Historian Oleh Turiy on changes in the attitude of Western intellectual circles to our struggle against the aggressor and the “homework” of Ukrainian scholars
Changes in the world’s perception of Ukraine were evident after the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, although they began with the Orange Revolution of 2004. The full-scale Russian invasion since 2022, and the heroic and successful resistance to it by Ukrainians with the support of partners from all over the world, have further increased and maintained global interest in our struggle, because it is not just about Ukraine fighting against Russian aggression. It is a democracy confronting tyranny with its persistent genocidal intentions. Dr. Oleh Turiy, Director of the Institute of Church History at the Ukrainian Catholic University and Vice-Rector of the same university, talks about changes in the perception of Ukraine and its history, including its church history, by intellectuals of the “collective West”, as well as about the chances and tasks of Ukrainian humanities in conveying and explaining our ideological heritage and its representatives, such as Metropolitan Sheptytsky.
– This latest war of Russia against Ukraine seems to be gradually changing the minds or at least silencing even those who for decades have not noticed Russia’s intentions and attempts to destroy everything Ukrainian, including the Church. As a researcher who is in contact with intellectuals in many European and American countries, can you share your observations in this regard?
– Thank you very much for this question, because changes have indeed happened and are happening. The process is not the same everywhere, because everything depends on people. I will give you a few examples to show you what trends exist and what the behavior of those people who generally have good will but for various reasons may have missed something or not fully understood something might be. If we take the field of theology of war and peace, a topic that we have been intensively studying at UCU recently, in the community with which I am in close contact, especially the professional German-speaking community in Europe, the war of Russia against Ukraine, and the cruelties of this unprovoked and unjustified aggression, are causing a very serious desire to rethink the naive pacifist position that has dominated the discourse there for decades. We know that even repeating the well-known Latin proverb “if you want peace, prepare for war” has become less and less “politically correct” over time. Certain circles have tried to replace it with the phrase “if you want peace, prepare for peace.” The concept of a just war or a legitimate right to defense has been gradually replaced by the concept of a just peace and dialogue at any cost. Obviously, these latter concepts are not bad in themselves. But only when there is no war, peace reigns, or at least peaceful coexistence is maintained, as it was after the end of World War II or even during the Cold War. Instead, these substitute concepts do not answer the question of what to do and what position the church should take when war breaks out, when there is an aggressor- a party that does not want peace
or understanding but aims to destroy the other. Obviously, in this situation, all kinds of talk like “let’s love everyone and live together” do nothing and do not save us from missiles and drones.
Therefore, in this community, where people are trying to sincerely and seriously understand why “politically correct” approaches have not worked and what is really going on, there is great interest in the position of Ukraine in general, and more specifically in the position of Ukrainian churches and theologians. That is, the world wants to listen to us. The experience of the resistance with which Ukrainians meet the enemy, defend themselves, and are ready to give their lives for values that for many in the “collective West” looked obsolete and irrelevant, shows that certain important foundations and principles do exist, and this war emphasizes them.
However, it is also worth remembering that there is another trend among some Western intellectuals. I am talking about those whom I call “professional ecumenists” who are accustomed to practicing the previously mentioned maxim of “dialogue at any cost.” As you rightly noted, if they do not directly support the Russian position, they at least try to relativize everything: to claim that “Putin is to blame” or “Kirill is to blame.” In other words, these people are ready to attribute the entire horrific war to individual figures, but they are not ready to see the imperial nature of the Russian state itself, the place and role of the Russian Orthodox Church in it, and in general in what is happening. In practice, the Russian Orthodox Church has actually ceased to be a church or religious institution, and is now an ideological pillar and propaganda mouthpiece of the regime, having partially succeeded to this role from the Communist Party. The latter is obviously a paradox, but modern Russia is made of such paradoxes, when, in particular, Tsar Nicholas II and Stalin are equally respected “benefactors” of this state and the Church. All of these things are noted by some researchers in the West, but very serious systematic work is needed in the field of what we now call decolonization, and from our point of view, I would add a clear need for de-imperialization. It is clear that these tasks cannot be accomplished in one go: a lot of work and research is required. Thank God, there are such scholars. What is very important is that they are not only in the “Western academy,” that is, they were born, for example, not only in the United States, Great Britain, or one of the EU countries. It is important that a lot of Ukrainians, even before this full-scale war, thanks to various scholarship programs and exchanges, ended up there and are now working in many universities. The war itself also added to this cohort a new wave of Ukrainian scientists who were forced to leave Ukraine, especially because of the occupation and the large-scale destruction of cities in the east of the country, and the danger of Kyiv being surrounded in 2022. And these people did not just stay in the West thanks to various support programs. There are many of them who are very actively using their time there and new opportunities to break certain speculative and at the same time persistent trends, to make the agenda pro-Ukrainian. In addition, there is another very important point here: when we talk about the international community’s support for Ukraine, we understand that we are talking about confronting the world of tyranny and the world of democracy. The Ukrainian struggle is not only a struggle to preserve our state and its territorial integrity. It is really a struggle between despotism and freedom. And all this is understood by those people who care about the values of freedom and democracy. I think that on this basis we can also build a kind of academic alliance, at least cooperation between Ukrainians and those people who share such approaches.
– The great challenge we are going through shows that we, Ukrainians, have not yet treated our rich heritage, the roots of our own identity, and the foundations of national security in the areas of religious and cultural life as consistently as we should. What has changed over the past two years, and what needs to be changed urgently in our approach to our history and awareness of its role?
– Let me start with an alternative view to our own. At least from the example of how our enemies act, we see that they use history in a very instrumental and propagandistic way to justify this war and falsify the past. All this further highlights the need for a truly scientific history based on facts. We, as people of faith, know the gospel principle: “Know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (Jn 8:32). I think this also applies to historical truth. Moreover, this phrase should be understood not simply as meaning that the truth will ” save you,” but that it will ” make you free.” Free in the sense of feeling your own freedom, dignity, and also free from certain clichés and stereotypes. The current war clearly emphasizes the reality of the existence of evil. Because before, we preferred not to see it, not to call it by name, instead talking about the “other position”, that “the truth is somewhere in the middle”. Now we can clearly see that evil exists, it is aggressive in nature, not dialogic in nature, so it must be identified and exposed. And it is necessary to fight evil for the truth, and only such truth liberates, as well as historical truth.
The Putin regime’s continued use of history, including religious history, in a very instrumental way, urges us to learn about the true history based on sources and facts, which liberates and leads to justice. Therefore, I think that, purely methodologically, we again understand the importance of sourcebooks and fundamental research, and we feel the need to rid this area of ideological layers. But we also feel the need to get away from ultra-patriotic, naive attempts to present Ukrainians as the most brilliant people and our history as an unbroken line of victories from Trypillians to the present. I am confident that an objective approach to our past will help us build our future on the right principles. After all, once again in history, we see that you can go halfway around the world with lies and deceit, but you can’t go back. This is how the Russian regime, through its propaganda of lies and hatred, has put itself in a situation where there is no turning back. This system must collapse or be destroyed, if not now, then in the long run. Accordingly, this allows us to look with optimism at the defense of our homeland and how to develop humanitarian knowledge.
– This meeting with His Beatitude took place in July 2023 and was rather a coordination meeting in the sense that our Institute of Church History would like not only to start another project of its own, but also to intensify interaction with people who work professionally in this area, because it is one of the priorities of UCU and the UGCC. Of course, a lot is being organised in this field both at the university and outside it. The Sheptytsky Centre holds many events focused on promoting the figure of Metropolitan Andrey and his heritage. The teachers of our management programmes often refer to the experience of the prominent hierarch to form value-based approaches in modern business and management. At the same time, it was important for the Institute to emphasise research tasks, because the popularisation and practical use of scholarly developments do not exclude, but require that these developments be based on a very thorough study of the sources that become – should become – available. In particular, a good opportunity and a huge challenge for us is the opening of the Vatican archives relating to the Second World War and the subsequent period. We are also talking about making sources from the former Soviet archives available… So I would say this: new sources make new approaches possible.
– In the field of Ukrainian church-historical studies, those dedicated to the study of the personality, heritage, and era of Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky are particularly noteworthy. His Beatitude Sviatoslav asked you to coordinate various aspects of this research. Presumably, you can already tell us a little about their agenda?
The second aspect of this matter is related to the interest of the Church and the wider Ukrainian public in making figures like Metropolitan Andrey known and understood by the world. Efforts in this direction have been going on for decades. We are talking about recognizing his virtues as a righteous metropolitan, and we also hope for his beatification. Discussions are ongoing, but there are also persistent initiatives to recognize the Metropolitan’s merits in saving Jews during the Holocaust. Some Jewish communities in Ukraine are making efforts to proclaim the Metropolitan Righteous Among the Nations. It should be understood that this is not about formal titles, but about making sure that social processes are based on truthful information received from thorough research. We need truthful arguments to knock out the weapons of untruth, false representation, and distortion that opponents used to attack the Metropolitan through the prism of certain ideological and propaganda clichés.
Speaking of what has been done, I would like to remind you that some things have just been published, and some are still being finalized. For example, the second edition of Father Andriy Mykhaleyko’s book about Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky and the Nazi regime was published, as well as an interesting study by three scholars from UCU-Vadym Adadurov, Oleksandr Zaytsev, and Anatoliy Babynsky-on the image of the Metropolitan in the diaspora. A serious selection of source texts is about to be published that will present various aspects of Sheptytsky’s personality through his significant articles that were important for cultural and spiritual life, national development, ecumenical thinking, and understanding of state and political processes. This book was also prepared by our colleagues from UCU-Myroslav Marynovych and Yaroslav Hrytsak, as well as Liliana Hentosh, who recently became a fellow at our institute and will coordinate the aforementioned research program on Metropolitan Andrey’s heritage. One of the objectives of the program is to prepare a good popular science biography of the Metropolitan in English and a similar textbook of his texts-sources that would be oriented toward a global readership and international context. There is a very interesting initiative of UCU’s Faculty of Humanities, which I think I can also announce, although we still need to work on it. This is the creation of a kind of synopsis of the Metropolitan’s life and work, not even by year, but by month and even day. This is necessary so that we can see as clearly as possible what was happening in the Metropolitan’s life against the background of the events of the time. This is a very interesting approach that will allow us to have both a closer look at Sheptytsky’s personality and an understanding of him in terms of global contexts. This work is important because a chronic weakness in our Ukrainian historiography is the irresistible desire of every researcher to begin historiography with himself. This is probably a heritage of Soviet “dissertation thinking” and a manifestation of some long-standing complex of inferiority. Instead, the greatness of such figures as Sheptytsky is necessary and only possible to understand in a broader context, especially internationally. This task cannot be accomplished if we do not understand what was discussed and debated during his lifetime, for example, in Poland, Austria, Germany, Great Britain, the United States, and other countries. Sheptytsky was an interlocutor of his contemporaries. I think this will be very interesting work. Obviously, this task will unite people from different structures of our university and from outside it.
– The fullness of the life of the modern UGCC, an organically Ukrainian and at the same time global church, also requires attention to the disclosure of all chapters of its history. What are the most frequent challenges on this path today: accessibility and publication of sources; knowledge of languages; cooperation between older and younger generations of church historians; the ability to explain one’s history to foreign colleagues and audiences; and preservation of cultural heritage from destruction by Russians in general?
– I think that the list you have prepared is an indicator that all these aspects are important. That is why I would be afraid to choose something as “most important” among those mentioned. So I’d rather answer in a slightly different way: we need all of this and more! Because we really need to find out what has not yet been researched, to have a dialogue at the conceptual level, to communicate with the international academy, to take care of the safety of sources, including digitalization, but to immediately think about making our treasures available to a global audience. I remember an episode with a respected Austrian professor who was generally sympathetic to us, Ukrainians, and our church. And when I reproached him for so often falling into the traps of Russian propaganda literature, he replied: “Imagine yourself in the shoes of a young student at an ordinary German or French university. Here he is, he has fallen in love with your church and history. What does he do? He goes to the library. What does he find there? A hundred books written from one perspective, and one or two of them are often of very poor quality, very polemical, written by a Ukrainian author or an author who sympathizes with Ukraine. How do you think he will develop a perspective of your history from reading this literature?” And this is understandable. Obviously, the situation is different now. The war has shown that not everything that the empire created for its own glorification is worthy of attention and serious interpretation. Instead, very often what has been pushed to the margins can show a very important and significant perspective. That is, we now have a chance to change the way we understand Ukraine and, taking into account the Ukrainian perspective, to better understand the modern world and its future. What is needed for this? People and money. These are two components that need to be worked on very deeply.
I have already mentioned that due to the current forced situation of war, we have realized as an unexpected advantage that many Ukrainian researchers from eastern and southern Ukrainian cities have found themselves in the international context and joined those young people who started building their careers there even earlier. This is a new generation of Ukrainian intellectuals integrated into the international community. And we need to think about how we can not only keep in touch with them, but also cooperate fruitfully and effectively. We need to make them feel that they are working for a common Ukrainian cause. We need to stop thinking in terms of someone being a “traitor” because they are now in a Western university. If he works there professionally, competently, and spreads a certain openness to Ukrainian issues among his colleagues via his personal presence, I believe that he is doing no less for the Ukrainian cause than someone who teaches our Ukrainian students here. I think we can reinforce each other and involve other people in the common goal. We must realize that we, Ukrainians, are in a situation where we have to catch up. That is, we have no imperial heritage or imperial resources behind us. But we can win through the quality of our work and product and through openness to others, to partners. In any case, there is no need to hide in our “ghetto”. We have just seen that Ukraine can survive politically if it stands as a united front with the help of its Western allies. I think that we can do something similar in the humanitarian sphere, particularly in the field of history, as well as in church and historical research.
by Volodymyr Moroz. Translation by Eduard Berdnyk