New Studies of Ukraine

As the flashpoint of the encounter between the Russian Orthodox and Catholic worlds, Ukraine--so the popular impression often runs--very often lives up to its very name of "borderland," that is, to a place of never-ending conflict. But several new and forthcoming studies challenge this perception from a variety of angles. The first and most wide-ranging of these is a collection edited by Giovanna Brogi Bercoff, Marko Pavlyshyn, and Serhii Plokhy: Ukraine and Europe: Cultural Encounters and Negotiations (University of Toronto Press, 2017), 496pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Ukraine and Europe challenges the popular perception of Ukraine as a country torn between Europe and the east. Twenty-two scholars from Europe, North America, and Australia explore the complexities of Ukraine’s relationship with Europe and its role the continent’s historical and cultural development.

Encompassing literary studies, history, linguistics, and art history, the essays in this volume illuminate the interethnic, interlingual, intercultural, and international relationships that Ukraine has participated in. The volume is divided chronologically into three parts: the early modern era, the 19th and 20th century, and the Soviet/post-Soviet period. Ukraine in Europe offers new and innovative interpretations of historical and cultural moments while establishing a historical perspective for the pro-European sentiments that have arisen in Ukraine following the Euromaidan protests.

The second, just released this month, is a collection that reminds us of the deep if messy roots of a very particular encounter: that between Christians and Jews in Ukraine, which has often been controverted though there is considerable evidence that it was also much better in parts of Ukraine than in other parts of Europe from the 19th century through to the First World War. A just-released study, from the widely respected historian Paul Robert Magocsi (author of many studies of the "Carpathian peoples," as it were--Rusyns, Ukrainians, and Galicians) together with Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, sheds fresh light on the complexities of these relations: Jews and Ukrainians: A Millennium of Co-Existence (University of Toronto Press, 2016), 320pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

There is much that ordinary Ukrainians do not know about Jews and that ordinary Jews do not know about Ukrainians. As a result, those Jews and Ukrainians who may care about their respective ancestral heritages usually view each other through distorted stereotypes, misperceptions, and biases. This book sheds new light on highly controversial moments of Ukrainian-Jewish relations and argues that the historical experience in Ukraine not only divided ethnic Ukrainians and Jews but also brought them together.

The story of Jews and Ukrainians is presented in an impartial manner through twelve thematic chapters. Among the themes discussed are geography, history, economic life, traditional culture, religion, language and publications, literature and theater, architecture and art, music, the diaspora, and contemporary Ukraine. The book’s easy-to-read narrative is enhanced by 335 full-color illustrations, 29 maps, and several text inserts that explain specific phenomena or address controversial issues. Jews and Ukrainians provides a wealth of information for anyone interested in learning more about the fascinating land of Ukraine and two of its most historically significant peoples.

The University of Toronto Press, the largest academic press in Canada, maintains a lively list of books devoted to Ukrainian studies in part because the Ukrainian immigration into Canada over the last dozen decades or more has been very large indeed, and there are a number of endowed chairs in Ukrainian history and culture at several Canadian universities. So the U of T Press is also issuing, in addition to the above, four other new studies, including Rhonda Hinther's study, Perogies and Politics: Canada's Ukrainian Left 1891-1991 (U of T Press, 2017), 304pp.

In this continued centenary period of the First World War (I write this on the 100th anniversary of the death of the Habsburg Emperor Franz Josef), a forthcoming study looks at Ukraine's role in the conclusion of that conflict: Borislav Chernev, Twilight of Empire: The Brest-Litovsk Conference and the Remaking of East-Central Europe, 1917–1918 (U of T Press, 2017), 304pp.

Twilight of Empire is the first book in English to examine the Brest-Litovsk Peace Conference during the later stages of World War I with the use of extensive archival sources. Two separate peace treaties were signed at Brest-Litovsk – the first between the Central Powers and Ukraine and the second between the Central Powers and Bolshevik Russia.

Borislav Chernev, through an insightful and in-depth analysis of primary sources and archival material, argues that although its duration was short lived, the Brest-Litovsk settlement significantly affected the post-Imperial transformation of East Central Europe. The conference became a focal point for the interrelated processes of peacemaking, revolution, imperial collapse, and nation-state creation in the multi-ethnic, entangled spaces of East Central Europe. Chernev’s analysis expands beyond the traditional focus on the German-Russian relationship, paying special attention to the policies of Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Ukraine. The transformations initiated by the Brest-Litovsk conferences ushered in the twilight of empire as the Habsburg, Hohenzollern, and Ottoman Empires all shared the fate of their Romanov counterpart at the end of World War I.

Finally, two further forthcoming studies both look at the aftermath of the Great War and the rise of the Soviet Union: first, Zbigniew Wojnowski, The Near Abroad: Socialist Eastern Europe and Soviet Patriotism in Ukraine, 1956-1985 (U of T Press, 2017), 304pp.

And second: Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge: State and Stage in Soviet Ukraine 1st Edition by Mayhill Fowler (U of T, 2017), 264pp.

New Books on Ukraine and Crimea

Paul Robert Magocsi is widely recognized as one of the leading scholars of East Slavdom. His previously published book Ukraine: An Illustrated History was just published in May of this year in an affordable paperback edition. And just before that, in March, a new study, especially timely given the events in Crimea this year and all the attention being paid to Russian antics there, was published: P.R. Magocsi, This Blessed Land: Crimea and the Crimean Tatars (University of Toronto Press, 2014), 160pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us:

A virtual island in the Black Sea, Crimea is connected to the European continent by only a narrow sliver of land. For centuries it was part of the Ottoman and Russian empires, then the Soviet Union, and today independent Ukraine. But its history goes back even farther, as is evident from a landscape filled with the remnants of cultures and peoples: classical Greeks, Goths, Byzantines, Mongols, imperial Russians, and, most importantly, Crimean Tatars.

An authoritative introduction to this fascinating region, This Blessed Land is the first book in English to trace the vast history of Crimea from pre-historic times to the present. Written by Paul Robert Magocsi, author of History of Ukraine - 2nd, Revised Edition: The Land and Its Peoples and the Historical Atlas of Central Europe, This Blessed Land will captivate general readers and serious scholars alike.

Two other studies will be emerging later this year analyzing Ukrainian realities in different contexts: in Canada, and then in the Soviet period. The first is Thomas M. Prymak, Gathering a Heritage: Ukrainian, Slavonic, and Ethnic Canada and the USA (U Toronto Press, September 2014), c. 352pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Since the 1970s and 1980s, the study of immigration and ethnicity has grown to become an essential aspect of North American history. In Gathering a Heritage, Thomas M. Prymak uses the essays and articles he has written over the past thirty years as a historian of Ukrainian and Ukrainian Canadian history to reflect on the evolution of ethnic studies in Canada and the United States.
The essays included in this book explore the history of Ukrainian and Slavonic immigration to North America and the literature through which these communities and their historians have sought to recapture their past. Each previously published essay is revised and expanded and several more appear here for the first time – including the fascinating story of French Canadian writer Gabrielle Roy’s connections with Ukrainian Canadians and her tumultuous affair with a Ukrainian Canadian nationalist in pre-war London.

Finally, coming out in October (according to the publisher's catalogue, but not until January 2015 on Amazon) is Matthew D. Pauly, Breaking the Tongue: Language, Education, and Power in Soviet Ukraine, 1923-1934 (U Toronto Press, 2014), c. 432pp.

About this book we are told:

In the 1920s and early 1930s, the Communist Party embraced a policy to promote national consciousness among the Soviet Union’s many national minorities as a means of Sovietizing them. In Ukraine, Ukrainian-language schooling, coupled with pedagogical innovation, was expected to serve as the lynchpin of this social transformation for the republic’s children.
The first detailed archival study of the local implications of Soviet nationalities policy, Breaking the Tongue examines the implementation of the Ukrainization of schools and children’s organizations. Matthew D. Pauly demonstrates that Ukrainization faltered because of local resistance, a lack of resources, and Communist Party anxieties about nationalism and a weakening of Soviet power – a process that culminated in mass arrests, repression, and a fundamental adjustment in policy.

Slava Ukrayina!

I have the fondest memories of the summer of 2001, which I spent in Ukraine. I have made it to five of the world's seven continents, but the trip to and time in Ukraine was, without a doubt, the most rewarding for all kinds of reasons, not least because I met the now late Archpriest Robert Anderson of most blessed memory. I would go back if for no other reason than to spend more time in such places of inneffable grandeur as the Kievan Caves Monastery and the Pochaev Lavra.

The world of Eastern Christianity is complicated enough for outsiders, but when you try to explain Eastern Christian ecclesial life in Ukraine, even the most sympathetic outsider is taxed trying to take in and differentiate among four Eastern churches: three Orthodox, and one Greek Catholic. Telling the history of how Christianity came to Ukraine, and how today the country ended up with four Eastern churches (to say nothing of a very substantial Roman Catholic population, and various Protestant groups also), takes one into further layers of often bewildering complexity.

Todd E. French therefore had his work cut out for him in his article "Orthodoxy in the [sic] Ukraine" in John McGuckin, ed., The Encyclopedia of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. I think on the whole he did a decent job, though there are some quirks, and noticeable gaps, in his coverage.

The first thing to notice, of course, is the strange presence of the definite article. Why is it there, but inconsistently? Many times he refers to "the Ukraine" but not always: the article appears twice on p. 604, but disappears on 605, reappears again on the left column on 606 but disappears in the right column on the same page--and so on throughout the article. That is sloppy copy-editing (whereas most of the rest of the two-volume text is free from any errors). The definite article used to indicate more than a lack of editorial attention: it used to indicate a lack of independence for the country when it was variously a province of the Polish-Lithuanian, Hapsburg, or most recently Soviet empires. But it has been independent for twenty years now, and proper English style does not require, indeed does not accept, the definite article: the country is, simply, Ukraine. Those who continue to insert the article are often ideologically committed to a nationalistic Russian revival of the old, thankfully dead, empire of the tsars in which Ukraine was nothing more than a province--"the Levant" of the Slavs, as it were.  Please God we have seen the end of that nonsense.

In any event, French gives the history in broad strokes, making it clear and comprehensible, with enough detail to cover the main periods and personages but without overwhelming the general reader. He does not take an overly apologetic approach--either apologizing for Russian influence, or excusing Orthodox behavior--and in fact commendably acknowledges, e.g., that "during General Dmitri Bibikov's rule (1837-52) the aim was to convert the two million remaining Catholics to Orthodoxy through willful tactics such as deportation and executions" (607).  Too many historians telling of relations in Ukraine invariably play up Catholic offenses--some real, some not, almost all wildly exaggerated--against the Orthodox, especially during and after the Union of Brest, and, more recently, after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. French avoids all that.

He also avoids, however, a couple of important details, not least the rather infelicitous "elevation" of the metropolitan of Moscow to patriarchal status. For those details, see Boris Gudziak's article "The Creation of the Moscow Patriarchate: A Prelude to Patriarchal Reforms in the Kyivan Metropolitanate Preceding the Union of Brest (1595-1596)" in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 37 (1996). Even more important is Gudziak's book, Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropolitanate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Genesis of the Union of Brest (Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies), which is not cited in this article but should be.

Missing, also, are several good texts from the "References and Suggested Readings" list at the end of French's article. A good very general introduction to Ukraine in general, for those with no background, is Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine.

I was also surprised to see that the work of Sophia Senyk is not here, especially her A History of the Church in Ukraine (Orientalia Christiana Analecta), and astonished that Paul Robert Magocsi is nowhere to be found. He has written many highly acclaimed works of scholarship that are nonetheless accessible to general readers, including:

• History of Ukraine - 2nd, Revised Edition: The Land and Its Peoples 
• Encyclopedia of Rusyn History and Culture 
• Ukraine: An Illustrated History 
• Galicia: A Multicultured Land (edited with Christopher Hann), and, of course, his well-known and hugely helpful cartographic works:  
• Historical Atlas of Central Europe Rev Exp edition 
• Ukraine: A Historical Atlas.

More recent scholarship that would need to be considered here would include:

• Barbara Skinner's Western Front of the Eastern Church: Uniate and Orthodox Conflict in Eighteenth-Century Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia.
• John-Paul Himka and Andriy Zayarynuk, Letters from Heaven: Popular Religion in Russia and Ukraine

Still, on the whole, this article, and The Encyclopedia of Eastern Orthodox Christianity generally does what one would expect such a volume to do and it remains a solid resource.