The Future of the Past

Historians from all over the world working on various topics in Ukrainian history gained an opportunity to evaluate the state of the field at three international conferences organized by the Institute of Ukrainian History, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute in 2012 and 2013.

The conference took place and the first drafts of papers were written a few months before the Euromaidan protests and the Revolution of Dignity, followed by the Russian annexation of the Crimea and the Russo-Ukrainian conflict over eastern Ukraine. Some authors took those developments into account in revising their original contributions for the volume of conference pro­ceedings published in 2016 under the title The Future of the Past: New Perspectives on Ukrainian History. I discuss their importance for the ongoing debate on the essence and future direction of Ukrainian historical studies below. National history, especially the national paradigm in the representation of the Ukrainian past, was an object of critical examination as well as a point of depar­ture for most of the historians who accepted the invitation to take part in the conference.⁹

The most systematic attempt to take stock of the main charac­teristics, advantages, and disadvantages of the national paradigm was undertaken by Georgiy Kasianov and Oleksii Tolochko.

These turned out to be the two main directions taken by the authors of The Future of the Past in their reexamination of Ukrainian history. What the study of Ukraine can tell us about Soviet, European, and global history was the question raised in Andrea Graziosis discussion of his personal “discovery” of Ukrainian history. It was answered in the essays authored by George Liber, Hiroaki Kuromiya, and Mark von Hagen, who proposed to reinterpret Ukraine’s twentieth-century history and political thought by considering them in the context of imperial­ism and anticolonial resistance. In von Hagen’s view, Soviet policy in Ukraine had clear colonial underpinnings and produced anti­colonial resistance manifested in such diverse expressions as the socialist writings of Pavlo Khrystiuk, the nationalism of Dmytro Dontsov, and the writings of Ukrainian national communists of the 1960s, such as Ivan Dziuba, who promoted Ukrainian-Jewish understanding.

Shifting from the transnational to the regional and back in an attempt to overcome the limitations of the national paradigm has become a prominent trend in Ukrainian historiography of the last few decades. Few regions of Ukraine have received as much attention from historians, both Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian, as Galicia. In the late eighteenth century, when the Habsburg histo­rian Johann Christian von Engel produced the first Central Eu­ropean work on Ukrainian history, its two main parts dealt with the Ukrainian Cossacks and the Galician-Volhynian Principali­ty.¹¹ The annexation of Galicia to the Habsburg Monarchy after the first partition of Poland launched a project of imagining and reimagining it in the context of Austria and Austria-Hungary, described with many important insights in Larry Wolff’s Idea of Galicia.¹

In his contribution to the conference volume, Wolff examined how Galician history was perceived by Habsburg elites in Vienna, Polish intellectuals in the region, and Ukrainian nation-builders such as Mykhailo Hrushevsky. Iryna Vushko added her voice to those who criticize the tendency of adherents of nationally fo­cused historiography to absolve representatives of their own na­tions of wrongdoing or criminal acts committed against “others.” She called on fellow historians to embrace the heterogeneity of Galician and Ukrainian history in order to “place Ukraine at the center of a European—not solely Ukrainian national—narrative.”

Right-Bank Ukraine, which had received little attention in traditional Ukrainian historiography, was the focus of Faith Hil­lis’s and Heather Coleman’s contributions, which dealt with the second half of the nineteenth century.

While the transnational turn in the study of Ukrainian history came in the wake of disappointment with the national paradigm and growing criticism of the multiethnic approach, which repli­cated the shortcomings of the former on a smaller ethnocultural scale, a number of essays in the volume demonstrated the po­tential of the transnational paradigm to reinterpret themes that received considerable attention in the national and multiethnic narratives, offering new ways of understanding familiar phenom­ena. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern argued in favor of integrating ethnic histories into the history of Ukraine as a region and mul­tiethnic community. The transnational, national, and multicultural converged in a new way in Mayhill Fowler’s appeal to “go global” with the history of Ukrainian culture. Distinguishing “culture in Ukraine” from “Ukrainian culture,” Fowler opted for the transna­tional approach to promote study of the former. She called for the “rediscovery” of imperial and Soviet layers of “culture in Ukraine.”

Relations between history and society in Ukraine and abroad were featured in the essays by Marta Dyczok and Volodymyr Kravchenko.

The essays collected in The Future of the Past give a good idea of the state of the study and, to some extent, also of the teach­ing of Ukrainian history outside Ukraine, particularly in North America, the center of non-Soviet research on the history of Ukraine prior to 1991. They also point toward new ways of exam­ining the Ukrainian past.