1996: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

Academia: jubilees, conferences, projects

North America's two leading Ukrainian scholarly institutions celebrated anniversaries this year. In the U.S., the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute's "Summer Institute" marked its silver jubilee, while to the north, the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies marked its 20th anniversary as an institution.

At Harvard

HURI prepared for the 25th anniversary of its summer courses by putting out a call to all alumni to attend the first weekend of this year's sessions, June 28-30, and 177 did.

At the first night's dinner/symposium held at the Faculty Club, this year's program director, Dr. Halyna Hryn, provided a synopsis of its history. She mentioned that while enrollment peaked in 1977-1979, now success is seen in figures indicating that 55 percent of students who signed up in 1995 were not of Ukrainian background.

The next day, the professors of Harvard's three chairs in Ukrainian studies, Prof. Roman Szporluk, the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Chair of History, Prof. Michael Flier, the Oleksander Potebnja Professor of Ukrainian Philology, and Prof. George Grabowicz, the Dmytro Cyzevskyj Professor of Ukrainian Literature, delivered addresses.

On July 1, Prof. Szporluk succeeded Prof. Grabowicz as HURI director. In an interview with The Weekly's Roman Woronowycz, Prof. Szporluk said he would concentrate on contemporary 20th century history, with an emphasis on Polish-Ukrainian relations and a general reconceptualization of Eastern European history.

Prof. Grabowicz told The Weekly he considered his biggest achievements as director to be the institute's expansion into the fields of contemporary political science and economics, and the broadening of contacts with Ukraine.

As 1996 drew to a close, HURI joined with George Washington University (the host institution) and the Ukrainian Embassy in the U.S. in sponsoring a conference with perhaps the most high-powered cast assembled during the year, as part of a project known as "Ukraine - Five Years of Independence."

Held December 12-14, the "Ukraine in the World" conference included Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security advisor and Center for Strategic and International Studies counselor; James Collins, special advisor to the U.S. secretary of state on the newly independent states; Richard Morningstar, U.S. ambassador at large for the NIS; Anton Buteiko, Ukraine's first vice minister for foreign affairs; and Dr. Yuri Shcherbak, Ukraine's ambassador to the U.S.

As chair of the American-Ukrainian Advisory Committee, Dr. Brzezinski appears to have coaxed the most assuredly positive stance on Ukraine's independence and strategic importance to date from Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott. In his December 12 address to the National Press Club, Dr. Brzezinski read from a letter received from Mr. Talbott in which the latter states "a strong prosperous, democratic and independent Ukraine can make a critical contribution to the stability and well being of Europe as a whole - a core U.S. national security interest."

Ambassador Morningstar's luncheon speech was the most cautionary of all, suggesting that Ukraine must progress from economic stability to growth if it hopes to continue to attract outside support from investors and foreign governments.

Five other sessions dealt with Ukraine's relations with its direct neighbors (including Russia), the Near and Middle East, Western Europe and the U.S., Eastern and Central Europe, and general issues of security and military affairs.

Conference organizer Lubomyr Hajda indicated that the "Five Years" project will include two more conferences - one on economic issues and the other on nation-building and social issues - and the total package will eventually appear as a two-volume publication of proceedings and data.

At the CIUS

The Canadian Institute celebrated its 20th year with a full-day conference (held jointly with the Ukrainian Canadian Congress's Alberta Provincial Council), a gala banquet, and the launching of Dr. Bohdan Bociurkiw's important new study of the Soviet regime's war against the Ukrainian Catholic Church.

Ukraine's Ambassador to Canada Volodymyr Furkalo brought greetings from President Leonid Kuchma during a special luncheon in honor of the institute.

In his keynote banquet address CIUS Director Dr. Zenon Kohut traced the history of the CIUS's founding in 1976 thanks to its first director, Prof. Manoly Lupul of the University of Alberta (U of A); a trio of scholars - the U of A's late Prof. Ivan Lysiak Rudnytsky, University of Toronto's Prof. George S.N. Luckyj, Carleton University's Dr. Bohdan Bociurkiw; and politically connected lawyer and U of A Chancellor Peter Savaryn.

Dr. Kohut listed the institute's major accomplishments, including the five-volume English-language Encyclopedia of Ukraine, the establishment of a number of programs in Ukrainian studies at the University of Alberta, the development and publishing of the Nova Ukrainian language development series for bilingual (English-Ukrainian) schools, the launching of a project to translate Mykhailo Hrushevsky's monumental 10-volume "Istoria Ukrainy-Rusy" (The History of Ukraine-Rus'), and the publication of more than 100 books and 58 research reports.

As the year drew to a close, the Hrushevsky Project, conducted by the Petro Jacyk Center for Ukrainian Historical Research at CIUS under the directorship of Dr. Frank Sysyn, gained impetus as it handed a completed manuscript of the first volume to CIUS Press for publication in the summer of next year.

In April, Canadian Cabinet Minister Anne McLellan announced a grant totaling $2.2 million in support of the CIUS's Canada-Ukraine Legislative Education Project. Over the three-and-a-half-year term of the project, customized educational programs will be organized for up to 120 Ukrainian legislators and government officials. They will involve the governments of Canada's three prairie provinces, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, as well as the Speaker's Office of Canada's House of Commons. In Ukraine, CIUS's partner in managing the project will be the non-profit International Center for Policy Studies, whose board of directors is chaired by Dr. Bohdan Krawchenko, former director of CIUS.

On April 26-28, CIUS's parent institution, the University of Alberta, hosted a conference titled "Studies in Ukrainian Culture and Ethnicity: Academic and Community Perspectives."

Sponsored by the Huculak Chair of Ukrainian Culture and Ethnography (the only center of its kind in North America conducting educational and research programs in Ukrainian folklore), it featured presentations by Dr. Andriy Nahachewsky, holder of the Huculak Chair, and Dr. Robert B. Klymasz of the Canadian Center for Folk Culture Studies in Hull, Quebec, as well as various graduate student forums and workshops.

Two major conventions

The two events that drew scholars in the field of Ukrainian studies in the greatest numbers were the third International Congress of Ukrainian Studies (ICUS) held in Kharkiv, and the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) in Boston.

The ICUS, held on August 26-29, was more like a meeting of the tribes, attracting over 600 scholars from 24 countries. University of Delaware political scientist Prof. Yaroslav Bilinsky provided a report for The Weekly, whose dour tone was balanced by accounts of tributes offered to "returning heroes" Columbia University Prof. Emeritus Yuriy Shevelov, who started his academic career at Kharkiv University in the 1930s, and to Prof. Assya Humesky of the University of Michigan, whose late father was a poet and public figure who lived in the eastern Ukrainian city.

Prof. Bilinsky also celebrated Prof. Wolf Moskowitz, chair of the Israeli Association for Ukrainian Studies, as "the most resolute defender of speaking Ukrainian, and only Ukrainian, in Kharkiv - even to his American colleagues"; and Tokyo University's Prof. Kazuo Nakai, "who in nearly flawless Ukrainian brilliantly analyzed 'Independent Ukraine in the Contemporary World,' " in the midst of a Russified city.

Harvard Ukrainian Studies journal managing editor Andrew Sorokowski described the AAASS convention of November 14-17 for The Weekly as a four-day extravaganza of "business meetings, banquets and bookstalls, as well as scores of receptions, roundtables and rival rosters of speakers. Topics covered the entire panoply of Slavic learning, from the momentous to the arcane, from the profound or provocative to the merely obscure."

About two dozen panels and roundtables dealt directly or indirectly with Ukraine, and those dealing with its relations with Russia "naturally attracted attention," including a session chaired by Harvard's Prof. Szporluk, titled "Constructing and Deconstructing Empire in the Eurasian Space." Yet another panel was conducted as part of an ongoing Ukrainian-Russian studies project coordinated by the CIUS, Columbia University's Harriman Institute and the University of Cologne.

On November 17, the annual meeting of the American Association of Ukrainian Studies was convened by President Humesky. The AAUS prize for best article in Ukrainian studies was awarded to Oleh Ilnytzkyj of the University of Alberta, with honorable mention to George Mihaychuk. The AAUS translation prize was awarded to Michael Naydan of Pennsylvania State University, with honorable mention to Halyna Hryn of Yale University and Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko.

Two oral history projects

On August 19, on the fifth anniversary of the failed 1991 coup in Moscow, a press conference was held at the Writers' Union building in Kyiv to announce the "Project on the Oral History of Independent Ukraine." The interviews, recorded in over 200 hours of videotape, begin with the celebrations of the Millennium of Christianity in Ukraine and go through 1991, capturing the individual accounts and opinions of more than 70 political, cultural and religious leaders and journalists from Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, the United States and Canada.

Margarita Hewko, who lived through the events leading up to Ukrainian independence in Kyiv, took the initiative to set up the project and became its first director, working out of Ukraine. She was later joined by Sarah Sievers, who now acts as the U.S. co-director and is a fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Excerpts selected by HURI were published exclusively in The Weekly, giving readers a glimpse of the type of materials that will be available some time in 1997. Phase two of the project, which has already begun, includes transcribing and editing the hundreds of hours of "oral history," translating into Ukrainian and English, and then making this available to students, scholars, researchers and journalists in both Ukrainian and Western university libraries and research centers.

Financial support totaling $37,000 was proffered by the Yale Center of International and Regional Research (Council on Russian and Eastern European Research), the Chopivsky Family Foundation and the Embassy of the Netherlands in Kyiv.

Viktor Susak, academic director of the "Living History" laboratory at Lviv University's Institute for Historical Research, conducted a more grass-roots oral history project in Canada and the U.S. from October 1995 to June 1996, under the joint auspices of his institution and the Multicultural History Society of Ontario.

Mr. Susak conducted 50 interviews with members of 12 extended families as project manager of an effort known as "Ukrainian Canadian Families in the 20th Century: Continuity and Discontinuity, Social Trajectories and Inter-Generational Relationships." He hopes to trace the impact of historical events on individual lives, based on a sociological approach.

Other major developments included the following.

• In October Prof. André Bandrauk became the first lecturer to visit Ukraine under the Royal Society of Canada - Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences Cooperation Agreement in a follow-up to the visit of the inaugural exchange lecturer, Dr. Anatolij Zagorodny, who came from Kyiv to tour Canada in March 1995. Dr. Bandrauk, from the University of Sherbrooke's department of chemistry, gave lectures on his specialty, lasers and computational chemistry, in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv and Odesa, and addressed public organizations about science and education in Canada.
  
  
• George Washington University (GWU) received a donation of stock valued at $400,000 from William Petrach of Arlington, Va., and established the William and Helen Petrach Endowment for Ukrainian Exchanges and Programs. The endowment will support exchanges of faculty and graduate students between GWU and Lviv State University, with a focus on training and upgrading scholarship in Ukraine and on generating first-rate research, teaching and policy analysis at GWU, in such disciplines as economics, international affairs, political science, history, languages and literature, geography, law, anthropology and other fields.
  
  
• In his June 23 "Canada Courier," Weekly columnist Chris Guly offered insights into the adversities that Dr. Bohdan Bociurkiw overcame in completing his book, "The Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church and the Soviet State (1939-1950)" - everything from the over-eagerness of his publisher (CIUS Press) to a grave illness that almost led to the amputation of his right leg in 1992. During his convalescence, Dr. Bociurkiw received copies of documents from the Lviv archives from a researcher-friend from Ukraine, and these quickly revived the ailing political scientist. The material enabled him to isolate the man responsible for conducting the liquidation campaign against the Ukrainian Catholic Church at Joseph Stalin's behest. "His name was Karin," Dr. Bociurkiw told Mr. Guly, "Serhiy Tarasevych Karin."
  
  
• The Shevchenko Society of Canada held a one-day conference on September 12 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Union of Brest at the University of Toronto. Panelists included historian Dr. Frank Sysyn; the Rev. Petro Bilaniuk, professor emeritus of theology and Church history at the University of Toronto; Prof. Ihor Monchak, a lecturer at the Lviv Theological Academy and formerly an instructor at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Rome and the University of Ottawa; and Prof. Alexander Baran, a historian from the University of Manitoba.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, December 29, 1996, No. 52, Vol. LXIV

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