WASHINGTON – Serhii Plokhy, the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History and director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, was honored with this year’s Omelan and Tatiana Antonovych Foundation award for his work as a historian and author of history books that insightfully analyze Ukraine’s past and present and shed light on what may be in store for its future.
As Ukraine’s Ambassador Valeriy Chaly noted in his opening remarks at the November 14 event at the Embassy of Ukraine, Prof. Plokhy’s work “has helped us to understand better our contemporary reality and predict further developments.”
Ukraine’s roots are in Europe and so is its future, the ambassador said, adding: “A nation that forgets its past has no future.”
Prof. Plokhy is the 68th laureate of the Antonovych Award since the annual presentations were initiated in 1981, with the first award going to Ukrainian poet Vasyl Barka. The list of honorees also includes such renowned writers and scholars as Vasyl Stus, Lina Kostenko, Ivan Dzyuba and Zbigniew Brzezinski.
This year’s award ceremony came one week after the official dedication of the Holodomor Memorial in Washington, for which the Antonovych Foundation had provided $100,000 two years ago to help finance its construction.
Dr. Marta Bohachevsky-Chomiak, who chairs the Antonovych Foundation’s awards committee, which selected Prof. Serhii Plokhy for the foundation’s 2015 award, shows his soon-to-be released book, “The Gates of Europe – A History of Ukraine.”
As the president of the Antonovych Foundation, Dr. Ihor Voyevidka, pointed out in his presentation, among the earlier Antonovych laureates honored for their work about the 1932-1933 Famine-Genocide in Ukraine were Robert Conquest, author of “The Harvest of Sorrow,” in 1987, and Ukrainian historian Stanislav Kulchytsky and Italian historian Andrea Graziosi in 2011.
In presenting him with the 2015 award, the Antonovych Foundation cited Prof. Plokhy’s most recent prize-winning book, “The Last Empire – The Last Days of the Soviet Union,” and his forthcoming book, scheduled for publication later in November, “The Gates of Europe – A History of Ukraine.”
Dr. Marta Bohachevsky-Chomiak, who chairs the foundation’s awards committee, noted Prof. Plokhy’s prolificacy in writing historical books that date back to the 1980s, when he was still teaching history at the University of Dnipropetrovsk.
After the break-up of the Soviet Union and the re-establishment of Ukraine’s independence, he moved to Canada in 1996, where he taught at the University of Alberta and joined the staff of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. Then, in 2007, he came to Harvard University as the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History; in 2013 he became the director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.
Dr. Bohachevsky-Chomiak pointed out that Prof. Plokhy and his work differ greatly from the “instant specialists” and “instant studies” that have appeared in recent years when Ukraine came into the world consciousness.
“He has shown what a genuine historian can accomplish, given the intelligence, given the will and given a little opportunity,” she said. “He has been able to see, to study and, most importantly, to present so that others may read and understand the critical role of Ukraine as a cultural, intellectual and political player.”
Accepting the Antonovych Award, Prof. Plokhy noted that, while walking through Washington, he and his wife noticed a thoughtful inscription on the National Archives building: “The past is prologue.”
“And in that sense, what happened in 1991 in the Soviet Union, and in Ukraine in particular, was, to a degree, for better or for worse, a prologue to what we see today, what we experience today,” he said.
While most of his earlier historical works dealt with the 16th and 17th centuries, he said, his “The Last Empire – The Last Days of the Soviet Union” focused on developments between July and December of 1991. It was published in 2014, he pointed out – a time of the most recent Ukrainian independence developments, when many of the same questions were coming to the fore once again.
Prof. Plokhy said that his study and comparison of 1991 and 2014 tells him that “the disintegration of the last empire is not completed,” but that we can learn by comparing it to the break-up of other empires in the world.
“Normally it is a long process. It is something that doesn’t happen overnight,” he said. “But it also allows us to look into the future with a certain kind of optimism,” he added.
The annual Antonovych Award is accompanied with a $10,000 honorarium for the laureate.
Omelan and Tatiana Antonovych established their foundation in 1980, with the goal of advancing the study of Ukrainian culture – its literature, history, art, music and religion. Since then, it has donated some $3 million to help finance the development of many academic and cultural institutions and monuments in Ukraine, among them, the reconstruction the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy’s main library, the renovation of the Vasyl Stefanyk Library and Artists Palace in Lviv and the building of the Boykivshchyna Museum in Dolyna, in western Ukraine, where Omelan Antonovych was born in 1914.
Mr. Antonovych spent his early adult years as a Ukrainian nationalist activist and, consequently, served time as a political prisoner in Polish and Nazi prisons. Later, he received a law degree at the Ukrainian Free University in Prague (1943). He and Tatiana Terlecky married after the war. She was a physician and later would become a world-renowned kidney specialist.
After World War II, the Antonovyches emigrated to the United States, settling in Washington, where Mrs. Antonovych worked as a scholar and taught in capital-area medical schools, while her husband focused on ranching and real estate.
Dr. Tatiana Antonovych passed away in 2001, and her husband in 2008. The following year, during the foundation’s awards ceremony at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, they were posthumously honored by the government of Ukraine with the Order of Yaroslav the Wise, fifth degree.