Shevchenko Scientific Society hosts program honoring Taras Hunczak
by Dr. Orest Popovych
NEW YORK - Russian imperialism and the Halychyna Division are topics bound to attract a crowd wherever Ukrainians gather, and on April 21 the home of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in New York City was no exception.
There the society hosted a program honoring Dr. Taras Hunczak, a professor of history and political science at Rutgers University, for his latest major scholarly works "Russian Imperialism from Ivan the Great to the Revolution" and "On the Horns of a Dilemma" - the story of the Ukrainian Halychyna Division. The first is a collection of original essays by nine authors in a volume edited and co-authored by Dr. Hunczak; the second is his monograph. Both were published in 2000 by the University Press of America Inc.
The presentation was organized and emceed by Dr. Anna Procyk, a vice-president of the Shevchenko Society, who introduced the first speaker, Prof. Wolodymyr Stojko, a historian. Dr. Stojko applauded the author for his monumental and timely effort to elucidate the history of Russian imperialism for the Western audience. This subject matter is particularly relevant today, when Russia has ceased to be an empire while remaining ambivalent about abandoning its imperial ways.
Dr. Hunczak managed to enlist the collaboration of eight outstanding historians from the United States and Europe, who provided separate articles on the history of the relations between Russia and Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic states, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Far East.
Dr. Hunczak's own article in the volume deals with "Pan-Slavism or Pan-Russianism." An introduction to the volume was written by the world-renowned historian Hans Kohn.
In great detail, Dr. Stojko outlined the structure of Dr. Hunczak's book on the Halychyna Division: the division's formation and command structure, the battle of Brody, the rebuilding of the division, the battles against Communist partisans in Slovakia and Yugoslavia, the division's transformation into the 1st Division of the Ukrainian National Army, its surrender to the British, life in the prisoner-of-war camps and, finally, its complete exoneration by the British of any wrongdoing during the war.
While praising Dr. Hunczak's book as the best on the Halychyna Division, Dr. Stojko said he would have preferred to see the story placed in a more expanded historical and political context. He then elaborated on the political situation and the controversial views surrounding the formation of the division.
When the author took to the podium, he highlighted the topics with some revealing and memorable numbers. It turns out that from 1462 and through the next 400 years, the state of Muscovy (renamed "Russia" in the 18th century) was expanding at a rate of 50 square miles a day. His volume on Russian imperialism was well received, as attested by 31 favorable reviews.
Dr. Hunczak's interest in the Ukrainian Division was sparked by controversial and often ill-informed references to it that have persisted to this day in the United States, Canada and Great Britain.
He said he had decided to undertake this study "not to prove anything," but to tell the true story of the division based on documentary evidence. The dilemma in which Ukrainians found themselves during World War II stemmed from the geopolitical fact that Ukraine was being crushed from two directions by two monsters: the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Nothing reveals the tragedy more convincingly than the horrendous losses in Ukraine's population in the 20th century - in World War II alone Ukraine lost an estimated 14.5 million people. Dr. Hunczak has calculated that in the absence of the two world wars and the genocides that devastated Ukraine in the last century, there would be 84.6 million Ukrainians living today.
Prof. Hunczak is the chairman of the history section of the Shevchenko Scientific Society.
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, May 20, 2001, No. 20, Vol. LXIX
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