KEYNOTE ADDRESS: Hrushevsky's history is essential to understanding Ukraine today

Following are excerpts of the keynote speech delivered by Dr. Nancy S. Kollmann, professor of history and director of the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at Stanford University, at the book launch to mark the publication of Volume 8, "The Cossack Age, 1626-1650," of Mykhailo Hrushevsky's multi-volume "History of Ukraine Rus' " in English translation.

...The appearance in English of Hrushevsky's Volume 8, dedicated to the Kozak uprisings and social conditions of the early 17th century and to the first years of the Khmelnytsky uprising, is truly a momentous occasion. From my vantage point I see its importance from many different perspectives. As a teacher of East European and Ukrainian history, I welcome it as an invaluable help in the classroom. As a historian and teacher of Russian history, it will be a wonderful tool to give students a different viewpoint on the development of the Rus' lands than the usual Russian nationalist myth promoted in so many other English-language books.

From my point of view as a scholar involved in promoting area studies of this part of the world East Europe, the former Soviet Union at a time of tremendous change, I see this book as very helpful in pushing new trends of thinking about area studies. What I'd like to do today is to elaborate on those two big areas a bit - the changes that are going in area studies and the usefulness of this book in the teaching of East European, Ukrainian and even, maybe even especially, in Russian history.

Let me start with the issue of area studies. Tangentially, but still importantly, this volume of Hrushevsky in English can help scholars, not just historians, as they struggle to reconceptualize how to study the part of the world that includes Ukraine. Because of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War and the gradual reconfiguration of geopolitical and social and economic connections among the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, we - that is, scholars in North America and Europe - are forced to rethink how we understand this part of the world. ...

Scholars in all disciplines, especially contemporary social science studies, now are rethinking how we conceptualize the history of the lands that include Ukraine. As you may know, during the time of Soviet power and the Cold War, particularly in the United States and less so in Canada, everyone studied Russian history and Russian studies. Russia was privileged, because it was the superpower; in the [United] States it got all the government funding and attention. The study of the so-called Eastern Bloc East European states, such as Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and Hungary, fell to the background and wasn't studied much. And Ukraine, as you know, was buried in the Russian empire and greatly ignored - and even worse discounted because the Russocentric view that was dominant argued that Ukraine was simply an integral part of Russian history, and didn't even have its own culture.

There were, of course, alternative visions expressed in the post-war period. Scholars like the Polish émigré historian Oscar Halecki tried to call the attention of the Western world to the independent history of the several nations and cultures in what he called East Central Europe. He argued that East Central Europe - and here he included Ukraine - was fundamentally part of Western civilization. And in the 20th century in North America, particularly in Canada, scholars were carrying out research, centers of study were being funded by people like yourselves in places like here, Toronto and Harvard, and books and journals were presenting an independent vision of Ukrainian history.

But this work wasn't enough to counterbalance the din from the dominant Russocentric scholarship. All the English-language textbooks and many of the courses taught in American universities at least were shaped by émigré Russian historians who gave no respect to the concept of an independent Ukrainian culture and history.

Now the landscape of area studies is changing. Scholars in a variety of disciplines are recognizing that the groupings that seemed to make sense in the Cold War "Russian and East European Studies" don't make sense anymore. What we used to consider Russia is now a complex of independent states and many different ethnicities and cultures. What we used to call Eastern Europe is looking more and more like Europe in its economic ties, its geopolitical connections (NATO, the European Union), its assertions of national and cultural identity. And Ukraine is being understood more and more as part of broader European trends post-Soviet change.

Scholars in the social sciences like political science, sociology and anthropology are very interested in studying the problems of post-Soviet transition economic development of market economies, political reforms of communist systems, cultural transformations in the realm of nationalism and identity-building.

They are finding Ukraine a very accessible place to study these processes of transition: the language is fairly accessible, the conditions of scholarship and field research are accessible. And they are approaching Ukraine with a relatively open mind - they aren't so steeped in a Russocentric vision of the world, they see connections across geopolitical regions, or they look for commonalities in development across many nations.

The net effect is that Ukraine is finding a place in the newly configured area studies as part of a more flexibly conceived geopolitical realm of European studies. For example, we are hosting a speakers series this year at Stanford in contemporary Ukraine, and we are finding several very interesting scholars - political scientists, an anthropologist who are using Ukraine as a case study in important processes of change.

Now what does Hrushevsky's book have to do with the new social science research in Ukraine today? It provides the factual underpinning, easily accessible in English, for scholars in other disciplines to acquaint themselves with the history that demonstrates how and why Ukrainians have developed so independent and separate a national culture and identity. It readily helps them cut through the seeming confusion of why this state that only rarely had its own sovereign state can claim now to be a cohesive political, cultural and social entity. That modern-day reality of independence is grounded in the history Hrushevsky covers in this volume.

Of course, Hrushevsky's book will be most influential to historians as they, too, try to re-envision their field in the aftermath of the collapse of the old Soviet empire. What is happening for historians is that they are forced to rethink the whole category of the nation, or at least the nation as the focus of what we study in the past. They are having to deal with the reality of real, independent republics like Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia and Belarus emerging from a history in which they had rarely, if ever, had independent status as a sovereign nation themselves. ... But historians have been used to writing history around the so-called winners in march of modern history, the nation-states and empires that exist now.

But if you envision your history as only the history of "Russia" or even of "Poland" or "Hungary," you miss a lot of other cultural experiences. You ignore the multi-ethnic reality of most European states, in the past and today; you quickly skip over the presence of non-dominant peoples in a state - Ukrainians in the Polish-Lithuanian state or in the Hungarian state for that matter, or Jews in the interstices of all these nation-states. You miss the many different cultural and religious communities when you're focusing only on the dominant one. And you miss the fascinating historical process of how a people can develop a sense of cohesion and separate identity, can become a nation, without having a state of their own. The example of Ukraine is a perfect case study in those processes of nation-building ...

Now this plays right into Hrushevsky's hands. In Volume 8, and elsewhere, he demonstrates his belief that the state isn't the unit that shaped Ukrainian history as much as it is the people, the culture, distinct social groups and institutions such as the Kozaks, the brotherhoods and the Church. In this book he devotes a great deal of attention to religion as a shaper of culture and of politics, and he situates the events in a broad geopolitical world encompassing the Polish-Lithuanian state, the Russians, the Turks and Tatars, the Moldavians and even the Swedes. He puts into action the agenda that historians are now talking about, which is trying to see the many overlapping and intersecting layers of connections that simultaneously structured a historical moment. ...

Now, turning to teaching, I want to say a bit about how useful this book will be in teaching undergraduates about Ukrainian, East European and Russian history across the board. Let me give you an example from my course called "Aristocracies and Absolutisms," which is greatly informed by the study I did at Harvard with Ihor Sevcenko, Frank Sysyn and Orest Subtelny who all taught while I was there. The course includes East Central Europe broadly defined Polish-Lithuanian state, Ukraine, Belarus, Czech lands and Hungary and the story of the course is basically to show how these lands all started out with similar situations and diverged historically. That is, they started out with monarchies, nobilities, parliaments; agrarian, peasant based economies, Christian cultural systems, primarily Catholic but Orthodox in the east. We then track how absolutism-the Habsburgs in the Czech and Hungarian lands, Russia in the east, Prussia in the north-challenged the parliamentary and noble political systems indigenous to the area, and how the counterforce of national consciousness emerged to challenge absolutism.

Now to present this story, Ukrainian history is absolutely essential because it is the best example of two trends that transformed society in this part of the world and that catapulted Eastern Europe into what we might call modernity. Those two are confessionalization and national consciousness. These are the trends that are right at the center of Hrushevsky's Volume 8. Confessionalization is that process that took place all across Europe in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, whereby political entities were identified by exclusive religious entities, national churches were founded and tolerance of other creeds fell to the wayside.

In Hrushevsky's Volume 8, students can get in great detail the story of how Metropolitan Petro Mohyla modernized Orthodoxy in the wake of the Union of Brest, and how bitterly the two Ukrainian Christian communities struggled to establish themselves after the union, and how these religious communities then played into political struggles for independence. The other theme of Volume 8 is national consciousness, which Hrushevsky rightly sees emerging out of the Kozak rebellions of the first half of the 17th century, coming to fruition in the Khmelnytsky rebellion.

Nowhere in East Central Europe in the early modern period are these themes better illustrated than in Ukraine. ... what happened in Ukraine in the 17th century changed the face of East Central Europe and marks a decisive turn into what we might call "modern" political and cultural formations. The Ukrainian 17th century changed the chessboard of European politics, severely weakening the Polish-Lithuanian experiment in electoral monarchy, it opened the door for absolutist powers like the Habsburgs and the Russians to meddle in East European affairs. In the Hetmanate it established for a brief but significant time a new sovereign state founded on national consciousness and Orthodox religious confession. It asserted the independence of Ukrainian culture, and started the process of creating a historical memory in new works of history, art, panegyrics and literature, and preserving those that had been preserved from Kyivan and earlier centuries.

... With this book in hand I can help transform students' understanding not only of how important and independent the Ukrainian heritage was in the past, but how crucial the history of Ukraine is in the transformations of modern European and East European history.

I hope that my remarks have made it clear how influential Hrushevsky as a historian has been on me as a scholar. Because I had the good fortune of studying at Harvard, where I went because I wanted to work with the Russian historians, I was exposed to the importance of Ukrainian history. Both my Russian scholar mentors [Richard] Pipes and [Edward] Keenan stressed that you can't understand Russian history without knowing Ukrainian history, and there was the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute to provide courses, inspiring mentors in people like Omeljan Pritsak and Ihor Sevcenko and fellow graduate students who are now leaders of the field [Frank] Sysyn and [Zenon] Kohut, [Paul] Magosci, [Orest] Subtelny. And Hrushevsky was a staple in my learning about Ukraine. I always found great satisfaction in introducing to my fellow Russian graduate students Hrushevsky's essay in which he argues that Ukraine has a separate path from Russian history and that Russian history shouldn't include Kyiv Rus'. It is very heartening to see that more people can be introduced to this great historian by these volumes in English. I congratulate the editorial team for a tremendous achievement. Thank you.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, December 1, 2002, No. 48, Vol. LXX

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