Transnational History

Over the course of its history, Ukraine has been a borderland not only of different state formations but, much more importantly, of different civilizational and cultural zones. Ukraine was always a border zone between the Eurasian steppe lands controlled by nomads and the set­tled forest regions.

Centuries of borderland existence contributed to the fuzziness and fragmentation of Ukrainian identity. Borders were created and policed to divide people, but the borderlands served as contact zones where economic transactions (legal and illegal) took place, loyalties were traded, and identities negotiated.²⁹ Ukraine's steppe borderland called into existence a special category of steppe dwellers, known as the Cossacks, and a special type of identity.

The cultural history of the Cossacks, and indeed of Ukraine as a cultural borderland, has not yet been written. Recent research on the ico­nography of the Feast of the Protection of the Mother of God indicates the importance of Ukraine as an area of multiple cultural transfers.³¹ Ideas emanating from the West were received, reshaped, or misinter­preted to fit local religious and cultural traditions and passed on farther east and south to the Orthodox lands of Muscovy and the Balkans. That was certainly the case with the set of ideas and models associated with the confessionalization of religious, social, and political life in Western and Central Europe of the Reformation era. First it was the creation of the Uniate Church. Then Kyivan intellectuals under the leadership of Metropolitan Peter Mohyla produced the first Orthodox Confession of Faith and exported models of Orthodox confessionalization developed under the influence of their relations with Catholics, Protestants, and Uniates to the rest of the Eastern Christian world.³² As Ihor Sevcenko has shown, Metropolitan Mohyla was a man of many cultural words, and one might add that in this respect he was representative of the Ukrainian elite culture of his time.³³ The transfer of cultural models from Kyiv to the east continued in the second half of the seventeenth century and for the better part of the eighteenth.

The new interest in the history of empires in the West, as well as in the former USSR (apparent, for example, in the articles published over the last few years in the Kazan journal Ab Imperio), allows historians of Ukraine to present their research in a new comparative framework. The history of Ukraine offers unique opportunities for research on rela­tions between centres and peripheries, as well as on interrelations between imperial peripheries, bypassing decision makers in the impe­rial capitals. Andreas Kappeler's seminal book on the multiethnic his­tory of the Russian Empire sets one to thinking of ways in which the Ukrainian experience under Moscow and St Petersburg can be dis­cussed and better understood against the background of the history of other non-Russian ethnic groups in the Russian Empire.³⁶ Terry Mar­tin's Affirmative Action Empire helps explain the role of Ukraine in the formulation of Soviet nationality policy. Roman Szporluk's articles encourage scholars to take a close look at the legacy of the Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman Empires in Ukrainian history.³⁷ Andreas Kap­peler's project on the comparative history of cities along the Austro- Russian border exemplifies the comparative study of Ukraine's eco­nomic, political, cultural, and religious institutions in the Russian and Habsburg Empires. Another interesting comparative project, directed by Guido Hausmann, studies academic life in East Central European universities, including those of Cracow, Warsaw, Vilnius, Lviv, and Kharkiv.

A number of American and West European historians are now involved in very productive research that is reconceptualizing the his­tory of the Second World War in Ukraine - the site of some of its major battles and worst atrocities, including the Holocaust. New research is introducing elements of multiethnic and local history, as well as the history of everyday life, into the study of Ukrainian history. In his book Making Sense of War, Amir Weiner has presented a new image of the war as experienced and interpreted by the multiethnic population of Vinnytsia oblast in central Ukraine. Karel C. Berkhoff made use of rich Soviet and German archives to reconstruct everyday life in German- occupied eastern and central Ukraine in his book Harvest of Despair, while Kate Brown, in A Biography of No Place, considers the multiethnic history of Eastern Volhynia between 1923 and 1953, with the war serv­ing as the focal point of her multilayered study. Brown's work is espe­cially interesting for its close attention to forced migrations from the region; for example, it follows Polish exiles to their new places of set­tlement in Kazakhstan. Another example of research dealing with the history of the war is Timothy Snyder 's book The Reconstruction of Nations. It discusses, among other things, the Volhynian massacres of 1943-4 as an example of ethnic cleansing and an outcome of the brutal­ization of society initiated by the Holocaust.

Most Western works on the history of the Second World War chal­lenge the dominant national narrative of Ukrainian history, but, even more importantly, they supersede the traditional debate shaped by the confrontation between the Soviet-era narrative of the Great Patriotic War and the national narrative of the liberation struggle against the Nazis and communists. This is an achievement that most Ukrainian historians and Ukrainian society at large cannot claim as their own. The public debate of the spring of 2005 about Ukraine's role in the Sec­ond World War yielded no results, as society remained sharply divided. Attempts to reconcile organizations representing Red Army veterans and fighters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army failed and resulted in street fights between supporters of the two sides. Today, Ukrainian historians have not yet managed to create a master narrative of Ukraine's Second World War.³⁸ There is also a long way to go before the Ukrainian experience is fully incorporated into the global historical narrative, whether we consider such events as the two world wars, the Revolution of 1917, the history of communism, or ecological history, of which Chornobyl is and will remain an important part.