Acknowledgments

This project started over ten years ago, when Alexander J. Motyl and I taught classes at Harvard’s Summer School. At the end of that semester, he suggested that I write a brief history of modern Ukraine, the topic of my course.

I am most indebted to Jacqueline Olich, former associate director of the Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and European Studies at the University of North Carolina, who invited me to a conference on the Holodomor at Chapel Hill in September 2008. Preparing a paper for her conference forced me to re-view the flow of the history of Ukraine in the twentieth century through the lens of its creation and development in the frame­work of the conflicts within the European state system.

Holly Brasher, Guido Hausmann, Jeff Jones, Nazar Kholod, Matt Payne, Lisa Sharlach, and Sergei Zhuk read earlier versions of various chapters and made perceptive comments on them. My colleague Andrew Demshuk evaluated one draft and commented on revised versions of two chapters. His assessments helped me shorten the scope of my project and, simultaneously, to better focus it. Hiroaki Kuromiya, Bill Risch, and Bohdan Vitvitsky critically assessed later drafts. Olga Bertelsen read the 2013 versions of chapters 6 and 7; Alex Motyl commented on chapters 8 and 9. Both provided sharp and profound insights. Pawel Machcewicz read chapters 4 and 8 and supplied me with excellent advice on how to improve them. Oleh Wolowyna always promptly replied to my emailed questions concerning Soviet statistical data and their interpretation.

My graduate and undergraduate assistants, Kathy J. Hakim, Kaye Nail, Jennifer Philips, Lonnie Goldberg, John-Mark Phillips, Maya Orr, and Mike Barrett, proofread various drafts, suggested improvements, and found in­formation relevant to my argument. They challenged me to explain my ideas in simple, not simplistic, ways to an audience that knew little about the history of East Central Europe, Russia, or Ukraine.

The University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Mervyn H. Sterne Library is small and underfunded, but its friendly and professional staff is without peer. Brooke Becker, Sterne’s extraordinary social and behavioural sci­ences librarian, and Eddie Luster, its superb interlibrary loan administra­tor, have helped me accumulate the books and articles necessary to create this book. In the process of writing this book, I also used the library re­sources at the University of Alabama and at the University of Chicago. I am grateful to their staffs as well as to Hugh K. Truslow, the Librarian of Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, who digitally provided me with a rare copy of Sylvia Gilliam’s 1954 monograph on the nationality problem in the Soviet Union.

I spent the summers of 2002, 2009, 2012, and 2013 in Washington, DC, thanks to grants from the Kennan Institute and from UAB’s College of Arts and Sciences (2012). Blair Ruble, Will Pomeranz, and Liz Malinkin helped make my stay in DC intellectually productive. At the Library of Congress, I am grateful to Jurij Dobchanskyj for his bibliographic prow­ess and for many enriching luncheon conversations. Like Jurij, the profes­sionals at the Library’s European Reading Room are indispensible.

In Washington, DC, I held fruitful conversations with Nick Eberstadt, Pawe! Machcewicz, and Sarah Cameron, who generously shared her disser­tation on the famine in Kazakhstan with me.

Without the support of Paul Bushkovitch, Jeff Brooks, Liah Greenfeld, and Hiroaki Kuromiya, who wrote letters and recommendations on my behalf, this book would not have been written.

I received a fellowship in the spring of 2004 from the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, where the idea for this book first germinated, despite the fact that I won the fellowship for another project. I hope that Michael Flier, the director at the time, and Roman Szporluk, who initiated many insightful conversations about the history of Ukraine, Europe, and Eurasia, will forgive me. I also received short-term funding from the Kennan Institute, the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), and UAB’s College of Arts and Sciences. Thanks to this funding, I received fi­nancial support from the Shevchenko Scientific Society USA’s Ivan and Elisabeth Chlopecky Fund, which made this publication possible.

Richard Ratzlaff is the best editor I have ever had. I am grateful to Brigid O’Keeffe for singing his praises. I am also grateful to Leah Connor, Stephen Shapiro, and James Leahy, my production team at the University of Toronto Press, for their professionalism and speed. They are the komanda of all komandas!

My maps were expertly prepared by Kelly Koenig of the University of Alabama’s Cartographic Research Library under the supervision of Craig Remington. The majority of them were inspired by Paul Robert Magocsi’s Historical Atlas of Central Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002); Historical Atlas of East Central Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993); A History of Ukraine (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996); and Ukraine: A Historical Atlas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985).

I based map 7 on a map produced by the MAPA Digital Atlas of Ukraine Project at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, reproduced in Uriadovyi kur”er on 22 November 2013, and on the information on popu­lation losses in 1932-4 provided by Oleh Wolowyna and his colleagues at the Institute of Demography at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

The transliteration of geographic terms throughout the text and in the maps comes from Paul Robert Magocsi’s Historical Atlas of Central Europe and Volodymyr Kubijovic’s Encyclopedia of Ukraine: Map and Gazetteer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984). Steven Seegel, Andrew Demshuk, Oleh Wolowyna, and Serhii Plokhy reviewed several versions of my maps.

In the penultimate draft, Zenon Kohut generously read the Introduction and chapter 1 and corrected errors in table I.1. Roman Senkus reviewed chapters 4 and 8; and John Micgiel, chapter 4.

I am grateful to all who helped me, but I alone take responsibility for my interpretations and for the facts presented.

In the course of my life and this project many wonderful people offered me help and encouragement, but did not live to see its completion. I would like to remember my mother, Maria Liber; my aunt, Xenia Antypiw; my mother- in-law, Mary Bemis; my Dovzhenko mentor, Roman Korohodsky; my colleagues, Andrea R. Brown, Raymond A. Mohl, and Glenn Feldman; my northwest Indiana neighbours, Erna Hnatyk and Vasyl Shuya; my Texas in-laws, Barbara and Rocky Veiera; and my Bluff Park neighbours, Sarah Branch, and Eloise and Cyrus Hughen.

I am most grateful to my mentors at Indiana University, Fedor Cicak and William B. Cohen, who passed away just as this book started to form. Without their encouragement and generosity, I would not have chosen this “less traveled” road. At Harvard, Karl W. Deutsch, Ned Kennan, and Omeljan Pritsak taught me to view the world from a global and trans­national perspective. At Columbia, Marc Raeff and Leopold Haimson inspired me to look for the “big picture.” During my New York days, Dr Jaroslaw Padoch befriended me and helped me in countless ways. As I edited these acknowledgments in late April 2015, I learned that Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy passed away. We both started our graduate studies and our careers at the same time at Columbia. Her friendship, en­ergy, and enthusiasm will forever be missed. This book would not have appeared without her help decades ago.

May all of my late family members, friends, and neighbours rest in peace.

30 April 2015