Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas

Im Auftrag des Instituts für Ost- und Südosteuropaforschung Regensburg
herausgegeben von Martin Schulze Wessel und Dietmar Neutatz

Ausgabe: 64 (2016), 3, S. 507-509

Verfasst von: Christopher Gilley

 

Alfred Eisfeld / Konrad Maier (Hrsg.): Loyalität, Legitimität, Legalität. Zerfalls-, Separations- und Souveränisierungsprozesse in Ostmittel- und Osteuropa 1914–1921. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014. 257 S., 1 Tab. = Veröffentlichungen des Nordost-Instituts, 17. ISBN: 978-3-447-06767-6.

The exchange of ideas between scholars in European Union countries and those in the states of the former Soviet Union are sometimes tricky. The obstacles can be both intellectual, resulting from different methodological and even ideological approaches, and practical, created by the difficulty of acquiring Western monographs and journals in the East or vice versa. The collection Loyalty, Legitimacy, Legality. Processes of Disintegration, Separation and Sovereignisation in Central Eastern and Eastern Europe, 1914—1921 publishes the results of a conference that sought to promote such dialogue. A particularly large number of Ukrainian scholars seem to have participated. Consequently, the collection is particularly good at showcasing some research that might not otherwise reach a German-reading audience. However, it also reveals that the difficulties of communication remain, particularly between Western and Ukrainian historians.

The legal scholar Otto Luchterhandt defines the three terms that provide the connecting theme of the collection. However, few scholars directly take up his terminology in their pieces. The exceptions are Rudolf A. Mark, Sebastian Rimestad and Pascal Trees. The latter’s examination of Polish soldiers’ residual loyalty after 1918 to the empires for which they fought in the Great War is one of the highlights of the book. Trees uses a broad base of primary sources and grants the term loyalty serious theoretical consideration. He finds indications of Polish loyalty toward the partitioning powers during the war and evidence for tensions between soldiers from different parts of the once divided Poland in the Polish army after the creation of the new state. It is only surprising that he does not refer to some of the recent relevant literature by Julia Eichenberg and Alexander Watson; indeed, the latter has directly addressed the same issues of Polish soldiers’ loyalty to the German Empire.

Other contributors, like Trees, discuss the relationship between the old empires and their subjects. In an intelligently and concisely written essay, Alexei Miller analyses the entanglement of the foreign and domestic policies of the four Central and East European empires. As a result of this, their use of the national question against their opponents during the Great War fatally undermined their own legitimacy in the eyes of the people they ruled. Irina V. Čerkaz’janova, by contrast, provides an example of the empires repressive domestic policy, in this case toward German-speaking educational institutions in the Romanov empire. She marshals an impressive range of archival sources to show that the debate on the German question had begun before 1914; while the measures adopted during the war did not aim at Russification, this was their practical result.

The collapse of the ancien régime states allowed the rise of new ones. Marek Kornat and Mariana Hausleitner examine different concepts of statehood proposed for, respectively, Poland and Bukovina, while Andrij Kudrjačenko and Rudolf A. Mark do the same for Ukraine. These are much-studied topics, but the articles by Mark and Hausleitner are particularly successful at presenting a large amount of information concisely; they are very useful introductions to their subjects. Pointing to the initial preference of many Ukrainian intellectuals for a federation with Russia over independence, Mark argues that the break in loyalty came with the October Revolution and the resulting war with the Bolsheviks. Hausleitner examines a topic also looked at by Mark, namely the land question, and shows how it intertwined with inter-ethnic conflicts. Kornat compares the concepts of Polish statehood put forward by Józef Piłsudski and Roman Dmowski; he then analyses the reasons for the failures of the former. Like many Polish contributions to this subject, Kornat fails to consider that many non-Poles, especially Ukrainians, did not desire to be freed by Poland. Kudrjačenko recaps plans for Ukraine’s future put forward after 1914, including some by German theorists of Mitteleuropa. Although the author obviously reads German, it is interesting that he does not refer to any recent German-language works on the topic.

These plans came into conflict with the presence of national minorities in the areas claimed by the new states. Joachim Tauber demonstrates how the Polish-Lithuanian conflict over Vilnius fuelled the Lithuanians’ hesitance in addressing the question of minority rights. Cornelia Schlarb has written a useful, concise introduction to the incorporation of Bessarabia into the Kingdom of Rumania in which she explains how the German settlers there supported the act as they saw the Kingdom as the best guarantor of their rights as landowners. Both articles are reminders that actively seeking out support from national minorities abroad could help undermine the new states’ legitimacy.

The three themes of imperial collapse, new state concepts and ethnic minorities, of course, all shaped the history of Ukraine in this period; it is therefore fitting that almost half the articles in the collection are devoted to Ukraine in one way or another. Jurij Kotljar, Igor Škljaev and Aleksandr Beznosov study local aspects of the turmoil in Ukraine. They investigate, respectively, the peasant republics created in southern Ukraine after 1917, Odesans’ experience of Revolution and Civil War and the armed formations set up by German settlers. The articles are all fact-heavy accounts of events that provide informative and self-contained introductions to topics woefully undercovered in the German-language literature (or indeed, Western historiography as a whole). Because they are of a perfect length for students, they are useful teaching aids. Taken together, they demonstrate in an exemplary manner that the larger Civil War between Reds, Whites, nationalist governments and foreign interventionists created the conditions for a multitude of smaller, local civil wars.

Other Ukrainian scholars look at transnational and transimperial connections. Aleksandr Rublev studies the role of (Habsburg) Galician Ruthenians in the (Romanov) Dnipro Ukraine, while Viktorija Solosenko looks at the ties between the Ukrainian and Finnish states created after the fall of the tsars. Rublev is right to argue that Galicians played an important role in events in the Ukraine as a whole, yet his account is written from the perspective that the Western Ukrainians were the true bearers of Ukrainian national identity. Solosenko finds some interesting points of contact, but she fails to answer the key question of why an independent, non-Soviet Finnish state was successful whereas a Ukrainian one was not.

In addition, three articles examine the relationship between religion, and ethnicity and loyalty to the state. Natalija Rubleva portrays the largely Polish Roman Catholic clergy in the Russian Empire as a decided opponent of both the tsarist state and Ukrainian nationalism. However, she does not consider the tensions created for priests by Christ’s injunction to serve earthly rulers and the fact that in their case this ruler not only professed a different confession but also persecuted their own. More nuanced is Elżbieta Alabru­dzińska’s study of Protestants in the eastern territories of the newly independent Poland. She shows how the German-dominated churches did not oppose the Polish state and could often help cool inter-ethnic tensions, yet they also helped slow down the Polonisation of Protestant communities. There were links between religion and ethnicity, but churches were not simply the expressions of national identity. Sebastian Rimestad confirms this point with a lucid examination of the canonical, political and ethnic issues surrounding the transferral of the Estonian Orthodox church from the jurisdiction of the Russian Patriarchate to that of Constantinople.

The organisers of the conference have made a good choice in the paper topics: they interlock well in that they examine a common set of themes from a number of viewpoints. Many of the articles will be useful to lecturers working in a German-language setting as they provide substantive yet concise introductions to their subjects for students. The goal of overcoming the gulf between Western and Ukrainian historiography is also a worthy one.

However, the articles reveal that there is much to be done in the latter area. Several of the Ukrainian contributions, particularly those dealing with the local dimensions of the Civil War, provide a wealth of information on events that rarely receive attention in the West. However, one sees evidence here of the often naively empiricist stance advocated by many contemporary Ukrainian historians: the belief that one must collect information on the past (and present it in a detailed chronology) before one can actually analyse events. This view is often accompanied by an uncritical position toward a nationalist teleology that is only interested in individuals and events as they relate to the so-called liberation movement. Underlying these methodological and ideological differences is a practical difficulty: most of the Ukrainian contributions do not cite any of the relevant Western research. Access to English- and German-language scholarship is highly problematic in Ukraine: even Kyiv’s national Vernads’kyi Library contains very few pertinent Western monographs and journals. Translations of some books, particularly by the Kyiv publisher Krytyka, are a step in the right direction, but these only scratch the surface of the problem. Nevertheless, one can hope that conferences and collections such as this will help overcome such hurdles.

Christopher Gilley, Hamburg

Zitierweise: Christopher Gilley über: Alfred Eisfeld / Konrad Maier (Hrsg.): Loyalität, Legitimität, Legalität. Zerfalls-, Separations- und Souveränisierungsprozesse in Ostmittel- und Osteuropa 1914–1921. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014. 257 S., 1 Tab. = Veröffentlichungen des Nordost-Instituts, 17. ISBN: 978-3-447-06767-6, http://www.dokumente.ios-regensburg.de/JGO/Rez/Gilley_Eisfeld_Loyalitaet Legitimitaet Legalitaet.html (Datum des Seitenbesuchs)

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