Papers by Volodymyr Kravchenko
Orest Subtelny, an American-Canadian historian of Ukrainian origin, passed away in Toronto on 24 ... more Orest Subtelny, an American-Canadian historian of Ukrainian origin, passed away in Toronto on 24 July 2016. His research topics included Ukrainian history of the early modern period as well as historiography, national identity, and the Ukrainian diaspora, primarily in North America. Subtelny's interests were not limited to Ukrainian subjects. He approached the latter as part of the general context of the history of the East European region, with a special focus on geopolitical, imperial, and national studies, from a broad, comparative perspective. Subtelny's crowning achievement is considered to be his Ukraine: A History, first published in 1988 by the University of Toronto Press in association with the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS). Several more editions appeared in English, in Ukrainian translation, as well as in other languages.Subtelny was born in Cracow, on 17 May 1941. In 1949 he and his parents left Poland for the United States and settled in Philadel...
East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies
Why focus on Odesa? Because it is the largest, strategically located port on the Black Sea-the co... more Why focus on Odesa? Because it is the largest, strategically located port on the Black Sea-the continental gateway to the Mediterranean? Or because it remains one of the world's leading exporters of grain-now closed by a broad Russian military blockade? Or is it because of the city's extremely rich tendency toward myth-making? Something as seemingly banal as Odesa's "Potemkin Steps" have been firmly immortalized into film canons from L.A. to Toronto to Paris by Sergei Eizenshtein (Sergey Eisenstein) in his worldrenowned film, Bronenosets Potemkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1925). Likewise, the city's astounding ethnic diversity compels some to trace the Odesan roots of such seemingly disconnected yet prominent figures as Sidney Pollack, Steven Spielberg, Sylvester Stallone, Whoopi Goldberg, and Leonardo di Caprio. All the above-mentioned considerations, and more, would inspire any scholar to reflect upon the magnetism of Odesa's past, present, and future. It is clear from its established literary reputation and many muses that Odesa, on its own, is a rewarding topic for many. Yet our decision to bring scholars together to better understand Odesa is motivated by a slightly different epistemology. This issue of East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies is the second of a four-part series, in which the first was devoted to the city of Kharkiv, the first capital of Soviet Ukraine (1920-34) and the second largest city in Ukraine today, globally known for its military-industrial capacity and cultural production (Kharkiv: The City of Diversity). The "Odesa" issue will be followed by one more, on Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia. What do all of these cities share? They were all established within the Ukrainian-Russian borderland in the course of Russian imperial expansion, which in turn was deeply intertwined with the project of "modernization." The fact that these cities found themselves today at the epicentre of the Russian-Ukrainian struggle over the borderland, testifies to the complexity of their historical and cultural legacies (Kravchenko, The Ukrainian-Russian Borderland and "The Russian War against Ukraine").
East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies
All rights reserved The Cicero Foundation is an independent pro-Atlantic and pro-EU think tank. w... more All rights reserved The Cicero Foundation is an independent pro-Atlantic and pro-EU think tank. www.cicerofoundation.org The views expressed in Cicero Foundation Great Debate Papers do not necessarily express the opinion of the Cicero Foundation, but they are considered interesting and thought-provoking enough to be published. Permission to make digital or hard copies of any information contained in these web publications is granted for personal use,
History: Reviews of New Books
liberty for all will provide a better guide to the future. Chabal explores the sweeping social an... more liberty for all will provide a better guide to the future. Chabal explores the sweeping social and economic modernization of the thirty-year period known as the trentes glorieuses (1945–75), as well as De Gaulle’s efforts to restore France to great power status. The themes that he uses to guide this discussion, grandeur and decline, provide a useful link between France’s domestic and foreign policy. Grandeur was about restoring France to first-class status in the international community. Doing so depended upon having the firm economic foundation that the Monnet Plan and the European Coal and Steel community were designed to deliver (63). Although he recounts the profound domestic changes wrought by the initiatives, Chabal believes the pursuit of grandeur by De Gaulle and his successors to be ultimately futile. Constrained by the reality of a world dominated by superpowers, the general’s foreign policy triumphs were more rhetorical than real (74). The future, moreover, seems no brighter for French grandeur. Chabal highlights recent trends that work to diminish France’s international clout, such as the rise of China and the reunification of Germany. The emergence of China as a deep-pocketed economic superpower has undercut France’s economic leverage in Africa (161). France has also been pushed out of the driver’s seat of the EU as a result of the body’s expanding membership and German unification. As the Euro crisis demonstrated, the economic agenda of the European Union is increasingly set in Berlin (164). Though Chabal wonders if Brexit will provide opportunities for a renewed Paris-Berlin axis, the reader comes away with the sense that the author views the decline of France as inevitable and that the nation had best learn to stop living in the past and accept the reality that it is a second-tier, not a first-tier, nation (23). He believes that the general public is having more trouble accepting this reality than its leaders are (156). The author does not submit the discourse of grandeur to the same rigorous analysis that he does so successfully with ideas such as resistance and republican values. Tracing the shifting ways in which the French have pursued grandeur could have yielded interesting results for Chabal. The French seem to have been able to reinvent the idea repeatedly to fit the changing international environment. Though the term is associated with de Gaulle, was not the Fourth Republic pursuing grandeur when it insisted on fighting national liberation movements in its empire? Well before de Gaulle’s return to office in 1958, French leaders believed they must fight the Viet Minh in Indochina to demonstrate to the world that France was not the sick man of Europe but, rather, a global power. After his return, de Gaulle eventually recognized that, rather than being a prerequisite of grandeur, the fight to keep Algeria French had become an impediment to it. The work of Gabrielle Hecht suggests that the meaning of grandeur was reconfigured yet again in the wake of the loss of empire. In The Radiance of France (MIT Press 1998), she shows how France turned increasingly to technological prowess as a way to assert its standing in the world. Nuclear power, high-speed trains, and the Concorde increasingly became the way that the French demonstrated that they were a leading nation. Tracing the shifting nature of French international ambitions suggests that the French have been better able to tailor their ambitions to international realities than Chabal’s account of grandeur allows. That one would like further discussion and broader application of an idea like grandeur demonstrates the power of the themes of this book as interpretive keys. Topics such as gender politics or European integration would also have benefitted from more sustained attention. Though he mentions the existence of a French version of the #MeToo movement, it would have been fascinating to hear what the author makes of its denunciation by 100 female French actors, performers, and academics, including the famous Catherine Deneuve. In a letter to Le Monde, they defended “a right to annoy (importuner), as being indispensible to sexual freedom” (January 9, 2018). However, as Chabal acknowledges, a concise study of this nature inevitably leads to worthy topics being neglected. It is a testament to the success of this short book that the reader is left wanting more. The reader would be hard pressed to find a better introduction and guide to contemporary France. One looks forward to hearing more from Dr. Chabal.
East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies
Translated from Ukrainian by Ksenia Maryniak Why was an academic conference devoted to problems i... more Translated from Ukrainian by Ksenia Maryniak Why was an academic conference devoted to problems in the Black Sea basin held in landlocked Kharkiv? Those who wish to find the answer to this question would do well to recall that in 2010, Kharkiv was the place where the "Agreement between Ukraine and Russia on the Black Sea Fleet in Ukraine" (widely referred to as the Kharkiv Pact or Kharkiv Accords) was signed. Upon travelling even farther into the depths of history, one would see how important the strategic role of Kharkiv was in Russia's expansion and modernization of the southern reaches of its empire. As well, Kharkiv seemed to attract more than its fair share of people from the Balkan region, particularly those from what is now Serbia and Bulgaria. In this respect it suffices to mention the founder of Kharkiv University, Vasyl' Karazyn (Russ. Vasilii Karazin, 1773-1842), and two of its professors, Teodor Filipović (1778-1807; pseud. Božidar Grujović), who authored the first constitution and laws of Serbia, and Marin Drinov (1838-1906), who was among the founders of the constitution and national academy of sciences of Bulgaria. Against this background, the North-South axis of Ukraine and Kharkiv's symbolic geography appears no less important than the East-West axis. The above-mentioned explains to a certain extent why the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS), which itself is located in the landlocked provincial capital of Alberta-Edmonton-came to be included as an organizer and sponsor of the conference. To be sure, there were no analogous "fateful" treaties with the US, for example, concerning the lease of a base for its fleet in Hudson Bay; however, numerous immigrants in Alberta do have roots in the Balkan countries, not to mention Ukraine. In 2013, the CIUS planned to hold an international summer school in Sevastopol, whose co-organizers were to include the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies at the University of Alberta and Kharkiv National University. However, no one could have predicted that the Kharkiv Accords would be a prologue to the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in 2014. As a result, the CIUS's summer school project
East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, Apr 15, 2020
his issue opens with a series of special issues of East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies devote... more his issue opens with a series of special issues of East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies devoted to the largest Ukrainian cities of the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine: Kharkiv, Odesa, Zaporizhzhia, and Dnipro. There are several reasons to believe these cities are key to the future of Ukrainian nation-state building. First, they represent the most developed and urbanized regions located in the huge Ukrainian-Russian historical borderland. Second, they are the products of Russian imperial and Soviet modernization, still unsurpassed by its Ukrainian equivalent. Modern megapolises on the territory of Ukraine started acquiring a more pronounced ethnic-cultural Ukrainian profile only recently, during the "short" twentieth century. It is no wonder that they are still looking for their proper places in post-Soviet Ukraine, while their urban landscapes reflect contradictory visions of their past and future. Third, their dwellers surprised many Kremlin-based nationalists in 2014 during the Russian aggression and annexation of the Crimea when they opted for a Ukrainian nation state rather than the new incarnation of the Russian Empire. Kharkiv occupies a very special place in Ukrainian modern history due to its changing roles as a regional centre and a national capital. During its steady progressive development, which culminated in the twentieth century, Kharkiv became a modern, multi-ethnic, and culturally diverse city, the capital of a historical region known as Sloboda Ukraine, and even served as the capital of the short-lived Soviet Donetsk-Kryvyi Rih Republic (1917-18). As a regional centre with influence far beyond its current administrative boundaries, Kharkiv is comparable to the "margin-centric" or "liminal" cities of eastern and central Europe, Cernăuţi/Czernowitz/Chernivtsi, Danzig/Gdańsk, Lviv/Lwów/Lemberg, and Trieste (Cornis-Pope and Neubauer). During its term as a national capital, Kharkiv was a worthy rival of Kyiv. Until World War II, there was no "primate" city in Ukraine; instead, there were several regional centres competing for the control of Ukrainian territory (Szporluk). Only two of them-Kyiv and Kharkiv-possessed a T
East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, Apr 15, 2020
The article attempts to identify Kharkiv's place on the mental map of the Russian Empire and the ... more The article attempts to identify Kharkiv's place on the mental map of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, and traces the changing image of the city in Ukrainian and Russian narratives up to the end of the twentieth century. The author explores the role of Kharkiv in the symbolic reconfiguration of the Ukrainian-Russian borderland and describes how the interplay of imperial, national, and local contexts left an imprint on the city's symbolic space.
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History
East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies
The Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) became the second academic institution in the ... more The Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) became the second academic institution in the Western world to fully specialize in exploring Ukrainian history, culture, and current affairs after the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI). Establishment of the CIUS in Edmonton was not predetermined. There were other ideas and competing projects with regard to place, profile, and institutional model of Ukrainian studies in Canada. Edmonton became a winner due to a unique combination of Western regionalism, multiculturalism, the makeup of the Ukrainian local community, and the personal qualities of that community’s leaders. Contrary to widespread opinion, the CIUS did not copy the institutional model of the HURI. The CIUS model is unique, as it embraces a broad, interdisciplinary research agenda, and community-oriented activities related to education and culture.
The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review
Why was Kharkiv assigned the role of an alternative political capital of Ukraine during the Eurom... more Why was Kharkiv assigned the role of an alternative political capital of Ukraine during the Euromaidan revolution of 2014? Why did this plan fail? In this article the author tries to answer these questions by exploring Kharkiv’s role and place in the regional context of ongoing Ukrainian nation-state building in the historical perspective, focusing on the period after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Issues of regional geopolitics on the Ukrainian-Russian border as well as the changing symbolic landscape of the city are explored. The proactive role of the central authorities as well as specific local traditions and identity played their roles in keeping Kharkiv on the sidelines of the “hybrid war” that engulfed the Donbas. The modernization matrix that promoted Kharkiv’s growth from a provincial town into a regional leader prevailed over the rhetoric of Russian nationalism employed by Putin’s regime during the annexation of the Crimea. At the same time, social apathy and nationa...
Canadian Slavonic Papers, 2016
Orest Subtelny, an American-Canadian historian of Ukrainian origin, passed away in Toronto on 24 ... more Orest Subtelny, an American-Canadian historian of Ukrainian origin, passed away in Toronto on 24 July 2016. His research topics included Ukrainian history of the early modern period as well as historiography, national identity, and the Ukrainian diaspora, primarily in North America. Subtelny's interests were not limited to Ukrainian subjects. He approached the latter as part of the general context of the history of the East European region, with a special focus on geopolitical, imperial, and national studies, from a broad, comparative perspective. Subtelny's crowning achievement is considered to be his Ukraine: A History, first published in 1988 by the University of Toronto Press in association with the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS). Several more editions appeared in English, in Ukrainian translation, as well as in other languages.
Mass Dictatorship and Memory as Ever Present Past, 2014
East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 2016
The Crimean Khans' yarlyks on Ukrainian lands (the late 14th to the mid-16th Century) Commentator... more The Crimean Khans' yarlyks on Ukrainian lands (the late 14th to the mid-16th Century) Commentator: Ayder Memetov 4:00pm-5:45pm Panel 5. Judaic Studies in Post-soviet countries Chair: Andrzej Tymowski Yuri Morozov, TV broadcasting company "1+1", Kyiv Jewish filmmakers in Ukraine, 1910-1945 Irina Serheyeva, V. Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine, Kyiv Catalogue of illuminated pinkasim-record books of Jewish communities in Ukraine of the late 18th to the early of 20th Century
East and Central European History Writing in Exile 1939-1989, 2000
Mass Dictatorship and Memory as Ever Present Past, 2014
East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 2015
arcel van Herpen's monograph, devoted to the "new imperialism" of the Putin era, is a thematic co... more arcel van Herpen's monograph, devoted to the "new imperialism" of the Putin era, is a thematic continuation of his previous book (2013), which analyzes the political nature of the so-called "Putinist" regime. I have already had occasion to write that, for all the undoubted merits of the latter work, its historical section leaves much to be desired (Kravchenko). In the book under review, the historical section has been expanded considerably, bearing the telling title "Russia and the Curse of Empire." Van Herpen analyzes the phenomenon of Russian imperialism, its origins, evolution, ideological foundations, and reciprocal ties with despotic rule in general. He offers a detailed account of Putin's revival of imperial doctrine and his neocolonialist project of reintegrating post-Soviet space under the aegis of the Kremlin. In the second section, titled "The Internal War," the author presents a thorough analysis of the Putin regime's policy of eliminating democratic institutions in Russia, especially its reorganization of the country's political landscape and its effective return to a one-party system, hidden behind the window-dressing of political pluralism. This part of the book also deals with the ideological doctrine of Russian imperial nationalism, the Kremlin's organization of a youth movement, and its revival of Cossackdom in the role of a Praetorian guard for the current master of the Kremlin. Van Herpen demonstrates that Russia's aggressive policy is directly related to the country's authoritarian system. The third section of the book deals with the "hot" wars started by the Putin regime within Russia and abroad-the First and Second Chechen Wars, as well as the Georgian War of 2008. Van Herpen considers them in conjunction with the Afghan War, which the Soviet Union started in the now distant year of 1979. He also offers a detailed analysis of the mysterious explosions of apartment buildings in Volgodonsk and Moscow that preceded the Second Chechen War and raises the question of war crimes M
Uploads
Papers by Volodymyr Kravchenko