E L SUJETO DE LA EDUCACIÓN

Another major figure in the history of the Slavs that occupies a significant place in contemporary memory politics of Russia is Prince Oleg. Oleg’s significance in mythmaking concerns an effort to gain control over the emergence of Rus' so as to prove that the history of Slavs is ancient and they were not conquered by the Vikings. In Vladimir Kil'burg’s film, Oleg the Seer [Veshchii Oleg 2020], Prince Oleg manages to unite scattered tribes into one polity, laying the foundation for Kievan Rus', and defending it both from the Vikings and the Khazars. Again, Russian cinema is going even deeper in history to make a claim about its superior position as an heir to the ancient past. A search of its foundation date is one of the major tasks of the memory policy in post-Soviet Russia. Bringing Prince Oleg into the present-day context is a claim that the prince is a direct founder of today’s Russia. As Wiejermars (21) maintains, “history can be an important source of framing devices” for many political leaders and movements. The scholar also mentions that “the rhetorical use of historical references can establish a line of tradition,” furthermore, “political actors can contextualize their connection to the political entity they seek to represent by indicating historical analogy between the present and a given historical occurrence” (Wiejermars 21). Putin’s regime follows the pattern by creating an image of an ancient prince uniting the isolated lands into one proto-state, demonstrating the necessity for Slavs to unite.

Russia has nothing to do with Kievan Rus' at all. In Russian official resources, it is considered that, after it was destroyed by the Tartars in 1240, Kievan Rus' literally moved to the north, where it was restored first as Muscovy, and then as the Russian Empire by reconsolidating all the Rus' lands. In Ukraine, in the meantime, historians insist that not only is Ukraine the only heir of Kievan Rus' as a polity, but also that the name Rus' belongs to Ukrainians as well and was appropriated by the Russians. According to Ukrainian historian, Mykhailo Hrushevskii, Kievan Rus' continued its existence as a state not in Muscovy, but rather in Halician-Volynian Principality in Western Ukraine, which became a political and cultural heir to the Kievan state and prolonged independent political life of Ukrainian-Rusian lands for another century after the collapse of Kiev. “The new state that arose there did not embrace all Ukraine as the kingdom of Kiev had done; yet for another century it remained a united and politically independent power in densely inhabited western Ukraine” (Hrushevsky 96). In his eleven volume History of Ukraine-Rus', Hrushevskii also introduced the concept of Ukraine-Rus', as well as insisted that Kievan princes used to call themselves russkie, Russian; this is why Rus' is an ancient name for Ukrainians. The Russian statehood, he would argue, emerged only after the Tartar Yoke was defeated in the 15th century and it has nothing in common with Kievan Rus' proper. The Vladimir-Suzdal principality, the future Muscovy, was a far periphery for Kiev, so there is no connection between these polities.

Hrushevskii’s interpretation of Ukrainian history has become the founding text for the construction of Ukrainian national identity, while Hrushevskii himself, banned in Soviet times, became a national hero of Ukraine featuring on fifty hrivnia note (Ukrainian currency). According to Serhii Plokhy, The History of Ukraine-Rus' “was also a major cultural and political statement strengthening Ukraine’s claim to national distinctiveness and ultimately supporting the cause of its political independence” (Unmaking Imperial Russia 6). Hrushevskii has contributed a lot to the

formation of the new Ukrainian national identity that is now perpetuated by contemporary historians in the process of nation-building. Although Hrushevskii’s oeuvre belongs to early twentieth century, he is much influenced by the nineteenth century aspirations of Ukrainian nationalism. Nineteenth century became an age of historicization globally, as modern historiography emerged seeking “to objectify the past in a professional and independent academic discourse” (Aleida Assmann, Shadows of Trauma 28). It is in this period, according to Aleida Assmann (28), that “national myths also emerge that appropriate the past to the present by focusing on particular moments that will support an identity-constructing narrative.” The study of history, therefore, often served the national constructions of memory.

According to Kraliuk (33), a contemporary Ukrainian scholar, “by and large, the medieval empire that is usually called Rus' or Kievan Rus, is neither Ukraine, nor, moreover, Russia, although it had a historical relation to the formation of the former and the latter.” The scholar further draws a parallel making an assertion that Rus' has the same relation to Russia and Ukraine as Roman Empire has to Romania and Italy. Romanians have taken their name from the Roman Empire but in fact were only a distant province, hardly influenced by the cultural achievements of the Roman Empire.

The same with Russians and Ukrainians. The former emerged on a ‘barbaric periphery’ of Rus', but in wake of different historical circumstances, have appropriated the name of Rus' and Russia (the latter is a derivative of Rus'). Ukrainians who now populate the lands that used to be the center of Rus' (in ancient times Rus' was mainly the territory around Kiev), although have lost their ‘Rusian name,’ but it is from their land that ‘the Russian land began’. Respectively, just like Italians have a lot more rights to claim the ancient Roman legacy than Romanians,

Ukrainians have a lot more rights to claim the legacy of Rus' than Russians (Kraliuk Iaroslav Mudryi 34).

Another aspect of Kievan Rus' that is most important for the Ukrainian national thought is that the Kievan state was an early form of what later came to be called democracy, based on the veche (literally, the place where people consider affairs of state importance), a council that solved most of the problems of the state. Democracy has never been the main principle of state structure in Muscovy, and was only briefly practiced in Novgorod and Pskov principalities, where it was eventually stifled. The modern Ukrainian state formation is supported by the historical fact of the early presence of proto-democracy on the territory of Ukraine during the Kievan Rus' period. “In spite of the democratic tradition of the Rusians, Muscovy has announced and established the idea of its unity on the principle of monarchy and autocracy: Moscow is the third Rome. It became the driving force of Moscovite history after the defeat of Novgorod” (Klymonchuk 189). With autocracy being the main principle of state power over the course of Russian history till the present time, the quasi-democratic nature of Kievan Rus' has encountered resistance both in Imperial historiography, in Soviet times, and today. The Ukrainian historical thought goes back to Kievan Rus' first of all as a source of democracy that should be emulated by the new state system in independent Ukraine. Another aspect of Kievan Rus' that should be noted is the relationship between Orthodoxy and state power. According to Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytskyi, in Kievan Rus', “the state and church power did not merge, they were separated, with each of them being autonomous in their realm of power” (8).

The diametrically opposite visions of the shared ancient past, hence, spawn different realities in which the Russian and Ukrainian cultural memories develop today creating conflicting images of the past as reflected in the present. As Kappeler argues, “the question of the historical

heritage is the most controversial issue of the Russian-Ukrainian relations. History is one of the crucial factors of national identity and it is used in the politics of history by states and societies” (112). The Ukrainian ideology is, therefore, based on a deep conviction that Ukrainians, among other Slavs, are the main successor of the common cradle of Kievan Rus'. Georgii Kasianov maintains that “the great majority of the world’s states and nations have undergone the ‘nationalization’ of history,” meaning “a way of perceiving, understanding and treating the past that requires the separation of ‘one’s own’ history from an earlier ‘common’ history and its construction as the history of a nation” (“Nationalized history” 7). The nation became a new telos for Ukraine, around which the new historical narrative and cultural memory was shaped. Having nationalized Kievan Rus' as the first form of Ukrainian statehood, Ukrainians were able to claim a millennial history of political thought.

2.5 Unknown Ukraine: Sketches of our History (1994-1996 Nevidoma Ukraiina. Narysy