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.

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 entitled 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 Riebers student at the University of Pennsylvania, Zenon E.

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 organizers’ view, such an approach would be self-defeating. What is needed is the applica­tion of free, critical thought, untrammeled by dogmas of any kind, whether Marxist or nationalist.” Rudnytsky argued that historians of Ukraine in the West could remedy the “deformations” of 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 the history of Eastern Europe as a whole.”⁴

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 ThnigTh 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 BriefHistory (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.⁵

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 ThnigThs 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.

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 re-emergence as an academic discipline both within and without Ukraine as a history intrinsically interesting precisely because it challenges so many of the clich6s of the nation-state paradigm.”⁶

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 edited 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 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.⁷