Eyes upon Paris, hopes upon Vilnius, hearts in Kiev: Discussing Ukrainian historiography at Harvard

27.11.2013
7 хв читання

 

Eyes upon Paris, hopes upon Vilnius, hearts in Kiev:

Discussing Ukrainian historiography at Harvard

The timing could not have been better: Ukraine had just won its first game against France in the play-offs leading to the World Football Championship. Chances of Ukraine signing the association agreement still looked good. It seemed for a moment that Ukraine could accomplish the impossible gaining the battle for Brazil and Brussels all at once. I travelled to Harvard with mixed feelings: somewhat pleased by the (valid!) pretext to skip teaching duties at my home institution but distressed about the fact that I may need to sneak in a football game – Ukraine’s second against France – into a busy conference schedule. I have watched football all of my life, and I have studied history for only half of it. By Tuesday, November 19, the hope for Ukraine’s successfully resolving the Euro-stalemate had vanished: I no longer believed that we can ever get to Brussels, but, with Ukraine wining the first play-offs game by a comfortable margin, we could still make it to Brazil.

Serhii Plokhii must have seen it differently. Mykhailo Hrushevkyi Professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard, he had been recently elected as a new director of the Harvard Ukrainian research institute. Plokhii had planned a conference on Ukrainian historiography to take place before the yearly congress of American Slavisists and east-Europeanists this years meeting in Boston. In this way, the participants could fit in two separate conferences into their schedule. Over twenty speakers – all united by their involvement in Ukraine- related topics – discussed the state of Ukrainian historiography in a two-day conference. A fair number of them represented the Ukrainian institutions in North America. At least some were – or still are – affiliated with the Harvard Ukrainian research institute. Some came from Ukraine directly. But many others have neither Ukrainian names nor Ukrainian affiliations.

harvardI travelled to Harvard with certain expectations if not prejudices. Ukraine has recently made it into a center-stage of historical debates, yet major discussions have leaned towards the twentieth century and violence in and surrounding Ukraine. Implicitly or not, these debates have focused on the question of Ukrainians’ responsibility for at l

 

east part of this violence (for example, the debates surrounding the Volhynia). This conference proved different. We did not see the “usual suspects:” Per Rudling came as a guest (and I told him we love him anyways), but the others were absent altogether. Instead, I encountered a cohort of people who, like myself, work on Ukraine-related topics by proxy: Larry Wolff talked about the intellectual construction of Galicia by the Habsburgs in the eighteenth century; Steven Seegle discussed the cartography of Eastern Europe, Faith Hillis presented her recently published book on the construction of Russian, little-Russian and Ukrainian identities on the right-bank Ukraine in the Russian empire. The organizers expanded the framework for discussion by introducing topics – and participants – whose work reach well beyond the horrors of the twentieth century. In that way, they overcome the (almost) traditional distinctions between Ukrainians as victims and Ukrainians as perpetrators. I can only applaud the intention!

Andrea Graziosi has done a wonderful job summarizing the core issues of the conference in his key-note address on the evening of November 20. I have known Graziosi from his publications most of them revolving – as they were – around the most difficult issues in Ukrainian history during the twentieth century – the famine and Stalinism. To say that his talk was eye-opening for me and for many others, as I discovered from private conversations held over drinks, would be an understatement. A charismatic Italian with a charming accent, Graziosi emphasized the values of studying Ukrainian history putting it into a truly European perspective. Many of the things he discussed we (Ukrainians) knew all along, but few of us in our Ukrainianess could fully see this perspective or verbalize it as efficiently as did Graziosi. It takes an outsider!

Iryna Vushko

Ukraine – Graziosi stressed – is a quintessential borderland and a product of colonization to an extent that no other (west)-European country is. Its colonial experience should shed light on modern European history beyond Ukraine and beyond Eastern Europe. Graziosi thus reversed the priorities in a somewhat remarkable way. At least some of us studying East-European history in the West, most notably, North America, have spent hundreds of hours thinking of how to integrate our stories into a larger European narrative, how to make our peers and colleagues working on the traditional, which is Western, Europe, take interests in subjects and events that take place east of Vienna or east of Poland, depending on your definition of Eastern Europe. By the end of the first day of the conference, at least some of us must have experienced what one of the participants described as Ukraine-fatigue. By the end of Graziosi’s talk, I felt a certain sense of jubilation: it is now up to those working on the old Europe to persuade us – East – Europeanists – to take interest in their work. For, after all, Eastern Europe and Ukraine have so much more to offer!

I could only focus on Graziosi’s talk because Ukraine had, by then, lost against France, our prospects of the world-championship in Brazil gone. Engaging fully in discussion over Ukrainian history was a Freudian way to get over the defeat. Discussions quickly became heated as some of the participants took up difficult subjects. If Andrea Graziosi impressed me for his intrinsic interest in things non-Italian, specifically Ukraine, Georgii Kasianov struck me for his courage in discussing the current stage of research on and in Ukraine. Specifically, he discussed attempts to create meta-narrative of Ukrainian history, one that stresses the continuity of Ukrainian history from the Middle Ages onward. Kasianov – perhaps stronger than anyone else at the conference – has shown how Ukrainian scholars, with some notable exceptions, still think about their history in exclusively national terms.

Much of the debates – in this as well as other panels – were shaped by references to Mark von Hagen’s pivotal publication form 1995, “Does Ukraine have a History.” Most notably, Serhii Bilenkyi in his presentation rephrased von Hagen’s question by asking his own “Does Ukraine – finally – have a history?” The debates surrounding this question revealed what Andrea Graziosi described, later that day, as the “multiple multitudes of pyramids” in Ukrainian history and historiography: is it the territory or the people of Ukraine who deserves to have a history? And in the age when the nation no longer constitutes a fruitful instrument of historical analysis – as some historians tend to agree – does Ukraine need a history?

This question is by no means abstract as an answer to it affects the way in which we teach history. In his presentation, Paul Robert Margocsy described the continuous interest in courses on Ukrainian history, stressing the growing enrollment of the students who have no Ukrainian background. His talk provoked a series of questions, which can be boiled to one large dilemma: is it still fruitful to national history? How many courses do we have on Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish history outside of Italy, Portugal, and Spain? Why does Ukraine deserve any special treatment?

All of these questions have practical implications specifically for those of us who represent the younger generation of scholars and who have completed their PhDs in what some intellectuals defined as a “post-national” age. We still remember our advisors pushing us to think beyond nations not only because national histories all too often turned into nationalized narratives but also because it is nearly impossible these days to land an academic position at a respected institution by producing such a narrative.

All of us present at the conference are, indeed, working on Ukraine-related topics. Most of us, however, integrate aspects of Ukrainian history into larger courses dealing with empires (Russian, Soviet, Austrian, and even the Ottoman), Europe, nationalism, borderlands, among the others. This way, we not only expand out context by making Ukrainian topics relevant to European specialists but also invite the Europeanists to think about how and why they should care about places like Ukraine. Those of us representing a younger generation are all too aware how difficult or nearly impossible it is these days to do just German or just French history. And why should Ukrainian history be an exception?

Debates became even more heated on the second day. Tensions became increasingly obvious already during the afternoon session on Tuesday, November 20. Norman Naimark in his paper discussed the patterns of violence on territories of today’s Ukraine. For Naimark, it seems, the borderland status is a key: he does not talk about Ukrainian violence or even violence against the Ukrainians; instead, he is interested in the question of why and how a particular region exposes a consistent pattern of violence over centuries. Yet his point – I feel – got lost in translation: it is hard for us, Ukrainians, to separate the territory and the people. It is all too easy to conflate a history of a region with a history of a nation and thus equate the history of violence on the territory of Ukraine with a history of Ukrainian violence.

The Ukrainian famine got somewhat lost in the debates, receiving less attention than I would have expected. Part of the reason was perhaps the absence of Mark von Hagen. In his paper, he placed the Ukrainian case within the broader context of European colonization, specifically building parallels to the Irish case. Because von Hagen was not present, no discussion on his paper ensued. More effective was Serhii Plokhii’s presentation on the recent HURI project, “Mapping Ukrainian Famine:” the digitized map allows to trace the exact number of death per 1000 people in different regions of Ukraine (available online at //gis.huri.harvard.edu). The map is designed as an interactive research tool for scholars of the famine.

I have learnt enormously from the papers and the discussion. This conference proved to be much more fun than any other than I remember from the past. This conference, at the same time, revealed new divides among scholars working on Eastern Europe, the Russian Empire, and Ukraine. Generational differences are these days more important than ethnic ones: it is not longer the Ukrainians against the rest, as neither the Ukrainians nor the rest constitute monolith groups. As I write, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians marching onto the streets protesting against our government halting the European agreement. None of us – I hope – talk about Ukraine-fatigue now.

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Revised Program of International Conference QUO VADIS UKRAINIAN HISTORY?

Аudio transcriptions of all panels from the Harvard International Conference: “Quo Vadis Ukrainian History?”

 

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