Serhii Plokhy. Harvard Ukrainian Studies. Volume 34, Issue 1-4, 2015-2016.
During the last few years, history has taken center stage in Ukrainian political debates and spilled over to the East European scene. In fact, battles over history have become part of a very real, not virtual, war. The use and abuse of history in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict of 2014-15 has been well documented, but the rise of history to prominence in Ukrainian politics began earlier.
In January 2010, a Ukrainian court ruled on the criminal responsibility of the Soviet leadership for the Holodomor, the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33, and found Joseph Stalin and his associates in Moscow and Kharkiv guilty of causing the death of close to four million Ukrainian citizens. The same month, before stepping down as president of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko posthumously bestowed the highest state award, the star of Hero of Ukraine, on Stepan Bandera, a radical nationalist leader of the first half of the twentieth century, who was assassinated by a KGB agent in 1959. The decision aroused numerous protests in Ukraine and abroad, and the new president, Viktor Yanukovych, allowed a Donetsk regional court to rescind the award. Yanukovych did not stop there: bowing to Russian pressure, he refused to refer to the Holodomor as an act of genocide despite an earlier decision of the Ukrainian parliament on that issue. Ukraine was in turmoil about its history, and the political compass needle swung from pro-Russian to pro-Soviet to pro-nationalist, depending on the head of state.
It was in such an atmosphere, in the fall of 2011, that Hennadii Boriak of the Institute of History of Ukraine, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and I planned a series of conferences to discuss the state of Ukrainian historiography in light of its multiple and often conflicting orientations. We decided to organize three conferences: the first would consider interwar national and nationalist historiography, the second would examine the legacy of Soviet historical writing, and the third would try to look into the future of Ukrainian historical studies. We were fortunate to obtain support for that idea from our home institutions, the Institute of History in Kyiv and the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard, as well as from colleagues and friends at other institutions.
The conference on the interwar period was held in Munich in July 2012 and cosponsored by the Ukrainian Free University; the conference on the Soviet legacy, hosted by the Institute of History in Kyiv, took place in May 2013 with the support of a grant from the Renaissance Foundation; and the conference on the future of Ukrainian historical studies, cosponsored by the Ukrainian Studies Fund, was held at Harvard University in October 2013. Its theme, “Quo Vadis Ukrainian History? Assessing the State of the Field,” provided the title for this introductory essay.
The key questions discussed at the conference dealt with the relation between Ukrainian historiography and the main trends in “global” historiography. Because Ukrainian history as part of the European and world experience has been the concern of the research and publications produced at Harvard since the early 1970s, it felt right to convene a conference on Ukrainian history that would take account of its current status and look into the future in the very place where the “global turn” in Ukrainian historiography had occurred a few decades earlier.
The Way of Herodotus
The historiography of Ukraine as a territory, not unlike that of many other places, countries, and peoples, has its origins in the kind of historical writing that would probably be characterized today as global or transnational history. In the mid-fifth century BC, Herodotus described what is now southern Ukraine and its multiethnic population, dominated by the Scythians but not limited to them, in his Histories. Comparing the Dnipro (Dnieper) to the other rivers known to the ancient Greeks, he concluded that it was second only to the Nile. Thus the lands and peoples of Ukraine have been part of global history ever since the father of historiography wrote about them. Several centuries later, the first known inhabitants of the Ukrainian lands, the Cimmerians, made it into the Bible.
When the Rus’ chroniclers in the city of Kyiv began to write their own history in the mid-eleventh century AD, they already had a significant body of literature on the subject, written largely by learned Greeks, whose emperors and patriarchs had brought Christianity to the former Scythian lands a few decades earlier. The task of the chroniclers was anything but simple: they had to collect local lore and fit it into the Christian and imperial historical schema brought by the missionaries. They did their best to place themselves, their rulers, and their land in the narrative of the creation of the world, the myth of Slavic ethnogenesis, and the history of the Byzantine Empire. They insisted that they were in control of their own fate: allegedly, they had never been conquered and had invited the Vikings (Varangians) to rule over their land of their own free will, just as they had freely chosen Christianity as their new religion. But the concept of world history and the chronological table they used to date the events of their past came directly from Byzantine writings.
The vision of Kyiv and Rus’ as parts of the Christian universe remained fundamental to the chroniclers’ outlook despite the shock of the Mongol invasion in the mid-thirteenth century. But as the world of the Rus’ principalities became smaller, and the ambitions of their rulers local rather than regional or global, the chroniclers turned into guardians of local memory, which had little connection with universal history. Not until the sixteenth century did foreign writers again turn their attention to Kyiv and the Ukrainian lands, prompting local authors to relate their history to global developments. The onset of the Reformation, with its battles between Protestants and Catholics—in Ukraine, these mainly took the form of polemics over the Union of Brest (1596)—made the two camps think of Orthodox Ukrainians and Belarusians as part of a broader religious struggle. Polemicists, both Orthodox and Uniate, conceived their history as part of an epic battle between Christianity and heresy. The Cossack wars that began in the mid-seventeenth century not only focused the attention of Western writers on the region but also led them to interpret the Cossack phenomenon as part of the general European wave of revolutions or of the Christian struggle against the Ottomans.
“Although Ukraine be one of the most remote regions of Europe, and the Cossackian name very modern; yet has that country been of late the stage of glorious actions, and the inhabitants have acquitted themselves with as great valor in martial arts as any nation whatsoever,” wrote Edward Brown in 1672 on publishing Pierre Chevalier’s history of the Cossacks in translation under the title A Discourse of the Original, Country, Manners, Government and Religion of the Cossacks. In Brown’s view, the Cossacks resembled his own countrymen in some measure, as they had won glorious victories at sea; the steppes settled by the Cossacks also resembled the sea and required a compass to navigate them. This initial attempt to explain Ukraine to the English reading public emphasized military and naval history, heroic deeds, and parallels with the English way of life.
The eighteenth century brought the ideas of the Enlightenment to Eastern Europe, where they found interpreters and promoters in enlightened despots such as Catherine II. The main task of local historians—first Cossack officers and then noblemen in the imperial service—became that of integrating their past into that of the empire even as they stressed the peculiarities of their region. That was a theme taken up by the Cossack chroniclers who wrote after the Battle of Poltava (1709). The genre was perfected by Oleksandr Bezborodko, a former Cossack officer who became one of the architects of Russian foreign policy at the end of the eighteenth century. His account of the post-Poltava history of his native Hetmanate described it as having benefited from the enlightened rule of Catherine II. The imperial authorities, for their part, were busy integrating the Ukrainian past into that of their respective empires. In Ukraine, a local governor general sponsored a History of Little Russia by Dmitrii Bantysh-Kamenskyi (1822). The Galician past was actively incorporated into the history of the Habsburg dynasty and empire.
The age of nationalism broke the link between local and imperial history, making the history of the nation and its territory the main object of study. Mykhailo Hrushevsky not only moved from one empire to another but also developed a nonimperial intellectual framework to create a historical narrative for the Ukrainian nation. National historians revolutionized historiography by abandoning the annals of dynasties and empires and studying the people. While they endowed their prospective nations with separate and unique pasts, their antiimperial project also allowed for an element of universalism. Thus, most Ukrainian historians from Mykola Kostomarov to Mykhailo Drahomanov and Mykhailo Hrushevsky imagined their land as part of a future federation—Slavic in Kostomarov’s case, European in Drahomanov’s, and Russian in the case of the early Hrushevsky.
The twentieth century brought the idea of world revolution to Ukraine. Communist writers imagined Ukraine as part of a world community of socialist nations; some of them, such as Mykola Khvyl ‘ovyi, called on the Ukrainian cultural elite to reorient itself toward Europe. Another, Matvii Iavors’kyi, saw Soviet Ukraine as a Piedmont for Ukrainians outside the USSR. The Stalin regime put a brutal end to such prospects, arresting and killing their exponents. The concept of the “history of the USSR” reduced the transnational aspect of Ukrainian history to an emphasis on Russo-Ukrainian relations—a restriction lifted only with the unexpected fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
In the West, Ukraine and its history remained largely unnoticed throughout World War I and the interwar period, but the prelude to World War II, when Ukrainians found themselves involved in the Czechoslovak crisis and emerged as a factor in the German-Soviet partition of Poland, changed the situation. The Ukrainian emigre historian Dmytro Doroshenko published his survey of Ukrainian history in Canada, while the Russian emigre historian George Vernadsky gave his imprimatur to an English translation of Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s survey in the United States. In the United Kingdom, W. E. D. Allen published his survey with Cambridge University Press. He defined the “Ukrainian problem” as “one of the chief reasons for the absence of balance in continental Europe.”
The European war soon became global, turning the attention of historians and the public at large away from Ukraine to Russia and the Soviet Union as a whole. But the war also contributed greatly to the internationalization of knowledge. In the Ukrainian case, it drove hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees and quite a few professional historians to Central Europe and, eventually, to the United States and Canada. In the final analysis, wartime developments not only directed the attention of the English-speaking language public to that part of the world, but also produced English-language authors who were prepared to write about it.
The logic of the Cold War, which engulfed the world soon after World War II, promoted the spread of anticommunism and nationalism as a means of opposing the Russocentric Soviet historical narrative. But the origins of Ukrainian history as an academic discipline in North America also had distinctive transnational characteristics. When a chair of Ukrainian history was created at Harvard University in 1975, its first occupant was Omeljan Pritsak, a renowned expert on the languages and cultures of the Turkic world. His closest ally and cofounder of the Ukrainian Research Institute, Ihor Sevcenko, was an authority on Byzantine cultural history. Both wrote on Ukraine, placing its history and culture in the broad context of the Eurasian and Byzantine worlds. Pritsak’s successor, Roman Szporluk, had made a name for himself as an expert on European intellectual history before coming to Harvard in the late 1980s. In terms of their academic background, interests, and expertise, the founders of Ukrainian historiography in the United States and Canada could not imagine Ukrainian history except as part of the Eurasian, Byzantine, or East-Central European worlds.
Rethinking Ukrainian History
The first North American academic debate on Ukrainian history took place on the pages of Slavic Review in 1963. It featured the Turcologist Omeljan Pritsak, the specialists on the Revolution of 1917-20 Arthur E. Adams and John S. Reshetar, Jr., and the intellectual historian of East-Central Europe Ivan L. Rudnytsky. Rudnytsky, who wrote the conceptual paper titled “The Role of Ukraine in Modern History,” and Pritsak, who was one of the commentators, were post-World War II immigrants to the United States. Both had been influenced by V’iacheslav Lypyns’kyi, who initiated the multiethnic approach to Ukrainian history in the 1920s. The participants debated the issues of the historical or nonhistorical status of the Ukrainian nation, continuity in Ukrainian history, the nature of the revolution in Ukraine, and its historical position between East and West.
Ivan Rudnytsky, who claimed in 1963 that Ukrainian historiography had not established itself in the North American academy and was at best an adjunct to Russian studies, organized a conference on Ukrainian history in Canada in 1978. It resulted in the publication of a collection titled Rethinking Ukrainian History, including nine essays, as well as transcripts of a roundtable discussion on the major challenges facing Ukrainian historiography in North America. By the time of the conference, chairs of Ukrainian history and institutes of Ukrainian studies had been established at Harvard University in the United States and at the University of Alberta in Canada, and the training of graduate students in history had begun. Some of those students, including Orest Subtelny and Frank E. Sysyn, took part in the conference and published their papers in the collection. Also among the participants were Roman Szporluk, then of the University of Michigan, his former student John-Paul Himka, and Alfred Rieber’s student at the University of Pennsylvania, Zenon E. Kohut, a member of the Harvard circle of graduate students.
The first question to be resolved by the conference organizers was whom they wanted to invite to the conference—Ukrainian historians or historians of Ukraine. They opted for the latter, inviting historians of Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian background. Among the latter was Patricia Herlihy, then of Wellesley College. The organizers still had to prove to themselves and others that “Ukrainian history” was a legitimate term for the history of the Ukrainian lands prior to the emergence of the name “Ukraine” as an ethnonym. Omeljan Pritsak resolved that issue during the roundtable discussion by pointing to Spanish history, which dealt with the history of Spanish regions long before the establishment of the Spanish state and its official name. Issues of periodizing Ukrainian history and establishing appropriate English-language terminology attracted most of the participants’ attention during the roundtable debates. But the overriding concern, formulated by Rudnytsky in his introduction to the conference volume, was that under conditions preventing the free development of Ukrainian studies in the Soviet Union scholars of Ukrainian history in North America had to take on the task of representing Ukrainian historiography in the West.
“How should Western students of Ukrainian history respond to this distressing situation?” wrote Rudnytsky with reference to the sorry state of Soviet Ukrainian historiography. “Many in the Ukrainian diaspora community believe that Soviet ideological orthodoxy ought to be met with an equally rigid and militant “patriotic” orthodoxy. In the conference organizer’s view, such an approach would be selfdefeating. What is needed is the application of free, critical thought, untrammeled by dogmas of any kind, whether Marxist or nationalist.” Rudnytsky argued that the historians of Ukraine in the West can remedy the “deformations” of the Soviet historiography if “they themselves study Ukrainian history in a universal context.” He wrote that by treating Ukrainian history in the context of the country’s relations with the Mediterranean world, Central Europe, and Eurasia, one could “bring to light Ukraine’s unique historical identity” and contribute to the “better understanding of history of Eastern Europe as a whole.”
The two key decisions made by the conference organizers and participants—to broaden the field of Ukrainian historical studies by including non-Ukrainian scholars and make that newly constituted field an integral part of North American historical scholarship—were clear departures from the model of Ukrainian historiography practiced by Ukrainian emigre scholarly institutions, in particular the Free Academy of Sciences and the Shevchenko Scientific Society. Those decisions resulted in the training of a first generation of Ukrainian historians in history departments of North American universities and the subsequent publication of monographs, issued predominantly by the institutes of Ukrainian studies at Harvard and the University of Alberta.
Between 1982 and 1996, scholars associated with the new field published three surveys of Ukrainian history. Roman Szporluk’s influential Ukraine: A Brief History (1982) placed the modern history of Ukraine into the context of nation-building processes in central and eastern Europe. From Harvard came the authors of two major syntheses of Ukrainian history: Orest Subtelny published his in 1988 under the title Ukraine: A History, while Paul Robert Magocsi joined the field eight years later with his History of Ukraine (1996). Subtelny’s survey has often been regarded as representative of the national paradigm of Ukrainian history, while the second became an epitome of the multiethnic approach to the subject.
The appearance of an independent Ukrainian state in 1991 had a major impact on Ukrainian historiography. Subtelny’s survey, translated into Ukrainian, became a standard textbook in Ukraine for some time, replacing the Russocentric and class-based narrative of the Soviet period. It also competed there with outdated approaches and models rediscovered or “repatriated” to Ukraine through the works of Ukrainian emigres belonging to the “statist” school of Ukrainian historiography. No less profound were the changes in the West, where the emergence of Ukraine on the political map provided much-needed political legitimacy for Ukrainian history as a distinct field of study.
But the validation took place in a very peculiar way, with a debate in the Slavic Review (1995) on an article by Mark von Hagen provocatively titled “Does Ukraine Have a History?” Von Hagen claimed that according to generally accepted Western political and academic standards, Ukraine did not yet have a history: in order to acquire that status, the subject would have to be fully incorporated into North American historiography. A number of scholars from the United States, Canada, Central Europe, and Ukraine were invited to respond to von Hagen’s paper, indicating a major transformation of Ukrainian history as a subject of study. It was now attracting the interest of leading scholars of non-Ukrainian origin in the West, while those on the “ethnic” Ukrainian side included new arrivals from post-Soviet Ukraine, such as the present author.
Mark von Hagen’s essay offered a critical but sympathetic review of the field and, more importantly, set an agenda for its future development. Returning to the question of the perceived lack of institutional, elite, and even cultural continuity in Ukrainian history, von Hagen proposed to turn Ukraine’s “weaknesses” into strengths. “Precisely the fluidity of frontiers, the permeability of cultures, the historic multi-ethnic society is what could make Ukrainian history a very ‘modern’ field of inquiry,” wrote von Hagen, who specialized in the history of the interwar USSR. He continued: “I want to make a case for the study of Ukrainian history and its reemergence as an academic discipline both within and without Ukraine as a history intrinsically interesting precisely because it challenges so many of the cliches of the nation-state paradigm.”
Has Ukraine Acquired a History?
Was von Hagen’s voice heard and the challenge taken up, and, if so, what developments have there been in Ukrainian historiography outside Ukraine since the 1995 Slavic Review debate? These were the questions Hennadii Boriak and I had in mind when we discussed preparations for the “Quo Vadis Ukrainian History?” conference. Participants were encouraged to rethink the meaning of the term “Ukrainian historiography,” as more and more scholars are studying Ukraine, its peoples and territory outside the bounds of the national paradigm. They were asked to identify ways in which the study of Ukrainian history could enhance our understanding of European, Eurasian, and world history, and how European and global perspectives could advance historical research on Ukraine. They were also asked to reevaluate the historical roles of the dominant nationality and the ethnic and religious minorities, as well as the role of regions in the longue duree history of Ukraine. Finally, they were asked to share their thoughts on how Ukrainian history should be taught in the twenty-first century, and what dangers could be expected from the politicization of historical debates.
We did not expect to receive answers to all these questions, but hoped to stimulate fruitful discussion of a variety of topics in Ukrainian history. We were very pleased with the results, as most of the papers we received, whether they addressed our questions directly or discussed particular topics, contributed to the broader debate on the future study and teaching of the Ukrainian past. This collection includes twenty papers by twenty-one historians that represent quite well the scope of topics and ideas discussed at the conference. We regret that for a number of reasons involving both participants and editorial decisions, we could not publish all the contributions.
The conference took place and the first drafts of papers were written a few months before the Euromaidan protests and the Revolution of Dignity, followed by the Russian annexation of the Crimea and the Russo-Ukrainian conflict over eastern Ukraine. Some authors took those developments into account in revising their original contributions. The importance of many themes raised in the papers, including the fluidity of Ukrainian borders and identities, the need for historians to move beyond the nation-state paradigm in the interpretation of history at home and abroad, and the importance of regional experiences, has been validated by recent events. The essays also provide an invaluable historiographic context for understanding the ongoing conflict.
The contributions to this volume are organized in four separate but related sections: “Toward a New Narrative,” “The Transnational Turn,” “The Return of the Region,” and “Representations of the Past.” Like any systematization of papers rich in ideas and content, this one has elements of oversimplification and stresses one theme or argument over others, but the papers in every group also have important features in common.
Toward a New Narrative?
National history, especially the national paradigm in the representation of the Ukrainian past, is an object of critical examination as well as a point of departure for most of the essays published in this section. If its authors are more or less unanimous in pointing to the shortcomings of the national history paradigm, they differ on ways of overcoming those limitations. A number of authors not only discuss new models going “beyond nationality” in writing about particular topics, but also suggest possible paradigms and approaches for a new synthesis of Ukrainian history from antiquity and the Middle Ages to modern times. The essays by Alfred Rieber, Libya Berezhnaya, and Georgiy Kasianov and Oleksii Tolochko that open this volume belong to that category.
Alfred Rieber makes a case for a comparative approach not only to the study but also to the teaching of Ukrainian history. He discusses the challenges facing current Ukrainian historiography against the background of the shift from Marxist-Leninist to nation-focused or nationalist approaches in Eastern Europe after 1989. In Ukraine, historians attempted to construct a new historical narrative on the basis of Cossack mythology or a cult of victimhood rooted in the history of the two world wars and the Holodomor. Rieber looks instead at the prospects for writing and teaching Ukrainian history within the broader contexts of world history and the history of empires, as well as postcolonial studies. He argues for a model that combines the geocultural and comparative/transnational approaches, placing the longue duree history of Ukraine in the context of the history of Eurasia and its borderlands.
European and Eurasian borderlands are at the center of Libya Berezhnaya’s attention. She follows the current explosion of writings that present Ukrainian history as a whole, as well as the history of Ukraine’s individual regions, as products of imperial, ethnonational and, finally, cultural borders. The paradigm treating Ukraine as a quintessential borderland between the European and Eurasian East and West first appeared in the English-language literature in the 1963 discussion in the Slavic Review, but, as Berezhnaya shows in her essay, it has much deeper roots in the political and historical debates of the first half of the twentieth century. The borderland paradigm has made major inroads into historiography in Ukraine since the fall of the Soviet Union, and Berezhnaya identifies the most promising trends in current studies, including the transnational and “entangled history” approaches.
In this volume, the most systematic attempt to take stock of the main characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages of the national paradigm has been undertaken by Georgiy Kasianov and Oleksii Tolochko. They add their voices to the ongoing discussion on the multivolume history of Ukraine—the traditional “genre” produced by the Institute of History of the National Academy of Sciences10—and what it should look like if the “genre” is to continue. The authors point to the limitations not only of the national paradigm per se but also of traditional approaches to writing multivolume academic histories of Ukraine. They propose to overcome those limitations by rejecting the “tyranny of territoriality” imposed by the concept of the modern nation-state and focusing instead on individual regions and/or territorial units larger than the nation-state. A new history of Ukraine, they argue, can be modeled on the Cambridge Histories series, which presents the current state of research on particular topics and subjects.
Kasianov and Tolochko, as well as other authors represented in this volume, see prospects of overcoming the limitations of the national paradigm by means of a transnational approach and highlighting the importance of regions. These turned out to be the two main directions of research dealing with particular themes and periods of Ukrainian history presented in this volume.
The Transnational Turn
The arrival of the transnational paradigm in the field of Ukrainian studies in general and Ukrainian history in particular was heralded by a collection of essays published by Georgiy Kasianov and Philipp Ther in 2009 under the title A Laboratory of Transnational History: Ukraine and Recent Ukrainian Historiography. Andreas Kappeler, one of the contributors to that collection, has been particularly effective in revealing the limitations on the study of Ukrainian history entailed not only in the national but also in the multiethnic paradigm. Ukraine, a country divided over the centuries by political and cultural boundaries, and probably more influenced by transnational trends than most other regions of Europe because of its statelessness, may well stand to benefit particularly from a transnational approach to the writing of its history. The study of Ukraine may also offer new insights into the history of the region in which it is located, whether it is defined as Europe or Eurasia. These are the common threads in a number of essays that represent the transnational turn in this volume.
The twentieth century is unquestionably the period most studied by current academic and popular historians throughout the world, and Ukrainian historiography is no exception to that trend, both in Ukraine and abroad. What the study of Ukraine can tell us about the Soviet, European, and global history of that tumultuous century is the question raised in Andrea Graziosi’s discussion of his personal “discovery” of Ukrainian history. Following in the tradition of two scholars of Galician origin, Ludwig von Mises and Lewis Namier, Graziosi presents the subject as part of the history of European borderlands, defined in political, social, and cultural rather than purely geographic terms. He notes the growing literature examining borderlands as faultlines that not only provoke conflicts but also produce new ideas and generate political and social movements that change “centers” and core areas. Graziosi suggests that by examining European history through the Ukrainian prism, historians can resolve a number of problems that have haunted European historiography in recent decades. Such study can help integrate the history of multiethnic regions into pan-European history, close the gap between the history of Eastern and Western Europe, and bring Eurocentric and postcolonial historiographies closer together.
George Liber offers a different take on the heuristic potential of the nexus between Ukrainian and European or global history by reevaluating Ukrainian history of the first half of the twentieth century in light of the research on European history produced in the last few decades. He reconsiders the process of Ukrainian nation-building by placing it in the context of the two disastrous world wars and the violent interwar period, which witnessed revolutions, new wars, civil strife, and man-made famine. He traces the development of the Ukrainian people from what he describes as the ethnographic mass of the pre-World War I period to the internationally recognized nation with its own homeland of the late Stalin period. This involved processes of both integration and fragmentation, accompanied by escalating levels of violence—a conception that fits the Ukrainian past into the paradigm of European history established by Martin Malia, Timothy Snyder, Richard Overy, and David Reynolds.
Mark von Hagen continues to revolutionize the writing of Ukrainian history by engaging with the “imperial turn” in historical studies. He moves forward by looking back at historical studies written within the imperial paradigm, starting with the works of Pavlo Khrystiuk, a Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary who championed an anticolonial interpretation of the Ukrainian Revolution, returned to Ukraine from the emigration, and eventually perished in Stalin’s Gulag. Von Hagen reinterprets Ukraine’s twentieth-century history and political thought by considering them in the context of imperialism and anticolonial resistance. In his view, colonial policy includes not only the Russian imperial and later Soviet occupation of the Ukrainian lands but also the Holodomor and Chernobyl, and anticolonial resistance was manifested in such diverse expressions as the socialist writings of Khrystiuk, the nationalism of Dmytro Dontsov, and Ukrainian dissident activity after World War II, including the alliance with the Crimean Tatars and the writings of Ukrainian national communists of the 1960s, such as Ivan Dziuba, who promoted Ukrainian-Jewish understanding.
Hiroaki Kuromiya adds a new dimension to the discussion of the transnational context by challenging the preoccupation of Ukrainian historiography with Ukraine’s place in Europe. He proposes to examine Ukraine’s historical connections with its Eurasian neighbors. While the notion of Ukraine as a country facing both east and west has long been popular in Ukrainian historiography, it is the European West that has received most attention. Those scholars who, like Omeljan Pritsak, paid more than lip service to the East focused almost exclusively on the premodern history of Ukraine. What Kuromiya brings to the table is close attention to a period not touched by scholars interested in Ukraine’s eastern connections—the twentieth century. He also focuses on Japan, whose rise to world power has rarely been discussed by Ukrainian historians. The essay suggests a number of areas for further research on Japan’s role in shaping the context of twentieth-century Ukrainian history, including the impact of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) on the rise of the Ukrainian national movement, relations between the Japanese government and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in the 1930s, and the history of Soviet-Japanese relations as part of the international context of the Great Ukrainian Famine (1932- 33).
While the transnational turn in the study of Ukrainian history came in the wake of disappointment with the national paradigm and growing criticism of the multiethnic approach, which replicated the shortcomings of the former on a smaller ethnocultural scale, a number of essays in this volume demonstrate the potential of the transnational paradigm to reinterpret themes that received special attention in the national and multiethnic narratives, offering new ways of understanding familiar phenomena.
Steven Seegel brings the national and transnational together in his reexamination of the life and work of Ukraine’s best-known “national” geographer, Stepan Rudnyts’kyi. Born in Galicia, trained in Lviv and Vienna, and employed in the Habsburg Monarchy and Soviet Ukraine before being arrested and executed on the Solovets Islands, Rudnyts’kyi not only defined but also crossed numerous boundaries. While following Rudnyts’kyi’s efforts to establish Ukraine as a geographic entity in the minds of his contemporaries and professionalize Ukrainian geography, Seegel puts special emphasis on the transnational aspects of Rudnyts’kyi’s life and stresses the multiplicity of his mental maps. The essay places Rudnyts’kyi among fellow German- and Polish-trained geographers of the era who transformed the profession while establishing territorial claims for their respective nations.
In his essay, “The Art of Shifting Contexts,” Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern argues in favor of integrating ethnic histories into the history of Ukraine as a region and multiethnic community. He discusses the recent works of Jewish historians who have gone beyond the parameters of ethnocentric or religiously defined Jewish history to place it in the context of multiple non-Jewish histories of the region. He focuses on a number of pivotal moments in the history of Ukrainian Jewry, including the “arrival” of Jews in the region, the Khmelnytskyi Uprising, and the revolutionary upheavals of 1917-20. Recent research by Jewish and Ukrainian scholars makes it possible to enrich the histories of both peoples and use the “borderland” paradigm not as a metaphor to describe Ukrainian history, but as a methodological tool to explore Ukraine as a multiethnic, multireligious, and multicultural contact zone, which, as Petrovsky-Shtern remarks, has had the characteristics of a colonial entity for most of its history. The transnational, national, and multicultural converge in a new way in Mayhill Fowler’s appeal to “go global” with the history of Ukrainian culture. She proposes to take thinking and writing on the subject beyond the “Ukraine versus Little Russia” paradigm attributed to Mykola Khvyl’ovyi. That paradigm presents Ukrainian culture as either national or colonial. One of its shortcomings is the exclusive focus on Ukrainian culture, neglecting the cultures of other peoples of Ukraine. Distinguishing “culture in Ukraine” from “Ukrainian culture,” Fowler opts for the transnational approach to promote study of the former. She calls for the “rediscovery” of imperial and Soviet layers of “culture in Ukraine” and challenges Ukrainian studies centers in North America to pursue research based on a broad understanding of culture and history in Ukraine.
The Return of the Region
Shifting from the transnational to the regional and back in an attempt to overcome the limitations of the national paradigm has become a prominent trend in Ukrainian historiography of the last few decades. In her essay on the borderland paradigm, Libya Berezhnaya surveys a number of recent contributions to the history of Ukrainian regions, showing how that focus can fit broader paradigms for the writing of Ukrainian history. Several essays in this volume offer new perspectives on relations between Ukrainian regional and national history.
Few regions of Ukraine have received as much attention from historians, both Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian, as Galicia. In the late eighteenth century, when the Habsburg historian Johann Christian von Engel produced the first Central European work on Ukrainian history, its two main parts dealt with the Ukrainian Cossacks and the Galician-Volhynian Principality. The annexation of Galicia to the Habsburg Monarchy after the first partition of Poland launched a project of imagining and reimagining it in the context of Austria and Austria-Hungary, described with many important insights in Larry Wolff’s Idea of Galicia.
In his contribution to this volume, Wolff examines how Galician history was perceived by Habsburg elites in Vienna, Polish intellectuals in the region, and Ukrainian nation-builders such as Mykhailo Hrushevsky. In 1906 Hrushevsky imagined Galicia as a concept associated with but distinct from Ukraine—two entities that Wolff portrays as moving toward each other. Hrushevsky’s ambivalence about the particular political and cultural atmosphere in Galicia was matched by that of the Viennese liberals, who began to imagine it after the Russian occupation of 1914 as separate from the rest of the empire—a separation that came to pass in 1918 with the disintegration of the dual monarchy. Iryna Vushko adds her voice to those who criticize the tendency of adherents of nationally focused historiography to absolve representatives of their own nations of wrongdoing or criminal acts committed against “others.” She calls on fellow historians to embrace the heterogeneity of Galician and Ukrainian history in order to “place Ukraine at the center of a European—not solely Ukrainian national—narrative.”
Right-Bank Ukraine, which has received little attention in traditional Ukrainian historiography, is the focus of Faith Hillis’s and Heather Colemans contributions, which deal with the second half of the nineteenth century. Both authors examine the formation of modern national identities in the region, while stressing its unique character and contribution to larger national and imperial identity-building projects. Hillis poses the intriguing question of how and why RightBank Ukraine, populated largely by Ukrainian peasants, where only 4 percent of the population gave Russian as its native language, turned into a hotbed of Russian nationalism in the decades leading up to World War I. She answers the question by bringing back the imperial state as an important factor not only in the mitigation of existing and rising national ideologies but also in creating alternative forms of nationalism. She also challenges the dominant “national awakening” paradigm in Ukrainian historiography and directs attention to proponents of the Little Russian identity—an important factor in the history not only of Russian nationalism but also of Ukraine that was marginalized, if not completely overlooked, by historians working within the Ukrainian national paradigm.
Heather Coleman addresses a set of related questions by focusing on the life and work of the dean of the St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, Fr. Petro Lebedintsev, a prominent religious and cultural figure of the second half of the nineteenth century. A local patriot and historian, Lebedintsev was characterized by some of his contemporaries as a “Ukrainophile.” Coleman untangles the meaning of that term in the case of Lebedintsev by paying special attention to his attachment to the city of Kyiv and its region, placing local patriotism at the center of her protagonist’s broader identities and loyalties, which included devotion to Orthodoxy, Southwestern Rus’, and Russian monarchism. The essay stresses that in Right-Bank Ukraine no nation-building project could succeed without taking into account and accommodating the local identities of religious and cultural figures such as Lebedintsev. This conclusion probably also applies to other regions of Ukraine.
A region never neglected by historians is Left-Bank Ukraine, which constituted the core of the Cossack Hetmanate in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It has been studied by numerous generations of Ukrainian historians belonging to the populist, national and, finally, statist schools of historiography. Zenon Kohut surveys the research produced on the history of the Cossack elites in the course of the last two decades—since the attainment of Ukrainian independence—both in Ukraine and in the West. He pays close attention to the question of the continuity of Cossack elites and sets an agenda for future research on the Cossack officer class, with special emphasis on the history of ideas, perceptions, and identities. He notes in particular the changing understanding of “nation” and “fatherland” and raises questions about the formation and coexistence of multiple loyalties and identities that allowed the Ukrainian elites to function within the profoundly different, if not conflicting, political and cultural systems of Muscovy (and, subsequently, the Russian Empire), the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Ottoman possessions in the northern Black Sea region.
My own contribution is part of a “spatial turn” in historical studies and indicates the importance of regions as ecological zones in the history of Ukraine. I rely on Geographic Information System (GIS)- based mapping to enhance our understanding of the causes, spread, and consequences of the Holodomor or Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33; one of the most tragic events in modern Ukrainian history. Ecological and economic zoning turned out to be a major factor in the formulation of government policy, and peasants’ chances of surviving the famine depended heavily on the ecological, economic, and political characteristics of the regions affected by it. The essay capitalizes on work conducted over the last five years by a group of historians, geographers, demographers, and information technology specialists, and in that sense is something of an outlier in contemporary Ukrainian historiography, which continues to be dominated by books and articles written by single authors or coauthored by scholars working in the same discipline. The result of a collaborative project, this article will hopefully contribute to promoting multidisciplinary research in Ukrainian history.
Representations of the Past
Relations between history and society in Ukraine and abroad are featured in the essays grouped in this section of the volume. Marta Dyczok and Volodymyr Kravchenko examine battles over public memory in contemporary Ukraine, while Tatiana Tairova-Yakovleva and Paul Robert Magocsi discuss issues of researching, writing, and teaching Ukrainian history outside Ukraine.
Marta Dyczok treats the Ukrainian media—the main focus of her study—as a platform to which Ukrainian intellectuals bring their ideas about the Ukrainian past, while society as a whole forms its collective memory—a process that is far from over in Ukraine after the Revolution of Dignity. The essay follows the evolution of public debate on Ukrainian history and memory from the last days of the Soviet Union to the current Russo-Ukrainian crisis. Dyczok discusses the clash of Soviet models of representing and interpreting the past with nationalist or nationally inspired visions of Ukrainian history. She concludes by indicating the lack of consensus among politicians, historians, and society at large with regard to a historical narrative.
Volodymyr Kravchenko explains the lack of consensus by taking a critical look at Ukrainian society’s troubled relations with its Soviet legacy. He argues that post-1991 efforts to replace the Soviet founding myth of the “Great October Soviet Socialist Revolution” with the myth of collective suffering at the hands of the Soviet regime have encountered major problems on the popular level. Attempts to replace the mythology of the “Great Patriotic War” with the narrative of nationalist resistance to the Nazi and Soviet regimes have proved even more difficult. The failure to “nationalize” the Ukrainian past has made elements of Ukrainian society receptive to the much more successful Russian project of reappropriating and recasting parts of Soviet historical mythology for purposes of Russian nation-building. Kravchenko suggests a way forward by integrating the Soviet historical experience into the Ukrainian national narrative. He indicates the “modernization” paradigm as the most effective tool for achieving that goal, noting that it could also help reorient the Ukrainian national narrative from an excessive focus on the past toward the future.
The Ukrainian historical narrative faces a different set of issues in terms of its reception at home and abroad. In Russia, the subject of Tatiana Tairova-Yakovleva’s essay, historians and citizens struggle with the Soviet-era legacy of presenting the history of Russo-Ukrainian relations as one of amity between two fraternal peoples. She indicates two very different tendencies emerging in the new Russian historiography. One is a continuation of the Russian imperial and Soviet tradition of representing those relations as basically problem-free, leading to an ultimate “reunification.” This vision has lately been reinforced by a new emphasis on Orthodox unity. The other tendency is represented by scholars who treat Russians and Ukrainians as separate peoples that have undergone different political and social transformations since the times of Kyivan Rus’, leading to a plethora of complexities and contradictions between them. The essay also surveys the institutional basis for the study and teaching of Ukrainian history in Russia, placing hopes for improvement in the field in the new generation of scholars, who are much more open to new trends than their Soviet-trained predecessors.
Paul Robert Magocsi, whose essay concludes the volume, shares his experience of teaching Ukrainian history for more than three decades in a North American university. Given the decreasing numbers of heritage students taking Ukrainian courses and the related trend of generally declining interest in the field, Magocsi argues that professors teaching Ukrainian courses should become Kulturtrager or promoters of Ukrainian history and culture. On the basis of his own experience, Magocsi suggests offering not only survey courses in Ukrainian history but also developing seminars aimed at non-heritage students interested in social history, gender studies, the history of Cossackdom, and so on. He makes a persuasive case for the need to teach Ukrainian history as part of core history courses and against “ghettoizing” such courses in Slavic or modern language departments.
The essays collected in this volume give a good idea of the state of the study and, to some extent, also of the teaching of Ukrainian history outside Ukraine, particularly in North America, the center of nonSoviet research on the history of Ukraine prior to 1991- As in the late 1970s, when scholars of Ukrainian history in the United States and Canada gathered for their first conference to assess the state of the field, a new generation of historians is seeking to define the field in relation to dominant historiographic trends in Ukraine, where most of the research and writing on the subject is done, and to the historical profession outside Ukraine. Today, as in the 1970s, most of the “westerners” reject the historiographic trend dominant in Ukraine. In the 1970s that trend was a variety of Soviet Marxist historiography; today it is the national narrative of the Ukrainian past. The task also remains largely the same as it was then—the integration of Ukrainian historical research and writing into world historiography, taking advantage of new trends emerging in the field.
Today, unlike in 1995, no one asks whether Ukraine has a history. As scholars of various backgrounds began contributing to the field, bringing in themes and approaches from other fields of historiography, the legitimacy of studying Ukrainian history ceased to be an issue. As noted above, the achievement of Ukrainian independence also served to legitimize the field. Recent research on Ukrainian history conducted outside the country has been profoundly influenced by the transnational and regional turns in historical study. The same is true of the continuing interest in empires, borderlands, minorities, and national and cultural identities, as well as the growing interest in spatial elements of historical research. All these approaches help expand the boundaries of Ukrainian history and enhance its heuristic potential not only at home but also, as Andrea Graziosi has shown, with regard to European history as a whole.
Thus, Ukraine now has a history abroad. But does it have one at home in the sense defined by von Hagen—an accepted written record of past experience? The national narrative, now dominant in Ukrainian historiography at home, has encountered major problems in the last few years when it comes to its reception on the elite and popular levels. As Marta Dyczok and Volodymyr Kravchenko show in this volume, the ethnonational narrative has exhausted its potential not only in purely scholarly and heuristic terms but also as an instrument for organizing the historical memory of Ukrainian society in such a way as to promote consensus. Should its practitioners be given another chance?
After all, Ukraine is still struggling with the process of nationbuilding, which most European countries completed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the help of the ethnonational historical narratives that most contributors to this volume reject as not only outdated but also detrimental to the better understanding of the Ukrainian past and its significance. Is it fair to “impose” on Ukrainian society a historical understanding informed by the transnational processes currently taking place in the countries of the European Union at a time when Ukraine is surrounded by and obliged to compete, sometimes militarily, with states that have placed the national paradigm at the core of their historical identity?
The events of the last few years—the Revolution of Dignity, the loss of the Crimea, and the insurgency and Russo-Ukrainian conflict in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine—have helped mobilize Ukrainian society in defense of the country’s integrity and sovereignty across ethnic, linguistic, religious, and regional lines. The tragic experience of war, resettlement, and lost territory has mobilized the Ukrainian civic nation. If one of the main tasks of historical writing is to explain a given society’s origins to its citizens, there is no better way to do so than by writing a history of the land and its people, taking account of the country’s regional and ethnic diversity while integrating its past into the history of the part of the world to which it belongs. Judging by this volume, that is the direction in which the new Ukrainian historiography in the West is moving and the answer to the Quo Vadis question posed in the title of the conference from the scholars who participated.
With the historians of empires discussing the ways of writing a “new imperial history,” the time has come to put on the academic agenda the need for a “new national history,” a genre of research and writing that would go beyond the ethnonational paradigm of the past and take advantage of the opportunities presented by global, transnational, multiethnic, and regional approaches to meet the growing demand of modern states, nations, and societies in common narratives and historical identities. Few countries are more in need of that kind of history than is Ukraine. The transformation of the Ukrainian historical narrative along the lines suggested by the new trends of historical research would make that narrative more inclusive and much more acceptable to various elements of Ukrainian society, which remains divided less by issues of language and culture than by the different historical experiences of Ukraine’s diverse regions. That transformation would also make Ukraine more understandable to its European Union partners, whose history has often been the product of the same transnational processes.