Janusz Radziwiłł during the revolt led by Zaporozhian Hetman Bohdan Khmel΄nyts΄kyi.⁸⁰ (Figure 4) Beginning in 1648, the uprising had ended with the incorporation of much of eastern Ukraine into the Russian empire.⁸¹ Smirnov had little information about the prints, which he had come upon as the “Kiev Albom” of Prince H. F. Radziwiłł in the library of the Academy of Arts. Only later could he identify the artist, Abraham van Westerveld, a Rotterdam engraver whom Radziwiłł had brought with him to capture the events. These remarkable prints, however, sparked no interest, save for one made from frescos on the south wall of Kyiv's cathedral of St. Sophia, featuring Grand Prince Iaroslav the Wise and his family. (Figure 5)

Figure 4. Westerveld Print of Kyiv During the Khmelnytsky Uprising (p. 22)

Source: Proceedings of the 13^th Archeological Congress in Ekaterinoslav, vol. 2

Figure 5. Westerveld Print of the Family of Iaroslav the Wise (p. 22)

Source: Proceedings of the 13^th Archeological Congress in Ekaterinoslav, vol. 2

This would be Antonovich's final congress. As if sensing that the septuagenarian was nearing the end of his life, Praskovia had organized an official tribute. Referring to herself as “the last of the Mohicans,” she apologized for being late to the table to publicly acknowledge Antonovich's contributions to the profession, and she recalled the warm friendship he had developed with her husband on their frequent excavations.⁸² At the same table Bahalii could laud Antonovich for “never moving away from his progressive origins as a true son of Ukraine.”⁸³ Coincidentally it would also be Iefymenko's final participation. Speaking on agricultural allotments in fifteenth-century Galicia, she continued her theme of differential historical development in land tenure and legality in territory that she and the absent Hrushevs΄kyi considered the true heir to Kyivan Rus΄, not Muscovy.⁸⁴ Her own History of the Ukrainian People, which had won the competition hosted by the journal Kievskaia starina (Kievan Antiquity) and with a narrative arc driven by her fundamental populism, was just coming to press.⁸⁵ Significantly, her history marked a turning point in the conceptualization of Ukraine's history; whereas she was continuing the Antonovich tradition of the distinctiveness of south Russia, implicitly making it possible to imagine a federated post-1905 Rus΄, across the border Hrushevs΄ki had just published his Survey History of the Ukrainian People that set a new paradigm for a Ukrainian national history that did not reduce it to a chapter in Russia's.⁸⁶

Uvarova took the last word at the congress. With revolution erupting around them, and the frictions between herself and the Ukrainophiles peaking, Bahalii skipped the closing banquet. Calling him out for “either stupidity or cowardice,” she disbelieved his excuse that he needed to catch the night train and therefore could not attend.⁸⁷

Stoking the flames, the next congress would also be held in Ukraine, this one in Chernihiv in 1908, to commemorate the millennial celebration of the city's first mention in the chronicles. Some IMAO members objected that this provincial city, also absent a university, hardly represented the “All-Russian” intent behind the congresses.⁸⁸ Never one to mince words, Uvarova lamented the lack of assistance from the learned societies for Chernihiv, attributing it in large measure to “Slavic laziness.”⁸⁹ But just as two open Ukrainophiles, Bahalii and Iavornits΄kii, had provided the impetus behind the two previous ones, so did an archeological personality commandeer this one, even to the extent of providing funding from his own pocket: D. Ia. Samokvasov, one of the preeminent figures in prehistorical archeology.⁹⁰ Proud of his heritage in the Little Russian nobility, Samokvasov was determined to incorporate Malorossiia into the empire. A native of the Chernigovshchina, or Chernihiv lands, Samokvasov's passion combined professionalism with patriotism. His first major excavation had been of Chernaia Mogila (Black Grave), in 1872, for which the city had been named. He focused primarily on the kurgans of the Severiane tribe, the East Slavic group that had settled the region in the seventh century CE.

Archeology had made it clear to Samokvasov that the Russian prarodina, ancestral home, stretched from the shores of the Black Sea to Lake Ladoga, and all twelve Slavic tribes “shared the same language, religion, and law code.”⁹¹ The new generation of Ukrainian nationalists, led by Hrushevs΄ki, however, were taking issue with the fundamentals of Samokvasov's finds. Identifying Chernihiv and the Severiane as distinctive from Great Russia, they saw them instead laying the foundation of Ukraine.⁹² Taking charge of the preparatory committee, Samokvasov quickly quashed notions of Ukrainian autonomy. The curator of the Chernihiv Museum had proposed a session on “Ukrainian Antiquities” that would highlight a special exhibit; this suggestion was voted down, 45–18.⁹³ Three committee members had recommended that the L΄viv-based Shevchenko Society form a complementary preparatory committee, but “nor did this find support among members.”⁹⁴ As a concession, the committee agreed to support the works being prepared for the congress by renowned Polish architect Kazimierz Skórewicz and Academician Marian Sokołowski, a specialist in the art and architecture of Kraków.⁹⁵ In her summation of the “friendly” congress, Uvarova commented further on the Ukrainophiles’ failure to have their separate session or to bring in scholars who dreamed of “separating the Ukrainian language, and maybe even the entire ethnicity, from the common Russian family.”⁹⁶ Notably absent were Bahalii, Iefymenko, Sumtsov, and Mel΄nik.

Samokvasov's certainty in the objectivity inherent in material artifacts had regularly paired him with Antonovich, who had served on his dissertation defense committee in 1873. Such confidence in materiality had made him one of the key scholars among the anti-Normanists, that is, those who rejected the purported “calling for the Varangians,” which credited westerners with the establishment of the first Russian state.⁹⁷ Samokvasov read self-seeking subjectivity into these ex post facto writings by Orthodox monks. This put him in good company with another archeologist, D. I. Ilovaiskii, a Great Russian nationalist who wrote popular histories.⁹⁸ Emphasizing the Russianness of it all, he argued that grand princes from independent principalities had come together and created one land, trade, and culture. For him, the year 907, another millennial anniversary to be celebrated at the congress, should mark the beginning of Russia's history. This was the date of the most favorable treaty with Byzantium: in 907 “united” Russians had defeated the “largest and most civilized state of the tenth century.”⁹⁹ Focusing on the Chernigovshchina, he began with “prehistory, in which we have no written or ethnographical records of the peoples living in the area of the Dnepr River,” concluding with the “antiquities of Russia in the most recent period, when the peoples of Malorossiia and Velikorossiia united in government, religion, and culture under the primacy of a single tsar, common laws, courts, and a common state language.”¹⁰⁰ Ironically, on this issue he shared the sentiments of Maksymovych, Kostomarov, and Hrushevs΄ki, who also denied the Normanists, although the latter three favored evidence of Slavic tribal predecessors that could be distinguished as Ukrainians.¹⁰¹

Samokvasov's commanding authority imitated the conservative restoration of autocracy in the “System of the 3^rd of June,” engineered by Minister of Internal Affairs Peter Stolypin in 1907. In the same vein, it reflected what Faith Hillis has successfully argued was the paradoxically symbiotic relationship developing between conservative ideology and modern politics in parts of Ukraine.¹⁰² Hillis does not mention Samokvasov, or discuss archeology in detail, but her underlying theme of the interdependence between Ukrainian and Russian nation-making becomes clear at this congress. Hetman Ivan Mazepa, who had led his troops at first for and then against Russia during Peter the Great's Northern War early in the eighteenth century, gave both camps a character to claim. With ties to Chernihiv, Mazepa also competed with Peter for influence over Orthodoxy, as Ukraine supplied a number of religious hierarchs to the imperial capital. The hetman built numerous churches and provided patronage to the Ukrainian Orthodox Brotherhoods that had founded the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.¹⁰³ Prominent Ukrainian architectural scholar G. G. Pavlutskii spoke on the distinctiveness of Ukrainian church design, with decorations noticeably different from those in northern Rus΄.¹⁰⁴ N. V. Sultanov, perhaps the era's most influential architect specializing in restoration, presented on the historical Mazepa House.¹⁰⁵ Local Maecenas V. V. Tarnovs΄kii had donated his impressive collection of Ukrainian antiquities to the Chernihiv Zemstvo in 1897, which paid 10,000 rubles for a building to house it.¹⁰⁶ The museum, “the pride of every Little Russian,” housed the congressional exhibit.¹⁰⁷

But the hetmanate lay in ruins, literally, in the rubble of buildings commissioned by the last hetman, Kirill Razumovskii. Architect F. F. Gornostaev visited the structures to report on them to the congress; Razumovskii, after all, was related to the Uvarovs. Photographs taken by P. P. Pavlov underscored the budding power of the camera to enhance archeologists’ adherence to objectivity.¹⁰⁸ The pictorial spread of what remained of the Razumovskii edifices fashioned a past that lay in tatters, recognizable and tangible. Gornostaev and Pavlov testified to the detritus of Little Russian splendor, ruins that fitfully recalled when the territory held vestiges of autonomy within the Petrine imperial administration. Classics of Elizabethan Baroque, these disintegrating buildings told the tale of decline and fall. The walls of the residence in Baturin were collapsing around the sepulcher in which Razumovskii's body lay interred.¹⁰⁹ By the time of Gornostaev's excursion, Baturin was in such poor shape that reportedly “Jewish merchants from Gomel΄” had purchased the estate with the intent of turning it into a factory.¹¹⁰ The newly formed Society for the Protection and Preservation of Russian Arts and Antiquities generated unsuccessful publicity to repair the Razumovskii wreckage, which was not restored until after Ukraine attained independence in 1991.¹¹¹ (Figure 6)

Figure 6. Ruins of the Baturin Estate, Residence of the Last Hetman, Kirill Razumovskii (p. 27)

Source: Proceedings of the 14^th Archeological Congress in Chernihiv, vol. 2

In his paper entitled “The Name ‘Ukraine,’” S. P. Shelukhin announced Ukraine as an independent polity. Pointing out that the word referred to an inhabited territory and had come into usage the same time as had Rus΄, he argued that the name had always referred to a people identified by distinctive anthropology and linguistics, and the “national self-awakening” inspired by the Khmel΄nyts΄kyi uprising had crystalized “Ukraine” as the name of a political entity to which other countries also referred.¹¹² Highlighting cultural differences, he contrasted the paid mourners in Great Russian funerary tradition to the absence of them at Ukrainian funerals, praising the lamentations of the latter as “short, not ritualistic . . . involving the people close to the deceased, so they are sincere and expressive.”¹¹³ Flitting as a gadfly around the congressional sessions, Shelukhin name-dropped “the well-known Ukrainian scholar and philosopher Grigorii Savvich Skovoroda,” pontificating that “he had much influence on the Great Russians of the Kharkiv lands.”¹¹⁴

Khvedir Vovk, who had been in Parisian exile since the 1874 congress in Kyiv, returned after 1905 and spoke in Chernihiv.¹¹⁵ Presenting on a neolithic site excavated by another archeologist, paleoethnologist Vovk was in the region spearheading a research trip from his new position as curator of the ethnographic section at Alexander III Museum in St. Petersburg. Accompanied by a battery of graduate students, he was collecting anthropometric data from the local population that would aid in the identification of a “Ukrainian race.” Ironically, learning of the study, Uvarova showed her irritation not at its topic but rather that Vovk would be taking the results back to St. Petersburg instead of giving them to the IMAO. Publishing his research in 1916, Vovk reached the pinnacle of early 20th-century modernity and laid a cornerstone for the immediate future of nationalism. Articulating categories in the contemporaneously modern language of race science, Vovk wrote that “only a fleeting glance . . . is necessary to see that Ukrainians, despite all the mixture we see among them today, belong to a single race.” His primary objective had been to prove scientifically that Ukrainians and Great Russians belonged to separate races.

Conclusion: Ukraine at Versailles, 1918

The efforts and ideas of our archeologists leads us directly to the Versailles Peace Conference, which reconfigured the map of eastern Europe following the Great War. Initiating Eric Hobsbawm's “apogee of nationalism,” the conference's conveners wrote “the dominant narratives about the naturalness and inevitability of the nation-states.”¹¹⁶ The Ukrainian delegation was one of many aspirants to statehood, however, who were denied a seat at the table. Shelukhin represented Ukrainian interests and focused his vitriol on the privileged status of Poland, which had already been singled out for statehood in the 13^th of American President Woodrow Wilson's “14 Points,” intended to serve as the blueprint for self-determination. As Shelukhin pointed out, even before Wilson, Ukrainians were initiating ways to legislate representation for multiple nationalities within statist borders.¹¹⁷ Delegate Stepan Rudnytsky, a Ukrainian pioneer in political geography, appealed in vain that Ukraine be recognized as a nation-state rather than an amorphous space on the map of eastern Europe.¹¹⁸ It bears mentioning that Rudnytsky included both Crimea and the Donets region in his anthropogeography of Ukraine.¹¹⁹

This returns us to the historiographical proposal advanced by von Hagen and Hen-Konarski, that is, that Ukraine presents an opportunity to re-imagine the historicized construction of nation-statehood. Although the inadequacies of the Versailles settlement were exposed years before they contributed directly to a second world war, it is worth noting here that Shelukhin and Rudnytsky were rightfully frustrated that “self-determination” was applied only to east European territories that had been occupied by German troops at some point during the war.¹²⁰ They assumed Ukraine to be a modern political entity, inspired in part by social scientists like themselves. Imbibing the self-confidence of nineteenth-century positivism, they made their case through facts rather than fancies. Shelukhin mentioned by name “Professor Sumtsov and Mrs. Iefymenko,” under attack because “they had greatly contributed to the intellectual development of the Ukrainian people.”¹²¹ On the other shore, though, sat Linnichenko, an Antonovich student who hewed more closely to Uvarova and Samokvasov. While maintaining professional and personal relationships with numerous Ukrainophiles, he bemoaned Ukrainian secessionists after 1917: “like the apostle Peter, we will renounce three times: our ancestors, our motherland, our national name.”¹²²

Linnichenko's laments sound of more than simply imperial nostalgia. Fast-forwarding to 1991, when Soviet Ukraine became an independent state, Linnichenko evokes the limits inherent in methodological nationalism.¹²³ Von Hagen's proposition that “Ukrainian history can serve as a wonderful vehicle to challenge the nation-state's conceptual hegemony” did not anticipate the horrors of Putin's violent irredentism.¹²⁴ But that is where we are, and centuries of histories dictate that even a cessation of hostilities is unlikely to transmute Ukraine into a singular imagined community. And for all the academic desire to move beyond methodological nationalism, from the post-World War II settlements through decolonization, politicized groups might broaden the purview of their nation beyond ethno-nationalism, but they still want the power invested in statehood. Timothy Snyder has tempered territorial boundaries with his observation that “nation-states in Europe have always been fragile and temporary as such,” which keeps Ukraine-as-liminal in the European mix. Writing after the events of 2014, Snyder focused attention on Russia's destructive effects on the international order, the collapse of a European system held in place since the post-World War II treaties according to which “sovereignty was taken for granted.”¹²⁵ Sovereignty, though, is as slippery a signifier as nationalism, even in democracies. One might say “especially” in democracies, where contestations over the vision of the nation-state are put to a vote. Russia invaded because Ukrainians voted to seek integration into a broader transnational system of neo-liberal Europe, shades of what Iefymenko was describing.¹²⁶ Antonovich and Bahalii would easily understand why one of Russia's wartime strategies has been to loot art and artifacts from Ukrainian museums, the material culture of national identity.¹²⁷ As would Samokvasov.