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” (Reference Cohen2022, 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 Reference Prokopovych1961, 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 Reference Krekoten and Krekoten1987, 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’.Footnote ¹ Again, it was Prokopovych (Reference Prokopovych1981) 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:

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 Reference Teleshun2000, 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] (Reference Mavrodyn1946), 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),Footnote 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 Reference Gnedich1885 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 Reference Pobozhii2019, 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 Reference Pobozhii2019, 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 Reference Pobozhii2019, 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 Reference Pobozhii1993). 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] (Reference Shmit1916) and Art, Its Psychology, Stylistic and Its Evolution [Искусство: его психология, его стилистика, его эволюция] (Shmit Reference Shmit1919). 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 Reference Shmit1919, 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 Reference Shmit1919, 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 Reference Puchkov2018). 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 Reference Pavlutskiy1900).

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 Reference Pächt1933). 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 Reference Fătu-Tutoveanu2012, 82) and the artificially created “absence of cultural institutions in the “colonies” capable of representing these colonies adequately abroad” (Pavlyshyn Reference Pavlyshyn and Shevchuk1997).

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 Reference Melnychuk2021, 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” (Reference Lopukhov1987, 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 Reference Biletskyi1969, 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 Reference Biletskyi1969, 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 Reference Miliayeva1965, Reference Miliayeva1966, Reference Miliayeva1969, Reference Miliayeva and Afanasiev1983, Reference Miliayeva1985, Reference Miliayeva1996; Lohvyn, Miliayeva, and Svientsitska Reference Lohvyn, Miliayeva and Svientsitska1976) or Ukrainian 19th-century art (Zavarova Reference Zavarova1967). In their turn, the students of Miliayeva and Zavarova continued along similar lines, where they oscillated between medieval Rus (Krutenko Reference Krutenko1989) and the Ukrainian art of the 20th century (Dymshyts Reference Dymshyts, Bilet͡s′kyĭ and Asi͡ei͡eva2000; Chegusova Reference Chegusova2002, Reference Chegusova2003, Reference Chegusova2010; Kara-Vasylieva and Chugusova Reference Kara-Vasylieva and Chergusova2005; Lagutenko Reference Lagutenko2006, Reference Lagutenko2007, Reference Lagutenko2008, Reference Lagutenko2011, Reference Lagutenko2017; Lysenko Reference Lysenko and Skrypnyk2007, Reference Lysenko, Balashova and German2015, Reference Lysenko, Chebykin, Koval′chuk and I͡Alans′kyĭ2017, Reference Lysenko, Dziuba and Zhukovskyi2019).

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:

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 Reference Nakonechna2017, 4).

With respect to art-historiographical publishing, encyclopedias, surveys of Ukrainian art, and biographies of artists (Avramenko Reference Avramenko2006; Naiden Reference Naiden2011; Kashuba-Volvach Reference Kashuba-Volvach2012) 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 (Reference Klekovkin2017), 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 (Reference Kryvolapov2006), 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.Footnote 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 Reference Stoliarchuk2015, 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 Reference Lozhkina2020, 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 Reference Mudrak1986, 103). Oleksandr Arkhipenko was born in Kyiv, where he studied to become an artist and worked until his emigration (Berghaus Reference Berghaus2019, 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,Footnote ⁴ Nikita Kadan,Footnote ⁵ Kateryna Lysovenko,Footnote ⁶ and Lada Nakonechna,Footnote 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 Reference Susak2010; Pavlova Reference Pavlova2012; Marcadé Reference Marcadé2013; Bilousova and Zavitii Reference Bilousova and Zavitii2020; Filevska, Reference Filevska2017; Kovalenko Reference Kovalenko2021).

IST Publishing focused on contemporary art and theory. They published the translation of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (Reference Berger2020), Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Reference Gumbrecht2020), Henri Cartier-Bresson: Interviews and Conversations (1951-1998) (Kartye-Bresson Reference Kartye-Bresson2022), Does Anyone Still Love Cities? Ecology against Modernization, a collection of essays edited by Bruno Latour and Rem Koolhaas (Reference Latour and Koolhaas2021), and Pascal Gielen’s Performing the Common City. On the Crossroads of Art, Politics and Public Life (Reference Gielen2015).

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 Reference Bart2022).

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 Reference Nakonechna2017, 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 Reference Demchuk2022a, 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 Reference Puchkov2022). 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 Reference Puchkov2022, 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 Reference Puchkov2022, 20).

Taras Berezuyk, who teaches at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture, was less sure about the usefulness of mysteztvoznavstvo (Berezyuk Reference Berezyuk2022). 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.” (Reference Puchkov2022, 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 Reference Kravchenko2022). 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 Reference Kravchenko2022, 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 Reference Demchuk2022b, 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 Reference Lozhkina2020, 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.