Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 also entailed an attack on Ukrainian historiography: on more than one occasion, Vladimir Putin has affirmed that Ukraine does not exist as a separate nation and that Ukrainians are part of the larger Russian nation. Throughout the conflict, Russian troops have specifically targeted repositories of Ukrainian national culture, such as museums and libraries; Russian authorities have even composed a list of forbidden books that are to be destroyed because their contents oppose official propaganda about the fraternal unity of Ukrainians with Russians. Several of these books were written by Serhy Yekelchyk. Originally from Ukraine, Yekelchyk was one of the first scholars who exploited the opportunities offered by the Ukrainian diaspora to move to Australia, and later to the USA and Canada, where he is now professor of German and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria. A prolific writer, Yekelchyk has studied many different topics and periods of Ukrainian history, with a particular interest in history as an academic discipline in Soviet Ukraine. It should therefore come as no surprise that Yekelchyk, despite his many commitments related to the conflict, tried to finish this book on the history of Ukrainian national historiography (which he had announced before the start of the invasion, and which had already aroused much interest in Ukraine) as quickly as possible.
The book uses and expands some research that had already been published in the form of articles in English and Ukrainian, but this does not make it any less interesting or compelling. It should be specified that the author does not aim to offer a complete and exhaustive overview of the history of Ukrainian historiography, but rather attempts to provoke reflection and debate by offering analyses on various questions of central importance for the development of Ukrainian historiography. The volume is divided into four sections. The first, comprising three chapters, addresses the birth of a new historiographical tradition in Ukraine after 1991. It describes how historians had to abandon Marxist ideology to convert to the most recent historiographical trends from the West, while also trying to respond to society’s need to understand the new reality of the national state. The second part, again composed of three chapters, addresses the historiography of the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada and its role in the construction of an interpretative paradigm of Ukrainian national history. Since 1991, diasporic historiography has strongly influenced historical research in Ukraine through the publication of Ukrainian versions of works by historians such as Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky and Orest Subtelny. The third section examines two specific areas: the birth and development of spatial (especially urban) history in post-Soviet Ukraine, and the writing of manuals on the history of Ukrainian culture, a new compulsory subject for various curricula of studies after 1991. The final section contains the last two chapters, which deal, respectively, with the introduction of decolonization theories into historical sciences in Ukraine and with how post-Soviet history textbooks address the problem of the birth of a Ukrainian nation in a multi-ethnic context.
Even if the choice of topics analyzed may appear unsystematic and colored by the author’s preferences, the picture that emerges from this reconstruction is rather coherent: the work of Ukrainian historians of the diaspora, especially of some who lived in Canada, has allowed the development of a historiographical tradition that represents an alternative to the Soviet one. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the interpretation of Ukrainian history developed in the West did not simply replace the Soviet version. The Soviet version of history had in fact already attributed a wide scope of action to nations as actors in history and Ukrainian historians easily reoriented their interests around the national question. Even if some Western researchers feared that nationalism could replace socialism as the ideology of the discipline of history, in doing so favoring the creation of teleological reconstructions, in practice many good historians (in particular Yaroslav Hrytsak and Natalia Yakovenko) defused this danger.1
Their younger colleagues have been able to update Ukrainian historical research according to the most recent trends. The particular attention they have paid to issues such as the public use of history and the politics of memory (especially in the case of Georgiy Kasianov)2 has helped to defuse the nationalist trap even in specific cases, for instance when research on the 1932–33 famine was understandably placed at the center of Ukrainian national rhetoric as a tragedy with genocidal contours. Of course, the developments of the most advanced historiography are slow to be fully reflected in the school textbooks, which – in Ukraine as elsewhere – are conditioned by ministerial programs and often include simplifications or provide contradictory reconstructions.
As soon as it was released, Yekelchyk’s book immediately elicited reviews and reactions from Ukrainian historians, who underlined its merits and highlighted some flaws.3 At this point, rather than underline shortcomings, I would like to highlight new perspectives for further research. First of all, I believe that one should look at the Ukrainian historiographical universe as a transnational space: the chapters dedicated to the fundamental works of Lysiak-Rudnytsky and Subtelny are illuminating, but these historians’ interpretations were not elaborated only within the environment of the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada, but rather in a much broader community of researchers, characterized by a continuous exchange between Canada and the United States, with Australian and British communities also playing an important role. This trait should also be underlined with regard to the developments of historiography after 1991: Ukrainian historians were able to travel around the world thanks to the network of scientific institutions connected to the diaspora, bringing together researchers from at least four different continents.
At least two other areas require further exploration. The first is the contribution of non-ethnically Ukrainian historians to the debate. If in the past they could be counted on the fingers of one hand (and Yekelchyk rightly cites Mark von Hagen and some Canadian historians several times), in the last twenty years the contribution by non-Ukrainian historians to historiographical reflection on Ukraine is great and can no longer be ignored. In fact, it is itself a sign of the success of the work done to consolidate Ukrainian studies as a field of research. Finally, one cannot talk about the history of Ukraine without mentioning oral history and, above all, women’s and gender history, which has produced some of the most brilliant studies of the last thirty years.4 They have managed to update Ukrainian scholarship to the most recent interpretative theories in the social sciences and to influence the civil and political debate in Ukraine on topics such as gender equality and human rights. The conclusion is that a solid Ukrainian historiographical tradition is today a reality that can play its part in resisting Putin’s attack on the country. Yekelchyk has reconstructed these developments in agile and quickly readable prose, providing information impossible to find elsewhere for anyone who is not an expert in Ukrainian history and creating an excellent starting point for further research in this field.
Notes:
1 Among their most important works were Iaroslav Hrytsak, Narys istoriï Ukraïny: formuvannia modernoï ukraïn’'koï natsiï XIX–XX stolittia, Kyiv 1996 and Nataliia Iakovenko, Narys istoriï Ukraïiny z naidavnishykh chaiv do kintsia XVIII stolittia, Kyiv 1997.
2 Most recently: Georgiy Kasianov, Memory Crash. Politics of History in and around Ukraine, 1980s–2010s, Budapest 2022.
3 See, for example, Krytyka, May-June 2023, with comments by Ostap Sereda and Iana Prymachenko.
4 Olena Stiazhkina, Zhinky v istoriï ukraïns'koï kul'tury druhoï polovyny XX stolittia, Donetsk 2002; Olena Hankivsky / Anastasiya Salnykova (eds.), Gender, Politics, and Society in Ukraine, Toronto 2012; Oksana Kis', Survival as Victory. Ukrainian Women in the Gulag, Cambridge, MA 2020.