Decolonizing Ukrainian Art History

Abstract

In this article, we analyze the influence of the colonial policy of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union on Ukrainian art-historical writing. As we shall reveal, the mechanisms of knowledge production created during that period continued to operate after the Declaration of Independence of Ukraine in 1991. The limitations that were imposed on the art-historical community, which can be regarded as colonial, shaped the crucial narratives (of the “triune nation”) and dictated the thematic scope of Ukrainian scholarship. The new notion of “mysteztvoznavstvo,” introduced in 1937 instead of the previously established Theory and History of Art, eventually led to a profound rift between Soviet Russian and Ukrainian scholarship and the Western world more generally. “Mysteztvoznavstvo” was supposed to be an umbrella term for art history, theory, and art criticism but ended up doing a disservice to each domain. Art theory in Ukraine was virtually nonexistent, whereas art history was mixed with art criticism, resulting in writing that did not meet widely accepted academic standards. This led to the isolation of Ukrainian scholars, who were confined to the Russian-speaking community and had very limited access to foreign scholarship. We also analyze the decolonization processes in the history of Ukrainian art prompted by the invasion of the Russian Federation into Ukraine after 2013, such as The Revolution of Dignity and “decommunization.” We argue that horizontal art history and decolonial approaches cannot adequately be applied if colonial tools are still used by the discipline. Epistemic decolonization can only be achieved after challenging the standards of “mysteztvoznavstvo” and, thus, by dividing art studies into three separate domains: art history, art theory, and art criticism, as each discipline has its own goals and methods.

Introduction

Some places of memory are so essential to the urban landscape of East-Central Europe that they become nearly invisible. Consider the memorial to the victims of the World War I (1914–1918), people murdered by the Nazis (1939–1945), and those who perished during the Communist regime (1948–1989) on Burianovo náměstí (eng. square), in Brno (Czech Republic). A similar memorial could have been erected in any Ukrainian city, town, or village because Ukraine’s history has much in common with the Czechia’s. However, one can find in Ukraine only memorials to the victims and soldiers who perished in WWII. In fact, those monuments are not even consecrated to WWII but “The Great Patriotic War,” a term coined by Soviet propaganda to refer to the period from 1941 to 1945. Astoundingly, virtually no memorials to the fallen in WWI or the victims of the totalitarian Soviet regime can be found anywhere in Ukraine. During the 30 years of independence, monuments to individual figures who were repressed during the Soviet era and memorials dedicated to those who died during the Holodomor of 1932–1933 appeared in some places. However, until recently the number of such names remained disproportionate to the number of street names and monuments commemorating figures of Russian culture and the top leadership of the USSR.

That situation is a conspicuous product of the Soviet and, later, Russian policy of the politics of memory that was imposed on Ukraine and internalized. The policy of memory, in turn, is one of the elements of a broader colonial project that we shall address before examining Ukrainian art history. Russian colonial narratives continue to shape and affect Ukraine’s internal policy and international image, causing others to perceive Ukraine through a Russian lens. All this hinders or makes impossible the process of decolonization or turning Ukraine into a semilegitimate state entity that arose without good reasons.

The topic is vast, and we are still looking for proper categories to examine and explain Russian and Soviet colonialisms, their common features, and their differences. In this article, we shall limit ourselves to the domain of art-historical writing and the aspects of cultural policy that had a deep influence on Ukrainian scholarship. We shall not attempt to provide an exhaustive picture of colonial policy per se, as it would require more than an article, but, rather, we seek to provide scholars with a framework that could be helpful for further studies. Nor shall we discuss in detail the notion of “Ukraineness” in art and art history. In the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, the identities of scholars were often too vague to be classified as purely Russian or Ukrainian. Thus, for the sake of consistency, in this article, we shall classify art and art historians as Ukrainian based on the place of creation for art and the place of birth for scholars.

Entangled Colonialisms? A Review of Literature on Russian and Soviet Colonialism

As the title of the present article suggests, postcolonial studies can be a powerful heuristic tool in contexts that are no longer associated with the classical colonial Empires. If the colonialism of the latter is not considered to be a topic for discussion, the existence of Russian and Soviet colonialism and the affinities between them are still expected to be explored and justified.

Postcolonial methodologies have been brought to post-Soviet Russia by Madina Tlostanova (Tlostanova 2008, 2012, 2017, 2022). However, her studies are limited to the Russian realm and, thus, fail to probe the other countries of the former Soviet Union. The entire issue lies in the fact that for a long time, the “second (intermediate) world” was beyond the reach of postcolonial theory. However, simply fitting it into either of the two dichotomies (West/East and North/South) would be erroneous, as it would disrupt the binary through the agency of the third, which was both colonizer and colonized (Tlostanova 2012, 131). In other words, the post-Soviet states cannot be neatly placed within any ready-made epistemes, especially when attempting to consider all local aspects. The common concept for postcommunist criticism, postcolonial theory, and decolonial options, despite their strained relations, becomes the concept of “coloniality,” as proposed by Aníbal Quijano and developed by Walter Mignolo, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, and María Lugones (Quijano 2000, 2007; Tlostanova 2012, 132). Coloniality, in contrast to colonialism, refers to knowledge structures that continue to operate repressively even when colonial policies cease.

Tlostanova views Russian politics as an extension of the Soviet, as they share coloniality of knowledge and existence. Her focus primarily lies in non-European colonial spaces within the USSR and Russia, and that is why Ukraine is not included. By writing “Russia” and “the USSR” in parallel, Tlostanova does not intend to emphasize their identity; it is evident that these were different states in many senses. Soviet colonialism was based on tsarist colonialism, which imitated and competed with Western European models of colonialism (Annus 2012, 38). A significant difference between the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire was the rejection of imperial status and the transition to a multitiered “voluntary” union of republics (Fătu-Tutoveanu 2012, 91). However, in our opinion the Soviet Union was a radical form of preserving the Russian Empire, albeit in a different form and on different grounds. The dissolution of the USSR was a moment when decolonization could have been altered by decoloniality (Tlostanova 2022). According to Tlostanova, the Russian and Soviet empires were a “two-faced Janus,” characterized by “the old incurable disease—secondary Eurocentrism,” and distinctiveness from more successful capitalist empires such as the British Empire, France, and Germany (Tlostanova 2008, 1; 2012, 134–135).

Addressing and dissecting individual aspects of the colonization strategies of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation is not the purpose of this publication and requires further systematic research. Jennifer Suchland ironically summarized the situation in the reformulation of Gayatri Spivak’s question: “Can the Postsocialist speak?” (Tlostanova 2012, 131). Rather, this is an ambitious attempt to discuss the void that is currently not integrated into Western European space, or fully into the Central and Eastern European space, or into the Russian space. The mentioned volumes and their lack of information about Ukraine only prove this. And, in our opinion it should begin with the coloniality of knowledge, in our case connected with art history.

Epp Annus considers the Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia) as having had “high national consciousness” and a “national culture” as of the year 1940. Following this, Russia (specifically, not the Soviet Union) occupied these states, making the Soviet period an occupation for them (Annus 2011, 441). However, there is a distinction between “occupation” and “colonization,” although they are often used interchangeably, employing the term “Soviet colonialism” as a fashionable term (Annus 2012, 23). Annus distinguishes “occupation” as the bloody process of land seizure, whereas “colonization” can have a peaceful character (Annus 2011, 442). Nevertheless, the actions resulting from this peaceful character ultimately led to tectonic changes in culture, politics, and community identity. It is also important to note that this concerns communities in their prenational stage of existence. Accordingly, a modern nation-state cannot be colonized, only occupied. This is why the USSR’s policy in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia is considered an occupation (Annus 2011, 444). These were states that already had their own national identities, recognized their belonging to a nation, and viewed their culture as superior to that of the occupier (Annus 2011, 443).

Like Tlostanova, Annus moves beyond binary thinking, as even the actions of the USSR, viewed under the label of “occupation,” do not entirely conform to the archetypal characteristics of occupation, which could be defined in analogy to, for example, the French resistance movement (Annus 2011, 444). The hybridization of forms of interaction, imposition of occupier’s rules and norms, and the shift in identity, despite this, led to the emergence of colonialism. The specificity lies in the fact that colonialism resulted from occupation, not colonization (Annus 2011, 445).

Annus’s approach challenges the “double silence” identified by David Moore, which refers to the neglect of postcommunism and postcolonialism researchers of each other (Moore 2006; Riabchuk 2013, 43). For postcommunist societies, Euro-integration hopes and actions were linked to affirming the idea of their states’ eternal belonging to Europe. The “Soviet” period was seen as an occupation, and the rejection of colonialism and its consequences was believed to diminish European identity (Riabchuk 2013, p 43).

In contrast to Annus’s approach, Dorota Kołodziejczyk and Siegfried Huigen propose to simply expand the concepts of “colony” and “colonization” so that processes in Central and Eastern Europe related to Russia/USSR’s policy could fall under these terms. Critique of colonialism in the region could significantly complement the knowledge of the imperialistic foundations of European modernity in general (Kołodziejczyk and Huigen 2023, 7). However, the collection discusses other empires, including Germany and the Habsburg Empire, not just the Russian/Soviet, which makes such an approach, on one hand, more abstract and, on the other hand, more relevant to the material. Similarly, Alexander Morrison focuses on the common characteristics of imperialism and colonization strategies rather than their nuances. He argues that the Russian Empire was unique, but in the same way as other empires: “Thus, in geographical, cultural and conceptual terms Russian Turkestan and British India can be seen as close neighbours; the Ukraine would be distant from the Gold Coast, but closer to Ireland, Austrian Ruthenia or Ottoman Rumelia, whilst Siberia and Canada could also rub shoulders” (Morrison 2012, 15).

However, to make such panoramic generalizations, it is still necessary to detail local experiences, clarifying their specificity. “This task cannot be accomplished through research into Soviet colonialism, since Soviet colonialism includes a diverse spectrum of models of repression and subordination, dependent on the prehistories of separate regions” (Annus 2012, 27). For example, Annus’s approach would not be entirely appropriate for the situation of relations between Ukraine, Russia, and the USSR because Ukraine was incorporated into the Soviet space much earlier than were the Baltic states, consequently, with a much less-developed national culture and a significantly weaker national identity. Therefore, we will now focus on the characteristic features of Russia/USSR’s colonialism regarding Ukraine.

Ukrainian territories were part of the Moscow Principality and the Russian Empire. Later, they became part of the Soviet Union, whose policy was dictated by Moscow. Each stage of these lands, which are now Ukraine, involved a policy of unification. Within the Russian Empire, Ukrainian territories did not have the status of autonomy, so regional specificity was governed by central legislation and rules. These rules had to be adhered to. Speaking of the Soviet Union, Soviet Ukraine became one of the cofounders of the USSR and, accordingly, had legal status, including the right to secede from the Union. However, the rhetoric here sharply contrasted with the actual state of affairs, so attention should be focused on internal, hidden circumstances rather than official texts and statements.

Official culture had a defined territory and served the state’s agenda. Anything beyond official culture at best fell into the underground and at worst was destroyed. It is worth mentioning terms like the “executed renaissance,” Holodomor, and other mass repressions, to which the Soviet authorities resorted to pacify the “local population.” These bloody events occurred in the 1930s when it was necessary to “neutralize” the part of the population that remembered and sometimes even participated in the creation of an alternative political project for Ukraine during the 1918s through the 1920s. This project differed from the Soviet one and envisioned the establishment of an independent state. Under Stalin, the perception of art was narrow and highly restricted (Annus 2018, 1). Ultimately, in the 1950s the direct connection between the Communist Party and art was openly declared official policy (Annus 2018, 1).

A fundamental feature of Soviet colonialism was the creation of a discourse around Ukraine that can be termed normative. It cannot be said that Ukrainian culture was prohibited or oppressed. On the contrary, it was actively created, clearly marking the boundaries within which independent and autonomous development was severely restricted. Therefore, Marko Pavlyshyn defines cultural colonialism as an ideology that influences individuals and institutions in a way that they accept as normal, reinforcing the imperial structure of dominance through their behavior (Pavlyshyn 1997, 224). Thus, the effectiveness of Soviet colonial policy was facilitated by the early annexation of Ukrainian territories and the linguistic and cultural proximity of Russia and Ukraine, reinforced by inclusive strategies that were capable of attracting the most active and ambitious Ukrainians (Riabchuk 2013, 50).

The lack of knowledge about Ukraine and Ukrainian scholarship in anthologies pertaining not only to the art of the region but also to its history as a whole is linked to several factors. It’s not so much a matter of conventional “orientalism” as it is the Occidentalism of epistemology, which excludes Ukraine from the map of the region. First, postcolonial criticism was born out of left-wing ideology and strongly associated colonialism with the development of capitalist relations. In this context, talking about “Soviet colonialism” would be considered an oxymoron (Annus 2012). Second, postcolonial and decolonial criticism do not provide an adequate toolkit for analyzing processes that took place in Central and Eastern Europe (Tlostanova 2012). Therefore, it is necessary not to “fit” ready-made tools and descriptive structures but to create a self-reflexive space that is capable of producing an effective toolkit for analyzing processes in the region. Third, until recently there was a widespread notion of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as stable nation-states, although neither of the states ever became such (Von Hagen 2014, 174). Additionally, the Soviet propaganda machine managed to establish the USSR’s status as an anti-imperialist state (Von Hagen 2014, 176). Fourth, both in the 19th century and after World War I, Ukrainian territories were viewed through the lenses of the more powerful and well-defined “Polish question” and “Jewish question” in Russia (Von Hagen 2014, 179). Fifth, Ukraine established itself as a state that maintained strong ties with the modern Russian Federation (especially until 2014). That is, in addition to a number of factors that generally made the region unsuitable for postcolonial optics, the special position of Ukraine in this region is also highlighted.

First, the hybrid war (since 2014) and later full-scale warfare (since February 24, 2022) waged by Russia against Ukraine can be attributed, in no small part, to Ukraine’s withdrawal from the sphere of influence of the Russian Federation. This shift was accompanied by Ukraine’s pursuit of European integration and Euro-Atlantic aspirations, which were formalized within its Constitution. Ukrainians increasingly turned to postcolonial theory and decolonial critique, viewing them as starting points to assert their affiliation with the West (Popova and Shevel 2024).

In this manner, postcolonial theory and decolonization were employed for political purposes, using an already-established discourse to swiftly assimilate into the Western sphere amidst a shift in foreign policy orientation. In 2022, there appears to have been a surge in reflections regarding Ukraine’s colonial past. This was accompanied by a series of discussions and publications on popular media platforms such as Lb.ua (Levchenko 2022a; Morozova 2022; Ostrovska-Liuta 2022; Sheiko 2022), Korydor (Holubov 2022; Levchenko 2022b), Krytyka (Hundorova 2022, 2023; Kozlenko 2022; Shaipova and Shaipov 2023), and a text series from Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Kyiv–Ukraine (Dovhopolova 2022; Kazakevych 2022; Kotliar and Levchenko 2022; Kovalenko 2022; Levchenko 2022c, 2022d; Melnychenko 2022; Nazarenko 2022; Ovchennikov 2022; Shlipchenko 2022; Terekhova 2022; Vodotyka 2022; Yatsenko 2022).

As a rule, texts by Ukrainian authors were translated into foreign languages to make them accessible to readers, at least within the English-speaking world. This, in turn, catalyzed a process of more active discussion regarding Ukraine as a former colony resisting the imperial ambitions of the Russian Federation (Badior 2022; Mälksoo 2022; Snyder 2022; Batuman 2023). The knowledge about Ukraine that existed in Western countries primarily originated from departments of Russian studies, which were focused on Russian-language sources and officially sanctioned, or at least normative, knowledge about the states of former Soviet republics. The demand from Western institutions for knowledge about Ukraine has been steadily increasing in recent years, yet Ukraine itself lacks the internal resources to meet this demand and generate knowledge about itself.

Until now, Ukrainian art history has been omitted from every edited volume that addresses national and transnational discourses in Europe, pushing Ukraine to the outskirts of its own region. It is omitted even where the scholars are discussing the Soviet Union. To make the point, we shall refer only to the two recent examples. The collection “A Socialist Realist Art History? Writing Art History in the Post-War Decades,” edited by Krista Kodres, Kristina Jõekalda, and Michaela Marek (2019) contains two pieces covering Soviet art history (Kodres, Jõekalda, and Marek, 2019. Authored by Nataliya Zlydneva and Maria Dmitrieva, these texts examine the period of the 1950s through the 1960s. Even these texts, however, overlook Ukrainian art-historical discourse (as much as the discourses of other Soviet republics) by identifying “the Soviet” with “the Russian.” (Dmitrieva 2019; Zlydneva 2019,)

In the edition “Periodization in the Art Historiographies of Central and Eastern Europe,” the contributing authors tackle various aspects of art-historical narratives in the region and deal with their entanglement (Kallestrup et al. 2022). Considerable attention is paid to the processes of hybridization. In particular, the researchers adapted the Western chronology to the local contexts. Despite that an entire monograph is devoted to the region, “Ukraine” is mentioned six times, four of which are in the bibliography and two of which are in the general list of examples. In contrast, “Russia” was mentioned 70 times. Moscow, St. Petersburg, Odesa (today’s Ukraine), and Kyiv in the Russian transcription “Kiev” (today’s Ukraine) are called the centers of art history within Russia (although more correctly the “Russian Empire”) (Kallestrup et al. 2002, 33). The lack of mention of Ukraine might seem like a nationalist projection or an anachronism, but it is not. Oleksii Tolochko, after analyzing a number of travelogues, claims that trips to the South of the empire led to the discovery of a new nation. “This people (and all travelers without exception will agree with this) has its own national physiognomy,” and “almost everything differs from the Great Russians” (Tolochko 2021, 60).

This space of silencing and the deceptive construction of a homogeneous space in the empire does not correspond to either the described modernity or the current modernity. However, it clearly fulfils its historiographical function, legitimizing Russia’s right to this space, which has long been labeled “Russian.” This is the result of the colonial strategy in Russian historiography (Nikolai Karamzin, Sergei Solovyov, Vladimir Klyuchevskyi, etc.), which incorporated Ukrainian history into Russian history before Ukrainians had a chance to write an independent history of their state (Tolochko 2021, 33).

The present article seeks to spark a discussion on Ukrainian art history from a postcolonial perspective. We consider this as a first step toward reassessing Ukrainian art and art historiography and examining them from a transnational perspective. We shall start by addressing the genesis of art history in Ukraine and its methodological foundations. Then we proceed by exposing the changes that were introduced during the Soviet era that resulted in a terminological ambiguity that affects modern studies and hinders progress in working out a uniform international recognition of Ukrainian art history. We shall try to pinpoint the reasons that inspired art critic Oleksandr Lopukhov to argue in 1987 that the theory of art is absent in Ukrainian scholarship (Lopukhov 1987, 1).

Finally, we address Ukrainian art historiography after 1991 and conclude with discussing the decommunization and derussification as parts of the contemporary decolonizing process. Considered in a wider intellectual context, the Ukrainian postcolonial experience can shed light on the peculiarities of Eastern European colonialism and ways of overcoming them.

Specificity of the Russian Colonizing Strategy

Historian Richard Cohen in his “Making History” cites a 1989 article by Rikki Kersten who commented on Japanese after-war revisionism and its manifestations in school textbooks: “By depicting Japanese war criminals as victims (of western imperialism), revisionists want their school children to memorise prewar Japan as a heroic nation that struggled to free its Asian neighbours from Western aggression” (2022, 574).

It is remarkable how relevant this sounds to us now in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine under the false pretext of saving the Russian-speaking people in Ukraine and defending Ukraine from becoming a colony of the USA. There is a common underlying principle behind the Russian and Japanese colonial narratives. Both were constructed in opposition to “the West” (mainly to Western Europe and the USA) and to its cultural and geographic expansion. Both were used to justify military aggression, deportations, and the rape and murder of civilians. Finally, both were directed at turning aggressors into victims who were made to defend themselves to survive.

In both cases, imperial aggression was presented as a preventive step. Such steps can be taken many times, fighting imaginary enemies. The hot phase of the confrontation, in this case, begins after the ideological work, and the policy of the empire becomes partly terrorist.

But there are differences too. Unlike in Japan, the Russian national idea is grounded on the irredentist dogma of the triune Russian nation, with the Russian nation being a “Big Brother” for the other two “Little Russians” (Ukrainians) and “White Russians” (Belarusians). They are to be united under one “Great Russian” rule—profess one religion (the Eastern Christian Orthodoxy) and speak one Russian language. Therefore, the lands of Ukraine and Belarus are to be purged from foreign influences and religions. They are not entitled to build their national identities and to enter unions with other countries without “supreme” permission from Russia. This dogma underlies every aspect of the Russian policy toward Ukraine and Belarus, and it is also crucial for the development of art history in Ukraine.

In addition, such policies have long been fuelled by Western European states. They saw the existence of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as a guarantee of peace in the region because Russia was part of the global system of international relations. Just remember George Herbert Walker Bush’s Chicken Kyiv speech in 1991. Europeans saw the Great Power of Russia as a guarantee of the balance of power. This also explains the current reaction of some Western intellectuals and members of the establishment who do not want to sever ties with the Russian Federation.

The first thing we need to discuss briefly is the term “Little Russia” that is still used by the Russian propaganda. The term has a Greek origin (“Μικρὰ Ῥωσσία”) and was used by the Patriarchs of Constantinople to refer to the smaller or less populated part of Rus’. Divided into two ecclesiastical provinces, the Western part of Rus’ consisted of six eparchies of 19 and, therefore, was smaller than the Central-Eastern part. Remarkably, until the 17th century the term meant the Orthodox Ruthenian lands that were part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. By no means was “Little Russia” meant to stand for the whole territory of Ukraine. Only in the middle of the 17th century was it broadened to the other territories of the so-called “Hetmanshschyna.” After the truce of Andrusiv of 1667, the territories of Hetmanshschyna were once more divided between Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The left-bank territories under the name of Little Russia were annexed by Russia. Ever since the Russians started to refer to Ukraine as “Little Russia,” it became a part of the discourse of the triune Russian nation.

The dogma of the triune Russian nation dates back to the time of Peter I. Not having enough support from his peers, Peter the First relied upon the Ukrainian intellectual elite. One of the most brilliant and controversial figures among Peter’s supporters was the Kyiv-born dean of the Kyiv-Mohyla academy Theophan Prokopovych. He became one of the first agents of Russian colonialism and the reason why Ukraine had later become a colonized element within the Russian empire. Theophan Prokopovych first came into prominence in 1715 as Peter’s protégé. He became the bishop of Pskov in 1718 and the archbishop of Novgorod in 1725. On April 6, 1718, Prokopovych uttered his famous “Sermon on the Power and Honour of the Tsar,” in which he set himself the task of proving the legitimacy and necessity of autocratic, unlimited tsarist power, proving that it “was arranged by God and armed with a sword, and as if resisting it is a sin against God himself” (Prokopovych 1961, 77–78). Prokopovych was commissioned to help the Tsar to integrate the Orthodox church into the state so that there would be only one head of the country. It is worth emphasizing that the relations between the Church and the Russian government are still extremely tight even now.

Prokopovych not only designed and implemented reforms in the Church but also propagated the idea of Slavic unity under Russian sponsorship. The idea was not new. The ideas of the historic unity of Eastern Slavs stemmed from the Brest Union dated 1596, which was directed at separating the Ruthenian Orthodox church from Constantinople and forming the Ruthenian Uniate Church presided over by the Pope. Zacharias Kopystenski argued in 1621 in his work “Palinodia” against the Union (Krekoten 1987, 93–107). He wrote about the integral “Russian nation” and the only “true” religion that cements it despite that some of the Orthodox territories are under the rule of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Thus, Prokopovych followed in the footsteps of those who regarded the Union with Rome as a threat to their “Ruthenian” identity.

But he went even further, stating in the panegyric written to celebrate the victory in the battle of Poltava that Tsar Peter is Pater Patriae, invincible “Russian Mars.” In this way, he created the image of the Orthodox Empire, heir to the Roman empire, justifying the later reference to Moscow as “the third Rome,” succeeding the ancient Rome and Constantinople. In the same poem, Prokopovych branded hetman Mazepa “the biggest enemy of the homeland.”

The political centralization and integration of the Eastern Orthodox Church into the State were followed by the introduction of the imperial cultural policy and linguistic marginalization. Here I would like to mention only two cases that expose the Russian colonial strategy.

The Millenium of Russia, a bronze monument erected in 1862 in the historic centre of Novgorod, was supposed to commemorate the arrival of Rurik, a Varangian chieftain, to Novgorod because this was considered to represent the inception of Russia’s statehood. The concept of continuous statehood, however, is highly dubious as well as the idea of Russia being the genuine heir to “Kyiv” Rus’. ¹ Again, it was Prokopovych (1981) who insisted on this line of succession. The monument itself is a 15-meter-tall bronze globus cruciger planted on a bell-shaped granite pedestal. The sculptures that adorn the monument can be split into three thematic groups. An angel and a kneeling woman in the first rank epitomize the Orthodox faith and Russia itself, the purported unity of the Church and the State. However, the image of a kneeling Russia did spark heated disputes. Minister of Education of the Russian Empire Sergei Uvarov, finally formulated a triad in 1833 on which the ideology of the empire was based: “Orthodoxy” (pravoslavie), “autocracy” (samoderzhavstvo), “nationality” (narodnost).

The second rank comprises 17 colossal figures whose contribution to Russia’s statehood was considered extraordinary. They are grouped to present six major scenes: the summoning of Rurik, the baptism of the Rus’, the Battle of Kulikovo, the autocracy of Ivan III, the start of the Romanov dynasty, and the formation of an empire under Peter I.

The iconography of the frieze in the lower part is the most striking. It reveals the way in which the history of Russia as an Empire was forged. The frieze comprises 109 figures of contributors to Russia’s glory; each was approved by the emperor himself. They were writers and painters, educators, statesmen, and military heroes. Mykola Gogol, a Ukrainian-born writer, who started to write in the Little Russian language but later moved to St. Petersburg, stands alongside Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov. Pushkin’s figure is remarkably taller than that of Gogol or Lermontov, even though he had not been taller than his peers in real life. This disproportion reminds us of the symbolic hierarchy of mediaeval icons. Among the educators portrayed are the Byzantine brothers Cyril and Methodius, who are said to have authored the Slav alphabet; Olga, who was a regent of Rus’ acting on behalf of her son Sviatoslav; and her grandson Vladimir I. Sviatoslavich (Rurikid), who installed himself as a ruler of the Kyiv Rus’ and baptized the country. Just taking into consideration these names, it is evident how 19th-century Russia inflated its own history, which was quite brief and started from the 16th century when the Romanov dynasty took the power. They strived to associate themselves with the Rus’, a mediaeval state with the center in Kyiv, ruled by a Varangian dynasty that had nothing to do with present-day Russia.

The imperial cultural policy also tried to appropriate the Lithuanian history. Three Lithuanian rulers, Algirdas, Gediminas, and Vytautas, were proclaimed to be Russia’s allies, fighting with Poland for the Ruthenian territories—a very dubious statement, to say the least. Moreover, the brief alliances with Lithuania were presented as proof that Lithuania, too, was destined to reunite with Russia.

The most controversial part of the monument is devoted to the display of the Russian military heroes. The Great Prince of Kyiv Svyatoslav, the Prince Danylo of Galizia, Ukrainian hetman Bogdan Khmelnytskyi, and Ukrainian Prince Konstantyn Ostrogski were surprisingly included in the roster of the Russian military glory, together with Ivan Susanin, Mikhail Kutuzov, Ivan Suvorov, or Ermak, a rather mythical conqueror of Siberia.

This monument symbolizes the integration of Ukrainian history into the Russian imperial narrative. Ukrainian statesmen, writers, and educators were proclaimed to be Russians. This strategy was later adopted by the Soviet authorities and intelligentsia and by their post-Soviet successors in the early 1990s.

The crusade against non-Russian languages—that is, language marginalization—was another element of the Russian colonial policy. Until recently, in Ukraine the Russian language was associated with progressiveness and the ability to move up the hierarchy. Business, teaching, and Internet blogging were popular and profitable only if they were in Russian. This attitude has deep colonial roots. The Valuev circular of July 18, 1863, together with the so-called Ems decree contributed to the marginalization of the Ukrainian language and sought to preserve Russian as the sole language of the whole Empire. In the secret circular of 1863, Petr Valuev, Russia’s minister for internal affairs, addressed the issue of “the Little Russia language” and made it clear to the censorship committees of Kyiv, Moscow, and Saint Petersburg how they should treat publications in Ukrainian:

Our press has been engaged for a long time in argumentation over the possibility of the existence of an independent Little Russian literature. […] In recent years the question of Little Russian literature has acquired a different character due to purely political circumstances, having no relation to literary interests as such. Previous works in the Little Russian language were addressed exclusively to the educated classes of Southern Russia, but nowadays the advocates of the Little Russian nationality have turned their attention to the uneducated masses, and those of them who aim at the realisation of their political plots have undertaken, under the pretext of promoting literacy and enlightenment, the publication of primary-school readers, alphabets and grammar books, geography texts, etc. (Miller 2003, 263)

The quote illustrates well not only the strategy of linguistic marginalization but also the suppression of the national identity that are distinctive features of classic colonial regimes.

The Ems decree of May 18, 1876, facilitated the colonial cultural policy. It banned the use of the Ukrainian language in printing, theatre plays or concerts, teaching in schools, and the import of publications. It is said to have been triggered by Mikhail Yuzefovich, an inspector of public schools in the Kyiv Educational District. He submitted a memo to Alexander Potapov, who was the Executive Head of the Third Section of the H.I.M. Chancellery, claiming that Ukrainians “want the independent republic of Ukraine presided by the Hetman” (Teleshun 2000, 27). Potapov, in his turn, told Emperor Alexander II about the memo. Oppression of the Ukrainian language and culture was almost continuous until the Revolution of 1917 when the Ems decree became void due to the change of power. Ukraine enjoyed a period of relative linguistic and cultural freedom until 1931 when the Ukrainization initiated by the new Soviet regime was curtailed to give way to Soviet colonial policy wearing the mask of internationalism and the “Friendship between Peoples.”

Despite being the fruit of 18th-century historiography, the dogma of the triune Russian nation received its final touches during the Soviet rule in the monograph by Vladymyr Mavrodyn The Ancient Rus [The origin of the Russian people and the formation of the Kyivan state] (1946), who referred to the Kyivan Rus’ as the common cradle of Eastern Slavs. Following his statement about the ethnic unity of the Kyivan Rus’ (refuted in a number of publications since), ² Soviet philologists argued for the existence of a common language in the Kyiv Rus’. Later on, this common language was altered in Ukraine and Belarus under the influence of the Polish and Lithuanian languages, argued Soviet scholars. They conclude once again that Russia, even under Soviet rule, appears to be a lawful heir of Rus’, entitled to “reunite” with its ancient territories.

“Kyivan Rus’” became part of the history of Russia as well as part of Russian art history. Specifically, Piotr Gnedich in 1885 placed the history of arts of “Kyivan Rus’” and “Northern Russia” in one chapter: “Rus’” (bearing in mind Russia). However, unlike the art of Northern Rus’, the art of Kyivan Rus’ did not fit into his vision of Rus’ art as a manifestation of the true spirit of the “Russian soul.” Both state formations were united by heredity, the shift of the center of civil power from Kyiv to Vladimir-Zalessky (Vladimir-on-Klyazma). In Alexei Novitsky’s two-volume History of Russian Art, “Rus culture” and “Russian culture” are treated as synonymous. Its origins in Russian culture date back to the princely era and concern primarily the cities of Chernihiv (now Ukraine) and Kyiv (now the capital of Ukraine).

Thus, after the integration of the territories, the history of these territories was integrated into the all-Russian narrative.

A Colonized History of Art? Ukrainian Scholarship before the Soviet Rule

Art history in Ukraine developed following Russia’s colonial moulds that were designed during the late 18^th to the 19th century and inherited by the Soviet Union. It was characterized by the further marginalization of the Ukrainian language, propagation of Russian as a language of scholarship, and imposition of the institutional hierarchy, where Moscow and Saint Petersburg preserved their primacy while Ukraine was regarded as a remote province with parochial scholarship.

From the very beginning, Ukrainian art history has had three main centers: Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa, whose universities were founded in 1834, 1805, and 1865, respectively. However, when one tries to write a comprehensive historiographical survey, one faces the difficulty of finding art historians who qualify to be referred to as Ukrainian without any reservation. All art historians who were born in Russia but worked in Ukraine or vice versa are considered Russian. This fact can be regarded as a kind of cultural appropriation. Moreover, this narrative of the Russian art historiography is broadcast worldwide, consolidating the construct of the “Great Russian culture.” Thus, the early Ukrainian art history requires a thorough and profound reconstruction.

The Department of Theory and History of Art was founded at Kharkiv University in 1863, only six years later than the eponymous department at Moscow University (now Lomonosov Moscow State University). A vivid example of the institutional hierarchy is the situation with the Imperial Kharkiv University, created in 1805 on the initiative of Vasyl Karazin. Educational programs were actually “discharged” from the center. A researcher of the Kharkiv University School of Art History, Serhiy Pobozhii, notes that in 1820 a course in aesthetics was appointed at the Faculty of Arts, according to the curriculum of the Moscow University (Pobozhii 2019, 6). In addition, despite the establishment of the Department of Theory and History of Art in Kharkiv in 1863, due to the lack of a specialist, lectures in the discipline were not given or were given irregularly (Pobozhii 2019, 12). As soon as a powerful local school began to form at the university, it was repressed. In October 1933, the entire Kharkiv Art History section was arrested (S. Taranushenko, D. Hordeeva, O. Nikol’s’ka, O. Barladina, etc.) (Pobozhii 2019, 24).

The repressive mechanisms (suspension, arrests, physical destruction) made it possible to control the colony so that it (1) did not turn into a unique and independent center and (2) maintained paternalistic dependence on the metropolis.

Yegor Redin (1863–1908), a student of Nikodim Kondakov, a scholar famous for his studies in mediaeval iconography, had served as the department’s director for 30 years. Redin is a good example of academic exchanges during the early history of Ukrainian universities. Redin graduated from Odessa University, where he wrote his thesis under Kondakov’s supervision. Thus, Redin focused on attribution, examination of style, and iconographic analysis in his essays on Byzantine art. As with Kondakov, Redin was interested in showing the Eastern (Syriac) influences on the art of Rus’, with Byzantine art serving as an intermediary (Pobozhii 1993). In his further studies, he followed Kondakov’s trail and explored Greek and Italian influences on the art of mediaeval Ukraine, employing iconographic analysis and searching for stylistic similarities.

Fedir Schmit (1877–1937) was another important art historian from Kharkiv who can be considered as a follower of Kondakov and Redin. Schmit was born and educated in Saint Petersburg. He moved to Kharkiv in 1912 after graduating from the University of Saint Petersburg. Schmit worked as a professor at the Department of Theory and History of Art at Kharkiv University until 1921 when he moved to Kyiv to take over the Archaeological Commission of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and lecture at the Kyiv Arts Institute. He signed the protest petition against the Red Terror in the summer of 1919; consequently, he was arrested in Saint Petersburg in 1932 and executed in Tashkent in 1937. Thus, his life is a perfect example of the inextricable interweaving of Ukrainian and Russian art history. Schmit’s outstanding contribution to the Kharkiv school of art history is irrefutable.

Whereas Schmit partly adhered to Kondakov’s iconographic method in his study of ancient Rus’ art, he went beyond its limits in his theoretical essays “The Laws of History. Introduction to the General Art History” [Законы истории. Введение в курс общей истории искусств] (1916) and Art, Its Psychology, Stylistic and Its Evolution [Искусство: его психология, его стилистика, его эволюция] (Shmit 1919). The ideas that seemed to be rather vague in the former essay were refined and reorganized in the latter.

Drawing on Vico’s concept of the cyclical development of culture and history and Wölflinn’s categories, Schmit proposed a six-partite model of art-historical development and identified a core artistic problem for each period: I. Irrealism, the problem of rhythm; II. Idealism, the problem of form; III. Naturalism, the problem of composition; IV. Realism, the problem of action; V. Illusionism, the problem of space; and VI. Impressionism, the problem of light (Shmit 1919, 298).

Generally speaking, he argues that the history of art can be considered an exact science because it has well-defined laws: styles are interconnected (the law of inertia), and one can easily discriminate between its periods (the law of periodicity) and see its advance (the law of progress). At each stage, art gets more and more international (through artistic exchanges), but every nation has its limited artistic vision (scope) and, therefore, the center of art is shifting according to the proficiency of each nation in a given period (Shmit 1919, 316–317). Thus, he attempted to reconcile the cyclical and stadial Hegelian model and adopt the Hegelian idea of the nation’s Geist.

Unfortunately, the theoretical research that he instigated perished following his tragic death and the suppression of his students’ work at Kharkiv University.

The art-historical research in Kyiv started with the establishment of the Imperial University of St. Volodymyr in 1834. At first, it was only a Cabinet of Fine Arts that stored the artworks confiscated from the Liceum Krzemieniecki. The Lyceum was closed several years earlier because of the Polish Upheaval of 1830–1831. The Cabinet of Fine Arts was turned into a Department of Theory and History of Art in 1875 and existed until the Revolution of 1917 when it was transferred to the Ukrainian Academy of Arts (later, the Kyiv Arts Institute).

Grigoriy Pavlutskyi (1861–1924), the future head of the Department of Theory and History of Art at Kyiv University, was born in Kyiv (Puchkov 2018). He received a classical education at Kyiv Gymnasia and entered Kyiv University to study classical philology. During his studies, he shifted his focus to Greek art and devoted his master’s thesis to the genesis of the Corinthian order. Pavlutskyi received a negative review from Adrian Prakhov (1846–1916), who held a professorship in the department at that time. Prakhov, who was born in Belarus and educated in Saint Petersburg, treated Pavlutskyi with the contempt that was often adopted by the Russian intelligentsia toward their Ukrainian peers. Fedir Fortunskyi, the dean of the University, considered the review a result of a conflict of interests (Pavlytskyi might seek to become a professor too) and appointed other reviewers who praised Pavlytskyi’s research. Nevertheless, after a couple of essays on Greek art, Pavlytskyi decided to switch to Ukrainian art, considering it a safer haven, as there was no rivalry.

Pavlytskyi’s approach to art history was comparativist: he compared artworks of different periods and by different masters to probe the connections between them. In his essay from the early 1900s titled “On the Link between Art and Culture” he also argued that artworks must be put in their historical context; in other words, he argued for Kulturwissenschaft, which became one of the dominant approaches in the European art-historical scholarship of the first decades of the 19th century (Pavlutskiy 1900).

Arrival of “Mysteztvoznavstvo”: A Soviet Art History

Russification and cultural appropriation continued under Soviet rule despite the short-lived policy of “Ukrainization” of the 1920s. However, those were not the only tools of oppression and colonization: a new terminology, the so-called Newspeak, was also imposed. Newspeak isolated Soviet humanities from the outer world, and the history of art in Ukraine followed suit.

The so-called iskusstvovedenie (“mysteztvoznavstvo” in Ukrainian) merged the theory and history of art and art criticism into a methodologically heterogeneous mixture. Mysteztvoznavstvo as an official title of scientific degrees was introduced by the Resolution of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR “On Scientific Degrees and Titles” №464 of March 20, 1937 (paragraph 11, subparagraph c, iskusstvovedenie). The title of the degree carved a deep rift once and for all between Soviet scholarship (including its Ukrainian branch) and the Western world. Nomen est omen: despite the preservation of the Department of Theory and History of Art, the Soviet science of art had lost its structure and disciplinary clarity. To this day, “mysteztvoznavstvo” remains the name of a scientific degree and stands in the way of the successful integration of Ukrainian scholarship into the international academic community. The importance of such integrations will be discussed later.

While delving into these issues, for the sake of consistency, we undertake to refer to the Ukrainian scholars as art historians despite that the name of their degree in Ukrainian is closer to “art expert.”

It is said that the Soviet scholars borrowed the term “mysteztvoznavstvo” from German-language scholarship for it is the literal translation of the term “kunstwissenschaft.” It had to merge art criticism, theory, and history of art. Mysteztvoznavstvo brings to mind Hans Sedlmayr’s article of 1933, where he introduced the “second science of art” that marked the establishment of the New Vienna School (Pächt 1933). In his article, Sedlmayr used the term “Kunstwissenschaft” as superior to “Kunstgeschichte.” Major Soviet scholars like Mikhail Alpatov were under the spell of the Vienna School, and considering that the first translations of Sedlmayr’s oeuvre came out in 1935 and 1936, it seems natural that they would have chosen the Russian version of kunstwissenschaft as the title for the new independent science.

German and Austrian scholarship played a prominent role in the Russian (and Ukrainian) art history before the Revolution. The first Russian translation of Adolf von Hildebrand’s work emerged in 1913 and Heinrich Wölflinn’s Classical Art in 1912, followed by Renaissance and Baroque in 1913, On the Interpretation of Art in 1922, and The Major Concepts in 1930. One would expect a drastic change in the methodological foundations of art history under Soviet rule, but this was not completely the case. Of course, the Marxist terminology was adopted but it never could have replaced the adherence to the formalism of the Russian art historians. In addition to the translation of Sedlmayr’s articles mentioned earlier, an abridged version The History of Art as a History of Spirit by Max Dvořák was published in 1934. Thus, the adoption of a German name for the discipline looks coherent with the methodological preferences of the Russian Soviet scholars. The introduction of the term “iskusstvovedeniye” also meant the rupture with the discipline’s subordination to history and emphasized its independence.

Iskusstvovedenie was introduced to Ukrainian institutions at the same time. However, it happened to coincide with the executions and repressions of Ukrainian writers, artists, and art historians known in historiography under the term “The Executed Renaissance” or “The Red Renaissance.” “The Executed Renaissance” meant the end of the policy of “Ukrainization” initiated by the Soviet authorities in the early 1920s. This put the issue of language marginalization back on the agenda. “Ukrainization” strived to mark the shift in cultural policy with the arrival of the Soviets. The “prison of nations,” as the Russian imperial regime had been branded, had to be replaced with the “friendship of nations” under Soviet rule. The Ems decree was revoked after the revolution and, therefore, the Ukrainian language could become a means of cultural communication. However, the drastic change of the 1930s signaled the beginning of a new period of Russia’s colonial expansion. “Iskusstvovedenie” as an official term and the whole science of art behind it can be regarded as one of the tools of the new cultural policy.

Why do we consider mysteztvoznavstvo to be a colonial tool? As discussed in the introduction, one can clearly define the common features of Russia/USSR’s colonialism in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states that influenced the scientific and cultural life of the republics that were brought under their dominance. Ukrainian art history bears witness to two of them: “formation of cultural transfer, which was tightly regulated and radicalized by the dominant force, guaranteeing the dominance and preference of Russian/Soviet culture” (Fătu-Tutoveanu 2012, 82) and the artificially created “absence of cultural institutions in the “colonies” capable of representing these colonies adequately abroad” (Pavlyshyn 1997).

Thus, in addition to the new terminology there were other conscious efforts to provincialize Ukrainian scholarship—namely, the drastic institutional changes. The Departments of Theory and History of Art were transferred from the universities to the newly established academies of arts, where teaching was limited to connoisseurship and the history of styles. For example, in Kyiv the department was transferred in the 1920s to the Ukrainian Academy of Arts, founded on December 5, 1917, where it remains to this day. However, no mention can be found about its origins as a part of a university in the survey of the Academy’s history or in the historical note displayed on its website. Apparently, art-historical education began with the establishment of the Academy.

In Kharkiv, too, the Department of Theory and History of Art was closed in 1920, when the university was turned into the Institute of People’s Education. As Liudmyla Melnychuk put it, in 1926 only a subdivision of art history was created as a part of the Department of the All-Ukrainian Academy of sciences in Kyiv (Melnychuk 2021, 27). The staff of this subdivision was formed mostly of Fedir Schmit’s students. All were arrested in 1933. Although they managed to survive the persecutions, the subdivision of theory and history of art was reestablished 30 years later as a part of the Department of Marxism and Leninism at the Kharkiv Institute of Arts and Design. The subdivision became an independent department only in 1992.

In addition to the academies or Institutes of arts, art-historical scholarship was also present at the research institutes. The Institute of Art Studies, Folklore and Ethnology was founded as the Ukrainian Folklore Institute in 1936 in Kyiv. Its activities focused on implementing the Soviet strategy of bringing art to the people because it originated from a number of ethnographic centers of the 1920s–1930s. The staff of the institute focused on publishing a multivolume encyclopedia of Ukrainian art. Its Lviv branch was established in 1939 and was presided over by Filaret Kolessa.

The lack of doctoral programs and scholarships that could have made it possible for Ukrainian scholars to go abroad and study Western or Eastern art as did their Russian colleagues forced young art historians to go to Moscow or Saint Petersburg. When they returned from the cities of the metropole, they were inculcated to act, consciously or not, as the agents of colonization who were bringing new ideas to the “remote provinces”—that is, their Ukrainian departments at the academies. Meanwhile, the Departments of Theory and History of Art continued to thrive in the Russian classic universities and prominent Russian scholars often went on research trips or conferences to Western Europe.

Therefore, the absence of doctoral programs until the late 1950s, the lack of art-historical literature in languages other than Russian, and the prominence of scholars who graduated from Russian universities resulted in the imposition of the parochial character on Ukrainian art history as well as on other branches of knowledge, thus achieving the ultimate goal of the Soviet authorities.

How did this strategy affect art-historical writing? First, Ukrainian art historians focused almost exclusively on Ukrainian art as an integral part of the all-Soviet paradigm. Their monographs were conceived only for Soviet audiences. Studies on Western art were virtually absent. Positivist methodology adorned with Marxist-Leninist terms was praised. Thus, it is next to impossible to find anything related to the theory or methodology of art. This brings us back to the words of Oleksandr Lopukhov that I quoted earlier: “One has to point out that theoretical training of the art historians needs a lot of work. For it is known that Ukrainian art historians do not raise issues of theory” (1987, 1).

Let’s examine just one work from the Soviet period: a monograph by Platon Biletskyi, one of the most famous Ukrainian art historians. In this work, Biletskyi addresses Ukrainian portrait painting of the 17th and 18th centuries. It’s written in Russian and was published by a Leningrad-based publishing house. Biletskyi tried to avoid referring to methodology related to the writings of Marx, Engels, or Lenin, focusing mostly on attribution and stylistic issues. This does not mean though that the book is free of Soviet/Russian platitudes: Orthodox art was examined in opposition to Catholic painting, which was branded as a tool of oppression; the Polish magnates whose portraits he studied were described as insolent and condescending (Biletskyi 1969, 232). Emphasizing the status of Poland as an enemy and the Catholic religion as alien to Ukrainians promoted the interests of Russia and its construct of Ukraine as part of the “Russian world.” The imposed enmity toward Poland persisted even in the face of specious Soviet internationalism.

Biletskyi paved the way for post-Soviet Ukrainian art historiography, where the concept of the nation becomes a cornerstone for writing on art. As he said, “There is no need to include in the history of Ukrainian art everything that was once created in Ukraine or by its natives far from the homeland” (Biletskyi 1969, 7). Ethnicity and Orthodoxy will become the key to the “Ukraineness” of art in the first decades of Ukraine’s independence.

It is necessary to clarify that the earlier remark about the challenges of integration of Ukrainian art historiography does not imply our intention to replace Russia as a metropole with the “collective” West. Instead, it pertains to the issue of obstructed communication, which hampers the scholarship from staying current and scientifically accurate. The Soviet legacy created a system that is riddled with corruption, where minimal to no contact with foreign colleagues was possible and contemporary literature in foreign languages was not stocked in Ukrainian research and public libraries, in stark contrast to libraries in Moscow—namely, the All-Union Library of Foreign Literature and V. I. Lenin State Library of the USSR (the so-called Leninka), which were always well stocked throughout the Soviet era.

As we mentioned before, the absence of doctoral studies in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities compelled Ukrainian-born art historians to pursue their degrees in the north. Whereas some of them chose to remain in Russia after their defense, others returned to Kyiv with a mixed identity and a preference for writing in Russian. This latter group tended to maintain academic contacts primarily with their Russian peers, a practice that continued long after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

For example, between 1953 and 1966, during the active postwar rebuilding period, the Department of Theory and History of Art at the Kyiv Artistic Institute was led by Petro Hovdya (1922–1991). Born in the Kyiv region, he studied at the Ilya Repin Leningrad Institute for Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture from 1943 to 1949 and later returned to Kyiv to hold senior managerial positions. He first became the head of the department, a position he combined with being the dean of the Faculty of Architecture and Art History. He also served as the editor in chief for the State Publishing House of the Ukrainian SSR, specializing in art-historical and musical literature from 1956 to 1959. Together with Mykola Bazhan, he coedited the six-volume encyclopedia titled The History of Ukrainian Art, which was the first comprehensive art-historical narrative of Ukraine. His own research encompassed studies on the artistic activities of Taras Shevchenko, a Ukrainian-born and Russian-educated academic painter, as well as Soviet painters Georgy Chernyavskiy, Oleksandr Lopukhov, Mykola Maksimenko, and Vadym Odainyk.

Even the selection of research topics was quite revealing. Ukrainian art historians did not engage in the study of Western European or Asian art, unlike their Russian counterparts, who extensively explored Italian Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque, and even Impressionist art. Instead, their focus was primarily confined to art that originated within the borders of Ukraine.

The aforementioned Platon Biletskiy again wrote on Taras Shevchenko, Ukrainian baroque art, and Heorgii Narbut, a Ukrainian artist of the early 20th century. His students worked on the art of Medieval Rus and Ukrainian baroque (Miliayeva 1965, 1966, 1969, 1983, 1985, 1996; Lohvyn, Miliayeva, and Svientsitska 1976) or Ukrainian 19th-century art (Zavarova 1967). In their turn, the students of Miliayeva and Zavarova continued along similar lines, where they oscillated between medieval Rus (Krutenko 1989) and the Ukrainian art of the 20th century (Dymshyts 2000; Chegusova 2002, 2003, 2010; Kara-Vasylieva and Chugusova 2005; Lagutenko 2006, 2007, 2008, 2011, 2017; Lysenko 2007, 2015, 2017, 2019).

Provincialization through institutional limitations was coupled with the enforcement of certain narratives. One crucial idea underlay all Soviet Ukrainian books and articles on art history, the idea of brotherly nations, whose history of art was inextricably intertwined. As it was mentioned earlier, this very idea was created and imposed in times of the Russian empire to justify the absence of independent Ukraine. Here the Soviet Union used the Empire’s legacy to keep Ukraine subordinated and isolated from its other neighbors.

To support our argument, we shall focus on a single case study: The History of Ukrainian Art from the Second Half of the 19th Century to the Beginning of the 20th Century, edited by Petro Hovdya and Borys Lobanovskyi. In the introduction, they traced the history of Russo-Ukrainian artistic contacts while subtly and persuasively demonstrating Russian dominance. For instance, when briefly discussing the history of artistic education in Ukraine, the authors mention art schools in Odesa, Kharkiv, and Kyiv founded in the 1860s, emphasizing the influence of Russia:

In 1865, the Odesa Society for the Promotion of Fine Arts established a drawing school in the city. Reorganized in 1889 as the Odessa Art School, this institution fell under the jurisdiction of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. Renowned masters such as K(yriak) Kostandi and H(ennadii) Ladyzhenskyi served as prominent teachers at the school. The establishment of a private school in Kharkiv in 1869 was closely linked to the educational efforts of the artist M. Raevska-Ivanova. One of the pivotal hubs of art education was the Kyiv Drawing School, founded in 1875 by M. Murashko, a classmate and friend of I. Repin. […] In 1901, an art school was established and put under the control the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, based on the foundation of the drawing school. (Hovdya and Lobanovskyi 1989, 7–8)

There are two main points to consider here. First, all local initiatives, after growing in size and significance, came under centralized control, specifically the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. Second, the Ukrainian artists who were in charge at these schools were Ukrainian-born but Russian-educated and, in the case of Hennadii Ladyzhenskyi, even the Academician at the Imperial Academy of Arts.

Thus, as in times of the Russian Empire, the colonizing strategy remained very similar to that during Soviet times. The central authorities used soft power to dominate the creative process. The state took control over the existing entities and put the agents of colonization on the top. If artists were forced to pursue their education in Saint Petersburg or study under the artists educated there in the late 19th century, in the 20th century art historians were compelled to continue their research in Moscow or Saint Petersburg because of the absence of doctoral studies, ill-stocked libraries, and the impossibility of traveling abroad, which was radically different from the experience of their Russian peers and contradicted the communist idea of the equality of opportunities.

All these artificial limitations and the tightly controlled knowledge transfer, which was inherently one-sided, support our idea of the colonial policy of the USSR toward Ukraine in the field of art history. As a result, Ukrainian art historians remained mostly isolated from their Western peers and restricted themselves to researching Ukrainian art, which was almost exclusively published in Russian or Ukrainian, making it inaccessible to a wider audience.

The Challenge of the 90s. The Nation as a Cornerstone for Writing on Art

Independence brought an end to colonial oppression but also came with its own challenges. The need to fill the gap in knowledge made Ukrainian art historians turn to the concept of the nation as a framework to write on art. But the Soviet heritage could not just be shaken off and the product of these efforts was rather biased and obsolete.

The reforms of the Kyiv Arts Institute are a good example of this trend. As Lada Nakonechna put it, reforms were limited to bringing back the original title “The Ukrainian Academy of Arts” and the restoration of the structure introduced by the Statute of 1917, directed at holding personal workshops with students assigned to one of their electives. Several new workshops were established—for example, for historical paintings or church art. With respect to the Department of Theory and History of Art, the only change consisted in the introduction of “Art Management” to the curriculum in 1992 (Nakonechna 2017, 4).

With respect to art-historiographical publishing, encyclopedias, surveys of Ukrainian art, and biographies of artists (Avramenko 2006; Naiden 2011; Kashuba-Volvach 2012) dominated the landscape. The Rylsky Institute of Art Studies, Folklore and Ethnology published The History of Ukrainian Art (in six volumes, 2006–2011) and The History of Ukrainian Applied Arts (in five volumes, 2010–2016), both of which epitomize Ukrainian national art historiography. The use of the term “Rus’-Ukraine” when referring to the period from the 13th until the first half of the 16th century exposes the foundational idea of building a continuous narrative of Ukrainian art as an uncontested entity. Looking for a Ukrainian tradition in the art of that period is rather premature because the territories were divided between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and The Grand Duchy of Moscow. Thus, their histories of art, too, were entangled. The rationale for ignoring the artworks created in the territory of Ukraine by artists of a different nationality also seems dubious.

The establishment of the Modern Art Research Institute in 2001 was a way to deal with the Soviet inertia plaguing the other traditional art-historical institutions that were reluctant to accept contemporary art as well as postmodern methodologies. However, their research output proves the impossibility of a tectonic change within the smothering paradigm of mysteztvoznavstvo. For example, the almost total absence of works in theory or methodology of art is quite remarkable and stems from the Soviet limitations discussed in the previous part. Only Oleksandr Klekovkin, who is a corresponding member of the National Academy of Arts, addressed issues of methodology in a number of his essays and handbooks. In the most recent handbook Art: Methodology of Research (2017), Klekovkin tried to shortlist the prominent schools and methodologies of the 20th and 21st centuries but ended up with a rather confusing survey of scholarship that was hardly relevant to contemporary art history. He expatiates mythological and ethnological approaches but fails to review the Vienna School of art history, iconology, or studies of visual culture.

The review of Ukrainian art historiography remains sporadic and biographical. One of the rare attempts to write a more cohesive account of art history was made in a book On Ukrainian Art and Art Criticism in the 20th Century by Mykhailo Kryvolapov (2006), an art critic. Of course, he was writing about the genesis and evolution of mysteztvoznavstvo in Ukraine, which makes his study inconsistent: he keeps shifting from art historians to art critics with an emphasis on the latter. Although he ventured to topple the Soviet narrative of Ukrainian art historiography and present its achievements, Kryvolapov nevertheless never questioned the validity of the term “mysteztvoznavstvo” that, however, blurred the disciplinary boundaries and hindered the integration of Ukrainian art into the international community.

Another issue with Kryvolapov’s survey is that he surveys the literature and lists important scholars while failing to analyze their contribution to the field. Thus, the reader can only guess about the main ideas, methodological approaches, or weaknesses of the preceding scholarship because, as was common in Soviet surveys, the historiographical review remains superficial. Nevertheless, the facts he gathered can still be a starting point for further discussion on Ukrainian art historiography.

The war of narratives was another characteristic feature of the 1990s that gained momentum over time. The notion of “the Russian avant-garde” is one of the most prominent cases. For a long time, painters who worked principally in Moscow in the 1920s were known in Western Europe as the Russian avant-garde artists, although their origin and identity were not homogeneous. From the beginning of the 1980s, the whole body of their work was tagged as “the Russian avant-garde” at exhibitions all over the world. ³ The term “Ukrainian avant-garde” was introduced by a French art historian Andréi Nakov while discussing artists whose works were presented at the Tatlin’s Dream exhibition in London (1973) (Stoliarchuk 2015, 7). The coexistence of these two terms and the dominance of the Russian avant-garde demonstrates the Russian strategy of cultural appropriation. Of course, some of the artists worked for a limited period in Moscow, but not all of them identified themselves as Russians. Oleksandra Ekster, for example, had a studio in Kyiv for a long time (Lozhkina 2020, 37). David Burliuk, the so-called father of the Russian futurism, was born in the Kharkiv Region and attended the Art School in Odessa (Mudrak 1986, 103). Oleksandr Arkhipenko was born in Kyiv, where he studied to become an artist and worked until his emigration (Berghaus 2019, 855). Thus, the acknowledgement of the entanglement of avant-garde history is a necessary step toward a less biased and politicized history of art.

Despite clashes over Soviet heritage, a bizarre friendship with Russia, however, went on. The academies have been using Russian handbooks in the theory and history of art, as Ukrainian scholarship still failed to develop its own theories of art. Some of the explicitly post-Soviet professors continued to lecture in Russian, standing in the way of adapting and reassessing art-historical categories in Ukrainian. Thus, the pending inevitable confrontation between the two trends, the national and post-Soviet spirit of the friendship between nations—that is, between Russia and Ukraine—was about to erupt. The Revolution of Dignity exposed all discrepancies in Ukrainian art history and made the community face an identity crisis.

The Revolution of Dignity and the “Decommunization”

The Revolution of Dignity of 2013–2014 proved to be a turning point for Ukrainian art history because it forced Ukrainian art historians and the whole society to consider the consequences of the lasting and deeply rooted colonial legacy on many levels. “Decommunization” as a process of dismantling the heritage of communist state institutions, culture, and psychology in the postcommunist countries was also an important step to the breakup from Russia, where pro-Soviet feelings were still quite strong. Decommunization also meant a radical change in the policy of cultural memory and marked the start of Ukraine’s decolonization. At the same time, it raised the issue of reconsidering and preserving the Soviet cultural heritage.

The exhibition Heroes. An Inventory in the Making under the curatorship of Michael Fer (Berlin) and the National Museum of Art (Kyiv) was the first attempt to address the Soviet artistic and ideological heritage from a more impartial perspective—that is, without any nationalistic bias. The curators aspired to present the Ukrainian heroes of different periods, from the Cossacks to the Soviet soldiers, from portraits of Hetmans to the bust of Lenin or Marx. It can be interpreted as a first step to acknowledging the tsarist and Soviet heritage but also as an attempt to draw a line between the present and the past.

Museums have also become where Ukrainian heritage once suppressed by the Soviet Union began to be put forward. Since 2007, the Art Arsenal in Kyiv has managed to implement a number of successful projects related to Ukrainian art of the 20th–21st centuries. Among them are Malevich+ (2016), Boychukism. Project “Great Style” (2017–2018), and Futuromarennya (2021–2022). The Odesa Art Museum was no less successful in this respect. Since the artist Oleksandr Roitburd, a representative of the “New Wave,” became the director, the museum began active work with its collection. From 2018 to 2019, the museum hosted the exhibitions Special Fund, Exhumation, and Strict and Stylish. These exhibitions sought to analyze the museum’s own collection, including the art of the repressed and the permitted art of the Stalin era. The practical consequence was a complete change of the exposition on the second floor of the museum dedicated to the art of the 20th–21st centuries. Museum policies became an impetus for the interest of art critics and art historians in the legacy of the 20th century and, therefore, in the colonial relations between Ukraine and Russia.

The artistic practices of Oleh Tistol, Mykola Matsenko, ⁴ Nikita Kadan, ⁵ Kateryna Lysovenko, ⁶ and Lada Nakonechna, ⁷ to some extent, preceded and determined the interest of art historians and critics in the problems of colonial heritage, construction of identities, and instrumentalization of history.

Decommunization sparked interest in the Western theory of art and contemporary art. Given the absence of significant theoretical or methodological works in Ukrainian scholarship, the emergence of Ukrainian translations of important essays by Western art historians was expected. However, they are published by the small publishing houses, whereas their bigger and older counterparts like Rodovid or Mysteztvo continue to focus on the catalogues, biographical sketches, or albums created for a wider public (Narbut, Malevich, Ekster, etc.; Susak 2010; Pavlova 2012; Marcadé 2013; Bilousova and Zavitii 2020; Filevska, 2017; Kovalenko 2021).

IST Publishing focused on contemporary art and theory. They published the translation of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (2020), Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (2020), Henri Cartier-Bresson: Interviews and Conversations (1951-1998) (Kartye-Bresson 2022), Does Anyone Still Love Cities? Ecology against Modernization, a collection of essays edited by Bruno Latour and Rem Koolhaas (2021), and Pascal Gielen’s Performing the Common City. On the Crossroads of Art, Politics and Public Life (2015).

Despite the outbreak of the war, the Ukrainian translation of Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes was released in 2022 by the Museum of the Kharkiv School of Photography (Bart 2022).

This period also witnessed a change in the institutions of art-historical education—that is, the aggravating decline of the National Academy of Arts and the establishment of the Department of Art History described in academic and journal publications by Lada Nakonechna, a young curator and artist. She argued that the structure of the National Academy of Arts and its curriculum had gone through only minor changes since the last reform in 1934, making it impossible to introduce any radically new courses in contemporary art theory or practice. The Department of Theory and History of Art is following suit here (Nakonechna 2017, 13).

The restoration of the Department of Art History at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv was an important step in the modernization of Ukrainian art-historical knowledge and scholarship. The loss of the monopoly infuriated the members of the National Academy of Arts: they accused the founders of the department of the lack of professional skills and proper art-historical training because the initial staff of the department consisted solely of trained historians. However, a different academic background proved to have its benefits: the curriculum of the newly established department included courses in theory and methodology of art; students were taught the methods of social art history, anthropology of art, and semiotic and iconological analysis in addition to iconographic and formal ones. The department also offered courses on contemporary art and curatorship.

Thus, the reestablished Department of Art History became an element of the decolonization of art-historical education and scholarship: the lack of Soviet-backed education in mysteztvoznavstvo helped the staff to forge a new kind of academic identity in a different, mostly Western, context. This shows not only in their approach to education but also in their research focusing mostly on Western and non-Ukrainian art, rather uncommon in Ukrainian art historiography. Of course, “Westernization” cannot be the only way to decolonize the discipline, but it’s also true that without acknowledging and digesting the ideas and methods of Western and Central European scholarship, the New Ukrainian art history won’t emerge. Bringing Ukraine back into the East-Central European context also implies its reintegration into the academic discourse.

In 2022, Stefaniia Demchuk and Illia Levchenko edited the special issue of Text and Image: Essential Problems in Art History, an electronic journal published by the Department of Art History. They invited colleagues from other Ukrainian institutions to reconsider Art History and mysteztvoznavstvo as opposing approaches in research and teaching. Demchuk translated into Ukrainian a published lecture by Ernst Gombrich, titled “Reflections on Teaching Art History in Art Schools,” which was given on January 4, 1966 (Demchuk 2022a, 6–17), intending it as a starting point for the discussion. The responses were mixed. Andrii Puchkov, a professor of mysteztvoznavstvo, academician in the Ukrainian Academy of Arts, and author of multiple books on art history and art historiography, strongly argued for the preservation of mysteztvoznavstvo (Puchkov 2022). For him, an “art researcher,”—mysteztvoznavez—is someone who is experienced in theory and capable of discerning different levels of artistic meaning within a work of art, whereas an art historian is someone who is only capable of reproducing existing knowledge (Puchkov 2022, 18). Puchkov claims that “[a] historian must remember quotes, dates, events, all kinds of junk that can be instantly Googled instead. But then why bother? Why should we exist if we can be replaced by Google? asks art researcher Lada MiliaevaI” (Puchkov 2022, 20).

Taras Berezuyk, who teaches at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture, was less sure about the usefulness of mysteztvoznavstvo (Berezyuk 2022). For him, the notion should be translated into English as “connoisseurship.” He sees these categories as interdependent but suited for different purposes: “If art history is a part of humanities with its clearly defined methodology and theory, then connoisseurship is a practical branch of knowledge essential to basic education. If the first aims to teach future scholars, the second is aimed at future managers of creative industries: cultural makers, museum workers, curators, etc.” (2022, 31).

The lack of unity in understanding mysteztvoznavstvo is evident in another essay by Marta Kravchenko from Lviv National Academy of Arts, who tackled the issue differently, from a lecturer’s point of view (Kravchenko 2022). She remarks on the changes she introduced into the structure of courses she has been teaching: first, by exploring more of the historical context of artworks and, second, by examining the artistic entanglements throughout art history and not focusing on a nation-centered narrative (Kravchenko 2022, 39–42). Thus, for her mysteztvoznavstvo meant both connoisseurship and a national art-historical narrative.

Stefaniia Demchuk took a critical position in her response, titled “Gombrich, Ukraine, and Another Science of Art”. Her stance was similar to one expressed here: “Going back to the notion of theory and history of art as a discipline that should be taught and researched, as well as tackling linguistic obstacles and reinventing methodology, might help to overcome the divide between Ukrainian scholarship and their foreign peers and make research conducted in Ukraine and/or by Ukrainian art historians visible to the European and global art community” (Demchuk 2022b, 45).

The discussion is yet to have practical outcomes, but it can be regarded as the first attempt to name the crucial issues in the development and practice of art history in Ukraine. Acknowledging the impediments is the first step to overcoming them.

An example of the evolution of a different kind of art-historical writing is the book The Permanent Revolution: Art in Ukraine, the 20th to the Early 21st Century (2020), published by Alisa Lozhkina, a curator and journalist. Lozhkina graduated not from the National Academy of Arts but from the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, which is another proof of the impossibility of change within the system inherited from the Soviet Union. The New Ukrainian art history had to grow from another root. At the beginning of her book, she explains that its title refers to Karl Marx’s concept of the “permanent revolution,” a revolution that has a beginning but not an end: “Ukraine has been riding the roller coaster of social upheaval for three decades as mass protests have followed one after the other, all while the tragic spectre of 1917 hovers silently overhead. Where the Western intellectual’s fantasy about revolution ends is where the reality of Ukraine’s recent history begins, and that reality exists in sharp contrast with any theory” (Lozhkina 2020, 10). The book is a coherent account of Ukrainian modern art under the Soviet regime and in the times of independence, but it avoids discussing the concept of “Ukrainian art,” which is problematic given its entangled history. Rather, the title suggests that authors should think about “Ukrainian art” in terms of territory, not as something belonging to a national discourse. Thus, all art created on the territory of Ukraine should be considered Ukrainian.

Ukrainian art critics and historians berated the book: its author was accused of being biased and subjectivistic, breaching the standards of academic writing, and misusing terms and concepts. But in my opinion, it was rather a conflict of discourses: from the very beginning, Ukrainian art historians created texts only for internal use (apart from the exhibition catalogues and catalogues raisonnés) that were quite different from texts intended for Western audiences. Thus, Alisa Lozhkina’s book, being intended for foreign readers, inevitably contained facts all too well known to Ukrainians or discussed the personalities sanctified by the national history of art in a way that could be considered offensive.

The period from the Revolution of Dignity until February 2022 can be considered as a window of possibilities. The educational and professional background of the new generations of Ukrainian art historians became more heterogenous, and their contacts with the international community were more robust. These trends made the confrontation with the pro-Soviet art historians who continued insisting on the “traditional” way of art-historical writing that was imposed in the 1930s paradigm inevitable. The confrontation must pave the way for the New Ukrainian art history as opposed to the traditional mysteztvoznavstvo that is a Soviet construct and, therefore, is unable to cope with its limitations. Thus, it also must be decommunized.

Conclusions

The open war that Russia started on February 24, 2022, made decolonization a pressing issue and sparked a series of heated debates. What started as decommunization eventually transformed into “derussification”—a questioning of every aspect of Russia’s infiltration of Ukraine’s culture. For example, should monuments to Aleksandr Pushkin or Mikhail Bulgakov, who were against Ukraine’s (or “Little Russia’s”) independence, be dismantled or transferred to be put on display in a future museum of Russian imperialism? What should we do about urban topography? How far should we go with renaming the streets and squares?

Monuments to the unknown soldier erected in every village, town, and city also came under scrutiny. Were they a component of the Russian colonizing narrative? Why don’t we erect monuments in memory of the victims of WWI or Soviet totalitarian rule? As you might recall, we started the essay by describing such a memorial at the Burianovo náměstí. Today we need memorials to commemorate not only victims of the past but also victims of the Russo-Ukrainian war that is still raging. These new memorials will reflect important changes in the policy of cultural memory and liberation from the Soviet and Russian clichés.

What does the change in historical narrative mean for Ukrainian art history? First, the notion of Ukraineness in the art of Ukraine has to become a subject of discussion as once happened with the Englishness of British art. This will pave the way for Ukrainian art history to go beyond the national paradigm and focus on the entanglements of its history. Second, we have to denounce the term mysteztvoznavstvo as one of the colonial tools that has been imposed to create a different paradigm of knowledge and writing that would separate Soviet scholars from their colleagues abroad. But in Ukraine, the new notion got a different coloring, as the introduction of this “new science” aligned with forced provincialization and isolation. Even though Ukrainian art historians have done valuable work preserving, describing, and attributing artworks, one still must step beyond positivistic documentation, which is impossible within the current paradigm. The absence of art theory in Ukrainian art studies is another confirmation of this fact. If the process of decolonization has well started, the quest for decoloniality of knowledge is yet to begin properly. Acknowledging the dysfunctional paradigm imposed by Soviet Russia and eventually internalized by Ukrainian scholars will be an important step in establishing a decolonized Ukrainian art history.