Where does Russian history end and Ukrainian history begin?

This question, which the dissolution of the Soviet Union placed on the scholarly agenda in the West, has not yet received a satisfactory answer. Should the study of the Russian past begin with the Scythians of the Northern Black Sea region, the Varangian princes who took con­trol of the Dnipro (Dnieper) trade route in the closing centuries of the first millennium, or with the rule of the Kyivan (Kievan) princes who established a major polity, known today as Kyivan Rus', in the first centuries of the second millennium? Generations of historians referred to Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, as the starting point of the Muscovite dynasty, the Russian state, and, ultimately, the Russian nation.

This book focuses largely on the development of Ukrainian histori­ography and its uneasy relations with its Russian counterpart. The sep­aration of Ukrainian history from the Russian narrative was the major challenge faced by Ukrainian historiography in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Even after the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the formation of independent Ukraine, Russia remained the larg­est irritant when it came to modern Ukrainian identity and historiogra­phy. The theme of the separation of Ukrainian and Russian imperial and national narratives was at the centre of my book on Mykhailo Hrushevsky (1866-1934), the Ukrainian historian and statesman who did the most to nationalize the Ukrainian historical narrative and sepa­rate it from that of Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹ Although some of the essays included in this volume dis­cuss Hrushevsky's contribution to the 'emancipation' of Ukrainian his­toriography, most of them go far beyond Hrushevsky and his work, both chronologically and historiographically. This book covers more than two and a half centuries of the development of the Ukrainian and Russian historical imagination, ranging from the mid-eighteenth cen­tury, when modern national identities began to develop, to the disinte­gration of the USSR and the search for a new historical identity in independent Ukraine.

The title of this book reflects its focus on the multiple representations of the past in the Ukrainian and Russian historical imaginations, which are viewed as products of encounter, conflict, and negotiation between different political, cultural, and historiographic traditions. This volume is not a comprehensive survey of Ukrainian or Russian historiography, nor is it a systematic account of relations between them. It seeks instead to discuss a number of important tendencies in the develop­ment of the two historiographic traditions in their 'contact zone.' In so doing, it focuses on selected topics in the Russo-Ukrainian historio­graphic encounter.

Individual chapters of the book address the major stages of this encounter, ranging from the vision of common historical origins that arose in the second half of the eighteenth century to the rise of modern national historiographies and debates over the 'nationalization' of the Russian and Ukrainian past in the wake of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The sixteen essays are grouped in four sections, each with its own historiographic focus and chronological limits.