Understanding Contemporary Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism. Olexander Hryb

which even in pre-modern eras often became politicized. It is particularly true of national identities today, when the power of mass political fervour reinforces the technological instruments of mass political organization, so that national identities can outlast the defection or apathy of quite large numbers of individual members. (Smith 1991b, 59)

      We can now summarize some conclusions from the previous description of the relationships between national identity and myth. Contrary to the assumption of some “modernists” that national identity within a nation-state was created by industrial society and would be overcome with the establishment of post-industrial society, Philip Schlesinger has precisely noted that such assumptions have failed to conceptualize national identity, as opposed to the identities of emergent collectivities within established nation-states: “The parameters of the nation-state are taken for granted.” Schlesinger concludes that national identity “is to be understood as a particular kind of collective identity. In other words, it is an identity constituted at a given strategic level of a society” (Schlesinger 1987, 260-264).

      Another important aspect here is that an individual internalizes reality (“national relationships” as it was called in Soviet Russian or Ukrainian terminology)11 in the context of the cultural and historical conditions of a particular society. In other words, an individual perceives and adopts national relationships not separately but in the context of other theoretical and practical aspects of reality.12 This complex determines the specifics of an individual consciousness. That is why we can easily observe that the conditions of social life, which become more intensive in societies during some transformations and especially in a period of national revival, cause meaningful changes within national consciousness. Sometimes these changes can provoke a confrontation between the multiple identities of an individual and his or her different loyalties. And it is myths that play an important role in overcoming this confrontation.

      On the social level of national consciousness, a myth (ethnic, national, etc.) can also serve the important function of mobilizing public opinion and collective action in order to solve contemporary contradictions in social (national) development. The fact that the importance of myths increases mainly during periods of social transformation only underlines the importance of these mobilizing functions.

      In an ideological sense, a myth as part of different, broader cognitive schemes (as a part of a complex belief system) is required to reconstruct the connections between the past, present and future in social consciousness if, for instance, the chain of historical self-perception is destroyed or broken. The Ukrainian scholar Oksana Zabuzhko stressed that the mythologization of national life is a result of “weak or uncompleted national worldviews” (Zabuzhko 1993, 51). At the same time, a myth itself can also successfully initiate a new chain in the process of social organization, and this is the case of so-called “invented communities.” Nationalism as an ideology and doctrine habitually employs different myths in order to subjugate the masses. As Eric Hobsbawm notes: “Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so. ‘Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation’ (Renan)” (Hobsbawm 1990, 12). Even nationalists themselves are conscious of their use of myths. For instance, Mussolini, one of the founders of fascism, said: “Our myth is the greatness of the nation.” The founder of Ukrainian integral nationalism, Dmytro Dontzov, in his main work Nationalism, wrote at the same time (1923) that each nation has and needs a myth for its own reinforcement (Dontsov 1966). So, we can sum up that myth within nationalist ideology is supposed to play a certain functional role such as mass mobilization or reinforcement of “weak national,” or rather nationalist, worldviews.

      It is important to stress the extreme ability of myths to survive under any conditions and the hopelessness of attempts to deny a myth from a rational point of view. This situation of mythical thinking continues to exist in the present and, as Leszek Kołakowski said, contemporary people believe in absurdities no less than ancient people did. Individuals may deny myth for themselves, but not for other people. “Through life in a myth people become aware of transcendence, and in this encounter the objective and the subjective are inseparable; thus it is as impossible to find scientific truth in a myth as to reduce a myth to its personal, existential content” (Kołakowski 1990, 102). This must be what Losev meant when he wrote in his “final dialectical formula of myth” that myth is “a miraculous personal history given in words” (Losev 1991, 169).

      Kołakowski also believed that narrative knowledge, to which some myths belong, is, in fact, much more positive for mankind than one can imagine. This point can be illustrated by the following passage:

      When I try ... to point out the most dangerous characteristic of modernity, I tend to sum up my fear in one phrase: the disappearance of taboos. There is no way to distinguish between “good” and “bad” taboos, artificially to support the former and remove the latter; the abrogation of one, on the pretext of its rationality, results in a domino effect that brings the withering away of others. Various traditional human bonds which make communal life possible, and without which our existence would be regulated only by greed and fear, are not likely to survive without a taboo system, and it is perhaps better to believe in the validity of even apparently silly taboos than to let them all vanish. (Kołakowski 1990, 13).

      Of course, Kołakowski does not mean that myth should remain a core of the modern worldview as it was in ancient times; but, presumably, as he suggests, it does make sense to restore, reluctantly, some of those irrational values, in order to survive, and thus to deny our rationality, thereby proving that perfect rationality is a self-defeating goal.

      In the concept of nation a myth has not only a mobilizing and ideological function but also transfers its own ability to be perennial (if not endless) to national belief systems. This suggests two main conclusions: on the one hand, that any approach which oversimplifies the role of myth in national consciousness is destined for failure (such an approach would not take into account the fact that internal, irrational logic is as successful for myth as rational logic is for science); and on the other hand, myth is a necessary element of a complex belief system for an “orderly” group outlook, i.e., a cognitive schema of the world or worldview. For the latter, myth is required as a legitimizing factor under conditions when other legitimacy is not available. Psychologically, this is possible because the fundamentals of belief are “deeper than knowledge or thinking” (Psikhologia 1990, 50). Belief precedes knowledge and thinking precisely because the latter both rely on it. And since belief comes first it is stronger than knowledge and thinking.