Preface

At the time of his death, in April 1984, my father left uncompleted vari­ous projects upon which he had expended considerable labour. One of his most cherished hopes was to publish a collection of his English- language essays, complementing his earlier Ukrainian volume, Mizh istoriieiu ³ politykoiu (Between History and Politics [Munich 1973]).

As all who knew him will testify, my father was a man of cos­mopolitan interests and prodigious (if always lightly held) erudition. From the ancient civilizations of China to contemporary American cul­ture, nothing human was foreign to him, and he had likely read several books on the subject. But the breadth of his learning makes all the more remarkable the central fact of his scholarly career—an exclusive concen­tration on problems of Ukrainian history, particularly of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Certainly, this dedication to matters Ukrainian did not make my fa­ther’s academic advancement any easier, inasmuch as the very existence of Ukrainian history as an independent field of knowledge was not gener­ally recognized by his American colleagues. Only with his arrival at the University of Alberta in 1971, and the founding of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies in 1976, did he find himself in a milieu truly con­genial to his intellectual vocation.

It is not necessary for me to try to summarize the contents of the fol­lowing essays, but a few observations may be in order. As a historian, my father had a healthy respect for the realm of the concrete, and he did not hesitate to decide an argument with an appeal to “empirical historical reality.’’ At the same time, perhaps the deepest influence on his thought was the philosophy of Hegel, as evidenced by his belief that “the histori­cal process has a logic of its own which transcends the plans and wishes of the actors,’’ his assertion that “freedom is possible only within the framework of a statist rule of law,’’ his equation Ofhistoricity with an ac­cess of self-consciousness, and his recognition of the ineradicability of conflict in human affairs.

Within the Ukrainian tradition, my father had the highest admiration for the conservative political thinker, Viacheslav Lypynsky. He referred on a number of occasions to Lypynsky⁵s demonstration of the pivotal role played by the nobility in the Khmelnytsky revolution of the seven­teenth century in order to refute those populist historians who failed to appreciate the need for differentiation in the social structure. It is princi­pally for his lack of a pluralistic vision that my father criticized Lypynsky⁵S antipode, the radical theorist Mykhailo Drahomanov, whose greatness he nonetheless championed.

When essays spanning over thirty years and written for diverse occa­sions are assembled in a single volume, some degree of repetition is per­haps unavoidable. I hope, however, that such overlapping will be felt to be minimal, and that the effect will be rather that of a unifying intel­ligence trained over a wide range of interrelated topics. In the case of pre­viously published as well as unpublished pieces, I have taken the liberty of making minor stylistic changes, always with a view to bringing out most clearly what my father intended to say. For their thematic richness, in addition to a series of programmatic essays, I would draw attention particularly to “The Fourth Universal and Its Ideological Antecedents,’’ those on a group of nineteenth-century Ukrainophile Poles-Terlecki, Czajkowski, and Duchinski-and to those addressing the problem of Ukrainian-Jewish relations.

A historian, despite his devotion to study of the past, is inevitably also writing with an eye on present concerns, and in the final two essays of this book, my father turns his attention directly to Soviet Ukraine. The history of Ukraine, caught between “the Russian hammer and the Polish anvil,’’ has been a tragic one, and the contemporary situation remains perilous. Yet Ukraine enjoys the recognition of at least nominal statehood within the Soviet Union, and the recent expressions of dis- sidence, in Ukraine as in Eastern Europe generally, show that the dream of independence refuses to die.

In the meantime, it is clear that activities in the West are closely fol­lowed on all sides in Ukraine, and there can be no more encouraging signs of the maturation of the emigre community than the establishment ofcentres for Ukrainian studies both at Harvard and the University of Al­berta. By perpetuating the memory of Ukraine’s past, my father sought to

enhance the prospects of its future, so that the world might see, in Drahomanov’s words, “one soulless corpse less, one living nation more.”

Peter L. Rudnytsky

New York