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ABSTRACT
This article examines the Soviet encounter with the Hutsul highlanders of the Eastern Carpathian mountains following the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland in 1939. It demonstrates that the period from September 1939 to June 1941 saw a wave of interest in Hutsul traditional practices across the Soviet cultural sphere that influenced expressions of Ukrainian identity in the USSR. Hutsul folk customs, clothing and handicrafts are displayed in detail in the two most prominent documentaries propagating the Soviet takeover of the Ukrainian west, Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s The Liberation and Iuliia Solntseva’s Bukovyna is a Ukrainian Land (both 1940). Through close analysis of the Carpathian sequences of these films and an examination of the attention given to the highlanders elsewhere in Soviet media, the article reveals how Soviet cultural practitioners view the Hutsuls through an ethnographic gaze that emphasises both their exoticism and their fundamental Ukrainianness. Drawing off a variety of precedents (both Soviet and non-Soviet), the films and other sources depicting Hutsul life contribute to a vision of Ukrainian identity defined by pre-modern culture and an absence of modernity, simultaneously furthering Ukrainian patriotism within the USSR and perpetuating imperialist perceptions of a civilisational gap between Ukraine and the Soviet centre.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Emma Widdis for her guidance during the writing of this article and to Birgit Beumers and Edward Tyerman for their efforts in making this cluster issue a reality.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Though the urban centres of western Ukraine were dominated by Poles and Jews, Ukrainian peasants constituted a substantial majority of the region’s larger rural population.
2. The film’s full title is The Liberation of the Ukrainian and Belarusian Lands from the Yoke of the Polish Lords and the Reunification of the Brother-Nations into a United Family (Osvobozhdenie ukrainskikh i belorusskikh zemel’ ot gneta pol’skikh panov i vossoedinenie narodov-brat’ev v edinuiu sem’iu).
3. Each film was prepared and released in both Russian and Ukrainian-language versions, though the Russian versions are more easily accessible. The films’ voiceover was read in each language by Leonid Khmara.
4. On Dovzhenko’s political difficulties in the 1930s, see Liber (Citation2002), 120–153.
5. All translations are the author’s.
6. On the politics of museum display, see Karp and Lavine (Citation1991).
7. It is worth noting that, perhaps due to technical limitations, all the highland footage in Bukovyna was shot outdoors. Though by no means all images of Hutsuls in Bukovyna contain mountains in the background, this representational trope appears repeatedly during the film.
8. Examples include Karmeliuk (dir. Favst Lopatyns’kyi, 1931), Koliivshchyna (dir. Ivan Kavaleridze, 1933) and Nazar Stodolia (dir. Heorhii Tasin, 1937).
9. Oleksa Dovbush was eventually filmed and released in reworked form in 1959 without Kavaleridze’s involvement, directed instead by Viktor Ivanov.
10. Similarly, Serhii Plokhy (Citation2011, 314–319) discusses how the annexation was popular among many intellectuals in the Ukrainian SSR on Ukrainian patriotic grounds.
11. On wartime Soviet Ukrainian patriotic discourse, see Yekelchyk (Citation2002), 63–74.
12. Examples of Hutsul-inspired films from these years include Sergei Paradjanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Tini zabutykh predkiv, 1965), Yuri Ilyenko’s The White Bird Marked with Black (Bilyi ptakh z chornoiu oznakoiu, 1971) and Borys Ivchenko’s Annychka (1968).
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Stefan Lacny
Stefan Lacny is a PhD candidate in Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge. His doctoral research investigates how early Soviet cinema processed its encounters with cultural ‘others’ in the USSR’s western borderlands in the period 1925-1941, taking as a focal point the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland in September 1939. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Cambridge and has worked as a guest lecturer at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland.