Preface to the First Edition

Ukraine is the second-largest land in Europe. Its population is close to that of France and its GNP is comparable to Italy’s. Yet the political prerogatives of the Ukrainians as a nation – not only in Europe but even in their own well-endowed and highly developed land – are minimal.

In dealing with Ukrainian history, I stress two themes. One of them is statelessness. In most national histories the acquisition and development of the nation-state is a paramount feature, but in the Ukrainian case the opposite is true. The frustration of the Ukrainians’ attempts to attain self-government is one of the key aspects of their historical experience. Therefore, the Ukrainian past is largely the history of a nation that has had to survive and evolve without the framework of a full-fledged national state.

Modernization is the other major theme of this work. The transformation of traditional agrarian societies into modern industrial and postindustrial ones is, of course, a global phenomenon. But in this general process there is a multiplicity of national/regional forms and variations. Modernization in Ukraine is striking in several ways. Once a quintessentially agrarian society, Ukraine became an industrialized country in an unusually rapid and traumatic fashion. Even more noteworthy is that modernization in Ukraine occurred largely under the aegis of non-Ukrainians.

Clearly there is much more to Ukrainian history than can be subsumed under these two major themes. Indeed, there are times and events that stand in contradiction to them. For example, in medieval Kievan Rus’, Ukraine formed the core of an impressive political, cultural, and economic conglomerate. In the 17th century the Cossacks were singularly successful in expelling foreign domination from the land. And in the late 17th and early 18th centuries the Ukrainians were the representives of modernity for the Russians, not vice versa, as was the case later. The early 20th century witnessed determined efforts on the part of Ukrainians to gain control of their own political and socioeconomic fate. The two themes of statelessness and modernization also cannot encompass the ancient and eventful past of a land that bears some of the oldest traces of human life in Europe, that was part of the classic Mediterranean civilizations, that attracted countless waves of nomadic invaders from Asia, that served as the cultural border between the East and West, and that witnessed the colonization of a vast frontier. Nonetheless, the condition of statelessness and the non-native predominance in modernization are important focal points and they help to illuminate the unusually broad, colorful, and complex canvas that is the history of Ukraine.

I was most fortunate in studying Ukrainian history, a field in which, until lately, good training has not been readily available. At various stages during these studies my mentors were three outstanding historians of Ukraine – the late Ivan Lysiak Rudnytsky, Oleksander Ohloblyn, and Omeljan Pritsak. To them I owe a great debt of gratitude, a modest expression of which is, I hope, the appearance of this book.

Colleagues in the field have helped me greatly in the preparation of the manuscript. For careful readings of and judicious comments on various chapters I thank Marko Antonovych, Yaroslav Bilinsky, Yuri Boshyk, John-Paul Himka, Wsevolod Isajiw, Miroslav Labunka, George Luckyj, and especially Danylo Husar-Struk.

Orest Subtelny

Toronto, July 1988