International graduate symposium in Ukrainian studies held in Toronto (05/28/06)

International graduate symposium in Ukrainian studies held in Toronto

by Oksana Zakydalsky

TORONTO - "New Perspectives on Contemporary Ukraine: Politics, History and Culture" was the title of the International Graduate Student Symposium held at the Center for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at the University of Toronto on March 17-19. The sponsors of the symposium included: the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine, the Danyliw Foundation and the Connaught Committee of the University of Toronto.

There were 15 presenters who read their papers at panels organized around five main themes: literature, identity, writing of history, Ukraine and the world, and the Orange Revolution. Each panel was chaired by a scholar and had an academic discussant who provided a critique of the papers. The students came from six American, five Canadian and three European universities; one presenter came from Kyiv.

The first panel on literature was chaired by Taras Koznarsky (University of Toronto) with Maxim Tarnawsky (University of Toronto) as discussant. Amy Moore (Berkeley) dealt with the concepts of post-colonialism and post-modernism and cautioned against their universalizing features: "central to their ethos is the necessity... of recognizing the role of particular historical, cultural and political forces in the development of the given object of study." She analyzed the works of writer Yuri Andrukhovych using these concepts.

Roman Ivashkiv (University of Illinois) also looked at Ukrainian literature as an object of post-modernist study. He said that at the break-up of the USSR, Ukrainian literature was recovering from a "Soviet coma" which had had two aspects: official Soviet socialist realism (social awakening and integration into the system) or national awakening and opposition to the regime (dissident literature). To illustrate that Ukrainian literature has overcome its Soviet heritage, he cited Andrukhovych, whose works have depicted the transition time of confusion over identities and values in post-Soviet Ukraine.

Yulia Tkachuk (University of Illinois) spoke about the representation of nation-building in literature and compared two novels, Askold Melnyczuk's "What is Told" and Vasyl Kozhelyanko's "Terorium," in the way that they depoliticized Ukrainian literature. Both novels showed that nation-building projects are doomed to failure if there is no national identification.

The panel titled "Rewriting the Past," chaired by Olga Andriewsky (Trent University) with Paul Magocsi (University of Toronto) as discussant, dealt with the writing of history. Serhiy Bilenky (University of Toronto) traced the changing visions of the city of Kyiv in Polish, Russian and Ukrainian discourse. Because the three peoples had different mental geographies, their visions of Kyiv were mutually exclusive and reflected both symbolic and political struggles that accompanied the changing social landscape of the city after the 1790s.

Peter Rodgers' (University of Birmingham) aim was to look at Ukraine's "regionalism" but at a deeper level than just the so-called east-west axis. He claimed that "eastern Ukraine" was actually a "meta-region" with differences across it and showed, through content analysis of regional textbooks used in secondary schools of the Luhansk, Kharkiv and Sumy oblasts, to what extent the textbooks complemented or contradicted the state's "official" historical narrative.

The panel on identity was chaired by Alexander Motyl (Rutgers University) with Dominique Arel (University of Ottawa) as discussant. Kristin Cavoukian (University of British Columbia) presented a comparative study of the repatriation processes of Crimean Tartars in Ukraine and Mekhatian Turks in Georgia. Both peoples were forcibly deported during World War II and are now being allowed to return to the countries where they had lived. While 250,000 Crimean Tatars have returned to Crimea, almost no Mekhatian Turks have returned to Georgia. She explained that this was due to the different ways that Ukrainian and Georgian nationalities are constructed and citizenship defined. Georgian government policy actively discriminates in favor of the titular majority while Ukraine's policy has defined national identity as a civic and ethnically inclusive concept.

Olha Zazulya (Laval) discussed identity strategies in Ukraine. Initially, once Ukraine's independence was proclaimed, the ethno-linguistic reference was dominant and it gave value to the Ukrainian language and culture, the rewriting of national history, dissociation from the Communist past and finding the "eternal Ukraine." The regime of the time contributed to this consolidation of national sentiment by adopting the national symbols of 1918 and giving the Ukrainian language state status.

But this strategy was not completely successful on the level of individual identity, and the strategy "shifted from a mass-media popularized ethno-linguist conception towards a civic conception of nation based on patriotism," Ms. Zazulya said, adding that the impact of the Orange Revolution marked the passage to a form of post-national identity based on civic duty, solidarity and the sharing of democratic common values.

Gennady Poberezny (Rutgers) claimed that regionalism has always been an important factor in the national development of Ukraine. It was exacerbated during the Orange Revolution and exploited in the March 2006 election. To accommodate its persistent regionalism and defuse separatism, he argued that Ukraine needed decentralization rather than federalization. He admitted that the difficulty here was that there existed a "natural regionalism" based on formal frameworks created for socio-economic and political life and a "constructed regionalism" - such as the orange-blue/white divide - which generated false myths that needed to be deconstructed.

The panel on Ukraine and the world was chaired by Marta Dyczok (University of Western Ontario) with Prof. Motyl as discussant. Svitlana Kobzar (Cambridge, U.K.) argued that the European Union's power of attraction can be seen as one of the most important indirect factors stimulating the democratization process in Ukraine. The EU factor was influential in political dialogue at the government level, the desire to "return to Europe" that held sway among the Ukrainian elite and the development of civil society.

Elena Kropacheva's (Hamburg, Germany) paper examined the question of Ukraine and the world, and concluded that the aim of Euro-Atlantic integration of Ukraine was incompatible with its aspiration of maintaining close relations with Russia. This dilemma for Ukrainian foreign policy was fueled by the conflicting relations between Russia and the West, which reinforced Ukraine's polarization between these two orientations, both domestically and in its foreign policy, and created a vicious circle.

Natalia Shapovalova (International Center for Policy Studies, Ukraine) pointed out that Russia's influence in Ukraine was dealt a serious blow by the Orange Revolution and that Russia has ceased to exert its power politically. Instead it has turned to manipulating relations with Ukraine through a penetration strategy in bilateral relations in business, culture (Russian speakers), media (control of both print and TV) and the Orthodox Church and its agencies with the goal of bringing Ukraine back under Russian influence.

Marc Berenson (Princeton) outlined a comparative study of tax compliance in Ukraine, Poland and Russia and explained that the lowest level of tax compliance was in Ukraine, which was a result of the lowest level of trust in the government by Ukraine's population.

The last panel focused on the Orange Revolution and was chaired by Prof. Motyl with Prof. Dyczok as discussant. Dmytro Hubenko (California State) presented a comparison of the coverage of the Orange Revolution in The New York Times and the Russian paper Izvestia. He argued that both newspapers presented (or "framed") the Orange Revolution in terms of a conflict. The New York Times presented the main problem as being the fraudulent election of November 22, 2004, while Izvestia tried to show that the central problem was the historical east-west divide in Ukraine.

Anastasiya Salnykova (Simon Fraser) argued that the existence of a strong national movement in Ukraine was the factor that allowed the creation of an imagined community and provided the social capital necessary for the victorious collective action of the Orange Revolution.

Per Rudling (Alberta) claimed that his "paper focuses on the recent surge of organized anti-Semitism in the wake of the Orange Revolution" and explained that about "85 percent of the anti-Semitic publications sold in Ukraine are published by a pseudo-scientific organization called MAUP (Mizhregionalna Akademiia Upravlinnia Personalom). MAUP is a large, well-connected and increasingly powerful organization, partly funded by money from Libya and Palestine, Saudi Arabia and Iran. It is closely connected with white supremacist groups in the United States and to David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Although the author described how some individuals - among them Viktor Yushchenko and Borys Tarasuyk - were listed as being on the board of directors of MAUP - he explained that, as the unsavory nature of the institution became clear, they resigned and published critical comments about MAUP. As this happened before the 2004 election, his paper actually presented no evidence of any tie between organized anti-Semitism and the Orange Revolution.

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