Y. Nakonechnyi Stolen Name. Why Rusyns Turned into Ukrainians

2015

Translated from Ukrainian. Kiev: BVL, 2015.

2021

The Russians and the Ukrainians, and indeed the Belarusians too, share an origin myth which reaches back to the legendary Rurik’s founding of the kingdom of the Kyivan Rus However, rather than reaching fruition in the early 20th century, as was the case in much of Central Europe, the origin story was subsumed into the Soviet experiment, and only remerged after 1991. It is still very much a work in progress. Here we will look at how the founding myth of the Rus has been used in the Ukrainian nation building project, which will unavoidably lead to comparisons with Russia and, to a lesser extent, other neighbouring countries such as Poland, Belarus and Lithuania. From the Normanist debate of the mid-18th century to the rise of nationalism in the 19th century and the use of the Rus in the the Soviet Union, we turn to the present with its all its historical complexity and political ramifications regarding the relationship between Ukraine and Russia.

East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies

Volume 6 of Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi's (Hrushevsky's) monumental History of Ukraine-Rus' is the concluding tome of a three-volume series (volumes 4, 5, and 6) dedicated to the Lithuanian-Polish epoch of the history of the Ukrainian people. Volumes 1 to 3 of Hrushevs'kyi's History, together, address the period ending with the fall of Kyivan Rus' and the Principality of Galicia-Volhynia, while the tomes after volume 6 deal with the early stages of the Cossack period and the (re-)establishment of Ukrainian sovereignty in the form of the Cossack Hetmanate. Hrushevs'kyi's conceptualization of the "history of the Ukrainian people" can be seen as one of his most important contributions to Eastern European historiography. In his work, we encounter the study of the Ukrainian people as a whole-as opposed to the study of various distinct entities located within a number of neighbouring states (Poland; the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; Hungary and then Austria-Hungary; Muscovy and then Russia; and so on). Hrushevs'kyi conceived of a fundamental unity permeating the history of the Ukrainian people from the time of Rus' all the way to the goal and apogee of the historian-cumpolitician-the re-establishment of a unified and independent Ukraine in the twentieth century (a project that Hrushevs'kyi himself took part in, both in its glorious beginnings and in its heartbreaking failures). In setting down a thesis on the continuity of the history of the Ukrainian people, Hrushevs'kyi provided subsequent generations of students of Ukrainian history with an essentially anti-statist methodological framework that allowed them to explore a subject area not merely reduced to a political history of a state with precisely delineated political borders. Such theoretical innovation and foresight have secured Hrushevs'kyi's high stature in the field of history-and especially in the study of Ukrainian cultural history. Mention should also be made of Hrushevs'kyi's importance in the study of the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (PLC) as a whole. By creating a model that includes the dwellers of the Brest and Pinsk regions of what is now Belarus within a definition of the Ukrainian people and that thoroughly documents them, Hrushevs'kyi has indirectly given us a paradigm for conducting cross-cultural and cross-national research that aims to

How do you write a history of a country that for centuries was split into several empires, lacked both an uninterrupted tradition of statehood and an established high culture with a standardized language, was inhabited by several ethnic groups, the dominant one -the "little Russians" or "Ruthenians" -being mostly illiterate peasants concentrated in rural areas who left no written records for wide swaths of time and lacked any national consciousness until World War I? How does one write about the history of these people who, even when they became literate, were forbidden to publish literature in Ukrainian (within the Russian Empire), and when Ukrainian history did not even exist as a field of study in universities? The answer, according to an international consortium of historians, is to write "transnational history," which they generally define as the study of relations between cultures and societies, focusing on "agents of cultural exchange" (pp. 3, 86). The purpose of this book, A Laboratory of Transnational History. edited by Georgiy Kasianov (Institute of Ukrainian History of Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Kiev) and Philipp Ther (European University Institute, Florence), is to contemplate alternative, more accurate, ways of interpreting Ukrainian history, eschewing "linear and longue durée causal explanations, as well as teleology,"

This article surveys the shifting constituencies associated with the naming alternatives of the Ukrainian past. I have written with two objectives in mind: one, to suggest that the reinvention and propagation of the term ukraïnets' (in plural ukraïntsi) as a national name was one of the greatest achievements of the national movement; two, to call attention to the past vitality of now-defunct naming alternatives and the shifting valences assigned to them.

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 2004

Volume 6 of Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi's (Hrushevsky's) monumental History of Ukraine-Rus' is the concluding tome of a three-volume series (volumes 4, 5, and 6) dedicated to the Lithuanian-Polish epoch of the history of the Ukrainian people. Volumes 1 to 3 of Hrushevs'kyi's History, together, address the period ending with the fall of Kyivan Rus' and the Principality of Galicia-Volhynia, while the tomes after volume 6 deal with the early stages of the Cossack period and the (re-)establishment of Ukrainian sovereignty in the form of the Cossack Hetmanate. Hrushevs'kyi's conceptualization of the "history of the Ukrainian people" can be seen as one of his most important contributions to Eastern European historiography. In his work, we encounter the study of the Ukrainian people as a whole-as opposed to the study of various distinct entities located within a number of neighbouring states (Poland; the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; Hungary and then Austria-Hungary; Muscovy and then Russia; and so on). Hrushevs'kyi conceived of a fundamental unity permeating the history of the Ukrainian people from the time of Rus' all the way to the goal and apogee of the historian-cumpolitician-the re-establishment of a unified and independent Ukraine in the twentieth century (a project that Hrushevs'kyi himself took part in, both in its glorious beginnings and in its heartbreaking failures). In setting down a thesis on the continuity of the history of the Ukrainian people, Hrushevs'kyi provided subsequent generations of students of Ukrainian history with an essentially anti-statist methodological framework that allowed them to explore a subject area not merely reduced to a political history of a state with precisely delineated political borders. Such theoretical innovation and foresight have secured Hrushevs'kyi's high stature in the field of history-and especially in the study of Ukrainian cultural history. Mention should also be made of Hrushevs'kyi's importance in the study of the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (PLC) as a whole. By creating a model that includes the dwellers of the Brest and Pinsk regions of what is now Belarus within a definition of the Ukrainian people and that thoroughly documents them, Hrushevs'kyi has indirectly given us a paradigm for conducting cross-cultural and cross-national research that aims to

The Polish Review, 2018

Sixteenth Century Journal, 2020