Ukrainian History in North America
Although the general situation of the Ukrainian historical profession in the West, especially in North America, was different from that in Ukraine, the fall of Soviet communism deeply affected it as well.
With the collapse of the USSR and the disappearance of the immediate Soviet military threat, the whole field of Soviet studies, of which Ukrainian history was a part, has disintegrated.In his essay Von Hagen writes about the two competing imperial views on the history of Eastern Europe, the German and the Russian. Although that approach was probably correct for Eastern Europe as a whole, in the case of Ukraine it was Russian and Polish historiography that dominated the scene. And in North America only Russian historiography had the opportunity to present its view of the Ukrainian past. The views of Russian emigre historians were shared for decades by the American scholarly community, and it took the entire lifetime of a generation of Ukrainian 'professional ethnic' scholars, as well as the emergence of an independent Ukrainian state, to challenge those beliefs.
Ironically, the rise of an independent Ukraine also brought a major negative change in the status of 'ethnic' Ukrainian historians in their diaspora communities in the United States and Canada. If before independence they enjoyed the high prestige and full support of the communities that funded Ukrainian studies chairs in North American universities, including the most prestigious ones, after the achievement of independence historians found themselves effectively overshadowed by other diaspora professionals. With the rise of new political and economic opportunities in Ukraine, it was not the historian Omeljan Prit- sak, the founder of Ukrainian studies at Harvard, but the economist Bohdan Hawrylyshyn, an acquaintance of George Soros and advisor to the Ukrainian government, who came to be considered a hero of the diaspora community.
This list of negative changes in the status of 'ethnic' historians within their community could be extended. There is little doubt that the emergence of an independent Ukraine attracted the attention of the Western political and scholarly community more than ever before to the field of Ukrainian studies, but the status that this specialty enjoyed as part of the huge government-supported Sovietology establishment was gone forever. During the USSR's last years of existence the Ukrainian question was considered vital for the life or death of the Soviet empire. In the mid-1980s Alexander Motyl of Columbia University wrote an entire book, Will the Non-Russians Rebel? exclusively on the basis of Ukrainian material. His major assumption was that the USSR would survive if the Ukrainians did not rebel. Indeed, the USSR did not survive the 1991 Ukrainian referendum, but the collapse of the USSR meant the end of Sovietology as a discipline and of the special place of Ukrainian studies in that field.Once Ukraine freed itself in the mid-1990s of the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world, it became one of a number of Eastern European countries located between Russia and Germany. Von Hagen tends to explain the absence of separate fields of study devoted to the 'non-historical' nations of Eastern Europe by the fact that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century - the formative years of European historiography - those nations did not exist on the political map of Europe. One can counter this suggestion with the argument that Sweden, along with other countries of northern Europe, existed on the map at that time, but Swedish history has not become established as a discipline in North American universities. What counts in this respect, apart from historiographic tradition, is the economic and political importance of a given nation for the rest of the world. Just as the history of Finland is studied as part of northern European history, so the history of Ukraine is on its way to occupying a place of its own among the histories of the Eastern European lands.
Although chairs of East European history do exist in major North American universities, in most of them there is a growing tendency to replace the history of the former Soviet bloc with the history of Russia and Eastern Europe. In such courses, a place should be reserved for the history of Ukraine. Given the disappearance of the Soviet threat and the new tendencies in American foreign policy, it is doubtful that any new chairs of Ukrainian history will be established in the West, except those endowed by Ukrainians.Von Hagen concludes his essay with the remark that 'Ukrainian history can serve as a wonderful vehicle to challenge the national state's conceptual hegemony and to explore some of the most contested issues of identity formation.' This statement would seem to deserve agreement, with only one caveat. Not only Ukrainian history but also Ukraine's present will be such a 'wonderful vehicle' if the experiment that is now going on within the boundaries of Ukraine - the creation of a non-ethnic state surrounded by 'normal' ethnically based nationstates of Eastern Europe - actually succeeds.
14