The history of Ukraine as a territory, not unlike that of many other places, countries, and peoples, has its origins in the kind of historical writing that would probably be characterized today as global or transnational history.
In the mid-fifth century BC Herodotus described what is now southern Ukraine and its multiethnic population, dominated by the Scythians but not limited to them, in his Histories.
Comparing the Dnieper to the other rivers known to the ancient Greeks, he concluded that it was second only to the Nile. Thus the lands and peoples of Ukraine have been part of global history ever since the father of historiography wrote about them. Several centuries later, the first known inhabitants of the Ukrainian lands, the Cimmerians, made it into the Bible.When the Rus' chroniclers in the city of Kyiv began to write their own history in the mid- eleventh century AD, they already had a significant body of literature on the subject, written largely by learned Greeks, whose emperors and patriarchs had brought Christianity to the former Scythian lands a few decades earlier. The task of the chroniclers was anything but simple: they had to collect local lore and fit it into the Christian and imperial historical schema brought by the missionaries. They did their best to place themselves, their rulers, and their land in the narrative of the creation of the world, the myth of Slavic ethnogenesis, and the history of the Byzantine Empire. They insisted that they were in control of their own fate: allegedly, they had never been conquered and had invited the Vikings (Varangians) to rule over their land of their own free will, just as they had freely chosen Christianity as their new religion. But the concept of world history and the chronological table they used to date the events of their past came directly from Byzantine writings.
The vision of Kyiv and Rus' as parts of the Christian universe remained fundamental to the chroniclers’ outlook despite the shock of the Mongol invasion in the mid-thirteenth century. But as the world of the Rus' principalities became smaller, and the ambitions of their rulers local rather than regional or global, the chroniclers turned into guardians of local memory, which had little connection with universal history.
Not until the sixteenth century did foreign writers again turn their attention to Kyiv and the Ukrainian lands, prompting local authors to relate their history to global developments. The onset of the Reformation, with its battles between Protestants and Catholics—in Ukraine, these mainly took the form of polemics over the Union of Brest (1596)—made the two camps think of Orthodox Ukrainians and Belarusians as participants in a broader religious struggle. Polemicists, both Orthodox and Uniate, conceived their history as part of an epic battle between Christianity and heresy. The Cossack wars that began in the mid-seventeenth century not only focused the attention of Western writers on the region but also led them to interpret the Cossack phenomenon as part of the general European wave of revolutions or of the Christian struggle against the Ottomans.“Although Ukraine be one of the most remote regions of Europe, and the Cossackian name very modern; yet has that country been of late the stage of glorious actions, and the inhabitants have acquitted themselves with as great valor in martial arts as any nation whatsoever,” wrote Edward Brown in 1672 on publishing Pierre Chevalier’s history of the Cossacks in translation under the title A Discourse of the Original, Country, Manners, Government and Religion of the Cossacks.1 In Brown’s view, the Cossacks resembled his own countrymen in some measure, as they had won glorious victories at sea; the steppes settled by the Cossacks also resembled the sea and required a compass to navigate them. This initial attempt to explain Ukraine to the English reading public emphasized military and naval history, heroic deeds, and parallels with the English way of life.
The eighteenth century brought the ideas of the Enlightenment to Eastern Europe, where they found interpreters and promoters in enlightened despots such as Catherine II. The main task of local historians—first Cossack officers and then noblemen in the imperial service—became that of integrating their past into that of the empire even as they stressed the peculiarities of their region.
That was a theme taken up by the Cossack chroniclers who wrote after the Battle of Poltava (1709). The genre was perfected by Oleksandr Bezborodko, a former Cossack officer who became one of the architects of Russian foreign policy at the end of the eighteenth century. His account of the post-Poltava history of his native Hetmanate described it as having benefited from the enlightened rule of Catherine II. The imperial authorities, for their part, were busy integrating the Ukrainian past into that of their respective empires. In Ukraine, a local governor general sponsored a History of Little Russia by Dmitrii Bantysh-Kamensky (1822). The Galician past was actively incorporated into the history of the Habsburg dynasty and empire.The age of nationalism broke the link between local and imperial history, making the history of the nation and its territory the main object of study. Mykhailo Hrushevsky not only moved from one empire to another but also developed a nonimperial intellectual framework to create a historical narrative for the Ukrainian nation. National historians revolutionized historiography by abandoning the annals of dynasties and empires and studying the people. While they endowed their prospective nations with separate and unique pasts, their anti-imperial project also allowed for an element of universalism. Thus, most Ukrainian historians from Mykola Kostomarov to Mykhailo Drahomanov and Mykhailo Hrushevsky imagined their land as part of a future federation—Slavic in Kostomarov’s case, European in Drahoma- nov’s, and Russian in the case of the early Hrushevsky.
The twentieth century brought the idea of world revolution to Ukraine. Communist writers imagined Ukraine as part of a world community of socialist nations; some of them, such as Mykola Khvyliovy, called on the Ukrainian cultural elite to reorient itself toward Europe. Another, Matvii Iavorsky, saw Soviet Ukraine as a Piedmont for Ukrainians outside the USSR. The Stalin regime put a brutal end to such prospects, arresting and killing their exponents.
The concept of the “history of the USSR” reduced the transnational aspect of Ukrainian history to an emphasis on Russo-Ukrainian relations—a restriction lifted only with the unexpected fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.In the West, Ukraine and its history remained largely unnoticed throughout World War I and the interwar period, but the prelude to World War II, when Ukrainians found themselves involved in the Czechoslovak crisis and emerged as a factor in the German-Soviet partition of Poland, changed the situation. The Ukrainian 6migre historian Dmytro Doroshenko published his survey of Ukrainian history in Canada, while the Russian 6migre historian George Vernadsky gave his imprimatur to an English translation of Mykhailo Hrushevskys survey in the United States. In the United Kingdom, W. E. D. Allen published his survey with Cambridge University Press. He defined the “Ukrainian problem” as “one of the chief reasons for the absence of balance in continental Europe.”2
The European war soon became global, turning the attention of historians and the public at large away from Ukraine to Russia and the Soviet Union as a whole. But the war also contributed greatly to the internationalization of knowledge. In the Ukrainian case, it drove hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees and quite a few professional historians to Central Europe and, eventually, to the United States and Canada. In the final analysis, wartime developments not only directed the attention of the English-speaking public to that part of the world but also produced English-language authors who were prepared to write about it.
The logic of the Cold War, which engulfed the world soon after World War II, promoted the spread of anticommunism and nationalism as a means of opposing the Russocentric Soviet historical narrative. But the origins of Ukrainian history as an academic discipline in North America also had distinctive transnational characteristics. When a chair of Ukrainian history was created at Harvard University in 1975, its first occupant was Om- eljan Pritsak, a renowned expert on the languages and cultures of the Turkic world. His closest ally and cofounder of the Ukrainian Research Institute, Ihor Sevcenko, was an authority on Byzantine cultural history. Both wrote on Ukraine, placing its history and culture in the broad context of the Eurasian and Byzantine worlds. Pritsaks successor, Roman Szporluk, had made a name for himself as an expert on European intellectual history before coming to Harvard in the late 1980s. In terms of their academic background, interests, and expertise, the founders of Ukrainian historiography in the United States and Canada could not imagine Ukrainian history except as part of the Eurasian, Byzantine, or East-Central European worlds.