Reasons for Defeating the Politicization of National-Cultural Revival in the Day of the UNR Directory: Interpretations of Ukrainian historiography

Abstract

The proposed paper is devoted to the conceptual analysis of modern historical studies, in which the defeat reasons of the politicization of Ukrainian national-cultural revival in the days of the Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic are studied. It is cleared up that in the modern historiography the activities of the Directory of the UNR are considered as one of the stages of clarifying the political content of Ukrainian national liberation process at the beginning of the ХХ century. It is found out that general and individual elements of state building during the period of the Directory of the UNR were disclosed in the synthetic works of such scholars: B. Andrusyshyn, O. Boyko, V. Vaskovskyi, V. Verstyuk, V. Gorak, Y. Kalakura, S. Kulchytskyi, V. Lytvyn, V. Lozovyi, Y. Pavlenko, O. Reent, V. Soldatenko, P. Sokhan, A. Tkachuk, M. Shapoval, V. Yablonskyi, D. Yanovskyi and others. It is stated that modern historians see the reasons of the failures of the Ukrainian National-Democratic Revolution in a number of objective and subjective, external and internal factors, which in the presented research are analyzed in the form of cause-and-effect concepts. In particular, the historiographical content of the reasons of Ukrainian national-cultural revival politicization defeat in the days of the Directory of the UNR: the internal organizational and ideological particularism, lack of legitimized leadership and armed forces, destructive influence of the ideological «world view chaos», inconsistency in the implementation of the political program, segmentation of social base and escalation of military confrontation with foreign state formations. It is found that Ukrainian historians consider politicization of national revival as its higher level and the main way to achieve state-building priorities. The attention is paid to the fact that the defeat of the state-building competitions of the Directory of the UNR negatively affected the process of national-cultural revival and national liberation struggle of Ukrainians.

It is established that modern historians are in full agreement with the idea that the politicization of the ideas of Ukrainian national-cultural revival through the creation of the Directory of the UNR formed the institutional background for their implementation, strengthened the democratic process of forming the modern nation and revived the tradition of Ukrainian statehood.