Preface

In the fall of 2013 Ukraine made a dramatic entry into world politics and news media with the events that became known as the Euromaidan Revolution, or the Revolution of Dignity.

Soon after, Ukraine found itself at the frontline of a series of even more dramatic developments: illegal seizure of the Crimea by Russia and the Kremlin-provoked, inspired, funded, armed, and often manned war in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. On two occasions—in the summer of 2014 and in the winter of 2015—Russia sent its regular armed forces into battle in order to assure the survival of the two puppet regimes it established in the area. The war soon acquired the traits of a regional conflict with global ramifications and with no end in sight. At stake was the future of the global post-Cold War order and the fate of democracy in the post-Soviet space—the factors that motivated the attention to the events in Ukraine worldwide.

The interest in Ukraine received a new boost in the sum­mer of 2016 when Paul Manafort resigned from his position as the chairman of Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign. Later on, Manafort was found guilty and went to prison for a number of financial violations, including undisclosed payments received from the ousted Ukrainian president V iktor Yanukovych. In the summer of 2019, Ukraine reemerged in the news because of Pres­ident Trump’s attempts to coerce Ukraine’s new president, Volo­dymyr Zelenskyi, into undermining Joe Biden—seen as the lead­ing Democratic contender in the presidential race—by opening a criminal investigation into his son, Hunter Biden, and his ac­tivities in Ukraine.

Throughout these events, I found myself obliged to answer numerous questions about Ukraine from both journalists and the general public. Although those questions were informed by the contemporaneous developments, a great many of them probed into the country’s history and culture to understand its present and future. My colleague Mary Sarotte and I sought to answer some questions about the recent history of American-Ukrainian and Russo-Ukrainian relations in an article for the Foreign Affairs while the impeachment hearings were still going on.

This collection of essays strives to answer the very same set question by looking at key moments in Ukraine’s history and how the country relates to its own history today. As many of the essays show, history is central to Ukraine’s current war with Russia and its relations with the West. As a genre, essay collections produce new knowledge and understanding by the collocation of individ­ual texts, which places them in dialogue and reveals connections of which the author or the reader were not previously aware. The heuristic potential of this collection became evident to me in the process of selecting, revising, and editing the studies that comprise this volume.

Most of the essays collected here were written and published in the last decade, which witnessed enormous change in Ukraine and Eastern Europe in general. During that period, Ukraine un­derwent the Maidan protests, a radical change of government, Russian aggression, the loss of the Crimea, and war in the Don­bas—developments that I discuss above and that could hardly have been predicted a decade earlier and that inevitably changed the self-understanding of Ukrainian society and its relation to its history.

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 guilty of causing the death of close to four million Ukrainian citizens. In the same month, before stepping down as president of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko 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. "That 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 pro­Soviet to pro-nationalist, depending on the head of state.²

Before the end of the decade, Ukraine underwent a process of radical decommunization driven at least in part by the incompat­ibility of post-Soviet historical narratives that presented the So­viet period in a predominantly positive light and the Holodomor narrative, which portrayed the Soviet regime as a genocidal mon­strosity. Another major factor contributing to that process was the drive to rehabilitate and fully integrate into the historical mainstream the story of the nationalist-led Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which fought for the independence of Ukraine during and after World War II. The decommunization campaign resulted not only in the demolition of monuments to Lenin and other leaders of the Soviet regime but also in the mass renaming not only of streets and squares but also of entire villages, towns, and cities, changing the map of Ukraine in highly dramatic fashion.

Russian aggression turned not only Ukraine but also Ukrainian history into a battleground, demanding a response from Ukrainian society on a number of historical fronts. Russia’s use of imperial history to justify its annexation of the Crimea and, in particular, its failed attempts to split Ukraine by creating a quasi-state of “Novorossiia” (New Russia) vaguely based on the area once claimed by an imperial province with the same name, rekindled long-standing Ukrainian interest in the history of the Cossacks, who settled the steppes of southern Ukraine prior to Russian expansion there in the eighteenth century. Moreover, Russia’s use in its aggression against Ukraine of Soviet mythology, especially that of the “Great Patriotic War”—the Soviet compo­nent of World War II—provided additional fuel and rationale for the decommunization campaign.³

What I discovered while working on this collection but did not fully understand before was that, by writing these essays in the course of the last decade, I became involved in a process of documenting new developments but also, more importantly, in an attempt to understand and explain them to myself and others in historical terms. I will explain below how the essays collected here contributed to both processes by pointing out the relations between individual essays and the historical shifts that have been taking place during the last ten years in the self-perception of Ukrainian society and its attitude toward history.

**

The volume begins with an introduction suggesting the need for a new national history of Ukraine that would take account of the main historiographic trends and achievements of the past few de­cades. The title of the first section of the volume, “Cossack Stock,” refers to the words of the Ukrainian anthem, a mid-nineteenth­century text that declared all Ukrainians to be of Cossack stock. Cossackdom became the founding myth of the modern Ukrainian nation, but Cossack history itself produced more than one my­thology.

The essay “Placing Ukraine on the Map of Europe” not only examines the first appearance of the term “Ukraine” on a European map but also discusses the synergic relationship be­tween Cossacks and princes, who were represented as antagonists in traditional historiography. The next essay, “Russia and Ukraine: Did They Reunite in 1654?,” analyzes the pitfalls of the Pereiaslav mythology used in imperial and Soviet times to justify Russian domination of Ukraine. The essay “Hadiach 1658: The Origins of a Myth” considers the myth that served to counterbalance that of Pereiaslav by presenting the orientation of the Cossack state toward Poland as a preferable alternative. Finally, “The Return of Ivan Mazepa” looks at the ways in which Ukrainian society dealt with the imperial mythology of the Battle of Poltava (1709) and the depiction of the Ukrainian hetman Ivan Mazepa, who rebelled against the empire, as a latter-day Judas.

The second section of the volume, “The Red Century,” includes articles and essays that discuss Europe’s and Ukraine’s bloodiest century—the twentieth. It begins with a reinterpretation of the Russian Revolution as a revolution of nations (“How Russian Was the Russian Revolution?”) and continues with two articles that discuss the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33, recently recognized by the Ukrainian parliament and the parliaments of a number of other countries as a genocide. The first of those two articles, “Killing by Hunger,” is a review of Anne Applebaum’s award-winning book Red Famine: Stalins War on Ukraine, while the second, “Mapping the Great Famine,” presents the results of a GIS-based research project on the history of the tragedy that firmly categorizes it as a man-made famine.

The next two essays, “The Call of Blood” and “The Battle for Eastern Europe,” discuss the international politics of World War II as related to Ukraine.

The third section of the volume, “Farewell to the Empire,” includes essays on Ukraine’s late Soviet and post-Soviet history. The disintegration of the USSR, whose history is discussed in great detail in my book The Last Empire, is here treated in a short piece entitled “The Soviet Collapse.” The history and memory of the Chornobyl (in Russian, Chernobyl) nuclear disaster, one of the factors contributing to the collapse, is discussed in the essays “Chornobyl” and “Truth in Our Times.” “The Empire Strikes Back” traces the evolution of Russian foreign policy and Russo- Ukrainian relations after the collapse of the Soviet Union and surveys the outbreak of the current conflict.

Essays on the politics of memory provide a context for un­derstanding the Russo-Ukrainian war and its contribution to major changes in Ukraine’s memory politics. The essay “When Stalin Lost His Head” uses the story of the beheading of a Stalin monument in Ukraine to analyze the clash between Soviet and post-Soviet narratives of history and types of memory, both lib­eral and nationalist. This is also the subject of the essay “Goodbye Lenin!,” discussed above. It attempts to explain the changes in Ukrainian society’s perception of history that became important contributing factors to the “Leninfall” (Leninopad), the grass­roots campaign to demolish statues of Vladimir Lenin, and later to the parliament-driven process of decommunization.

Visions of Ukraine’s European future and their relation to history are discussed in the four essays that constitute the fourth and final section of the volume, “European Horizons.” The first of those essays, “The Russian Question,” discusses the development of the Russian national idea and nationalism as they have shaped and justified the war. “The Quest for Europe” reconstructs the image of Europe as it appears in the writings of Ukrainian intel­lectuals from the nineteenth century on, arguing that the notion of Europe has been constructed as an antipode to Russia and continues to function in that capacity with regard to Ukrainian history and identity.

In “The New Eastern Europe” I discuss the post-Cold War shift in the application of the term “Eastern Europe” from the Soviet satellite nations of the Cold War era to the former So­viet republics of Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova. I examine the consequences of that shift, as well as the rise of Ukraine as a new battleground between the collective West and Russia, for the new political and cultural map of Europe in the essay “Reimagining the Continent.” I argue that the post-Cold War era has produced a new understanding of the limits and frontiers of Europe that are now being contested in the war in and over Ukraine.

Although they cover a large swath of territory, both chrono­logical and historiographic, the essays collected in this volume do not encompass all of Ukrainian history. I believe, however, that, read as a collection, they offer a broader and deeper understanding of Ukrainian history and Ukraine’s current challenges through the interpretation of its past than they could do when published individually. Taken together, they offer a fairly comprehensive answer to the question of why Ukraine has been central to the East-West confrontation of the post-Cold War era and has com­manded world attention more than once during the past decade.