“Getting history wrong is an essential factor in the formation of a nation,” wrote Ernest Renan, basing this observation on his analysis of the nation-building experience in nineteenth-century Europe.^[1] Many historians today tend to agree with Renan’s statement and are doing their best to “get history right” as they search for alternatives to national history. More often than not they face an uphill battle in that regard, both within and outside their profession.
On the one hand, the influence of globalization in North America and European integration on the other side of the Atlantic have certainly shaken the old belief in nationality as the only legitimate principle for organizing the history of humankind. The retreat of primordialism in nationality studies and the demonstration of the temporal and constructed nature of national identities, as well as the interpretation of nationalities as imagined communities, further undermined the legitimacy of the nationality principle in historical writing. On the other hand, most historians continue to practice national history, and the governments of nation-states continue to encourage the use of history for purposes of patriotic education. An international group of scholars currently working on a five-year program of the European Science Foundation entitled “Representations of the Past: The Writing of National Histories in Europe” observed that the rise of radical right-wing and separatist movements in many West European states “has put national history center stage.” They also point out that, “if anything, the proliferation of new nation states in eastern Europe after 1989 brought about a renewed interest in national histories in many of the former Communist states.”^[2]
Asking historians in Eastern Europe to abandon the national approach to history after decades of the suppression of national narratives by the communist authorities may be rather like asking Leopold von Ranke to tone down his nationalist and statist rhetoric after the unification of Germany. Still, one can approach East European historians with much more hope today than could have been mustered in dealing with German and Italian historians in the second half of the nineteenth century. For one thing, writing traditional national history today means contributing to the isolationism and provincialism of East European historiography imposed by decades of existence behind the Iron Curtain. The new nations of Eastern Europe want to be part of a united Europe, while their younger historians want to be part of the larger European and world community of historians.
But how is one to overcome the deficiencies of present-day writing on the history of Eastern Europe – deficiencies often caused by decades of totalitarian rule in that part of the world and general indifference on the part of Western historians to the history of nations without a state of their own? Here I shall discuss the possibilities of rewriting, reshaping, and restructuring Eastern European historical narratives, focusing on the history of Ukraine – an entity defined for the purposes of this paper primarily in territorial terms. I will start by discussing the formation of the national paradigm of Ukrainian history and considering its pluses and minuses. I will then look at alternatives to national history. They include rewriting the Ukrainian historical narrative along the lines of multiethnic and local history, as well as applying methods employed in transnational, regional, and international history. Finally, I shall discuss the prospects for treating Ukrainian history in the context of a broader supranational area, including East Central Europe and Eurasia. By analyzing recent developments in the field, I hope to indicate the direction of future research on the history of the region.

NATIONAL HISTORY

If one were to choose a specific date for the beginning of modern Ukrainian historiography, the year 1895 would probably fit the bill. In December of that year the editorial board of the Ukrainophile journal Kievskaia starina (Kyivan Antiquity) published the prospectus of a survey of Ukrainian history and announced a competition for writers willing to produce such a work. The most recent survey of “Little Russian” history had been published more than fifty years earlier, in 1843.^[3] The winner was Aleksandra Efimenko, who subsequently published a History of the Ukrainian People (1906). There are several interesting observations to be made about the competition and its winner. First, the date of the competition indicates how late Ukrainian intellectuals turned their attention to the need for a national historical narrative. The Polish Society of Friends of Scholarship came up with such an initiative for Polish history as early as 1808, while the Russian Empire created the position of official historiographer even earlier, in 1803 – it was taken by Nikolai Karamzin. It was a sign of new times that a woman became the “official historiographer” of Ukraine as a result of the 1895 competition. The Ukrainian women’s movement was taking shape at this time, and the symbol of Mother Ukraine was becoming increasingly popular in Ukrainian national discourse.^[4] A sign of the tolerance of the Ukrainian movement at the time was Efimenko’s ethnic origin: she was a Russian, born and raised in northern Russia, where she met and married her Ukrainophile husband, who had been exiled to Arkhangelsk province (gubernia) from Ukraine. A sign of the weakness of the Ukrainian movement was that Efimenko did not hold a doctorate in history and had no university position.^[5]
Intellectual inspiration for writing a survey of Ukrainian history came from Mykhailo Drahomanov, a former professor of ancient (Roman) history at Kyiv University. He was dismissed from his position in 1875 for allegedly conspiring to bring about Ukraine’s secession from Russia and left for Switzerland to avoid imminent arrest. Inspired by the ideas of Giuseppe Mazzini, Drahomanov imagined Ukraine as part of a future European federation and called for a synthesis of Ukrainian history presented in a European context. He further maintained that the new narrative should go beyond national and confessional paradigms – a reference to the dominant interpretation of Ukrainian history as a struggle between Orthodox Rus’ and Catholic Poland. Drahomanov wrote in 1891: “…our history must be examined as a whole in all its eras… and in each of these eras we must pay attention to the growth or decline of population, the economy, mores and ideas in the community and the state, education, and the direct or indirect participation of Ukrainians of all classes and cultures in European history and culture.”^[6]
Drahomanov’s ideas were taken to heart by Mykhailo Hrushevsky, who, according to David Saunders, was the “Macaulay, Michelet, and von Ranke of Ukraine (or in East European terms, its Palacky, Lelewel, and Kliuchevskii).” Hrushevsky was the first historian to hold a university chair of Ukrainian history.^[7] The chair was established in 1894 at Lviv (Lemberg, Lwow) University in Austria-Hungary and officially designated as a chair of world history with special emphasis on the history of Eastern Europe. Hrushevsky published the first volume of his academic History of Ukraine-Rus’ in 1898. In 1904 he not only presented a general outline of Ukrainian history as a national narrative in his article on the “traditional” scheme of “Russian” history but also convinced the Russian authorities of the need to publish his Survey History of the Ukrainian People, which presented a coherent narrative of the Ukrainian national past. Hrushevsky and his students at Lviv University responded very seriously to Drahomanov’s idea of creating a Ukrainian historical narrative that would deal not only with politics and religion but also with economic, demographic, intellectual, and cultural history. But their main concern was to establish Ukrainian history as a distinct field of study on a par with the history of Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Poland.^[8]
In carrying out that task, they faced challenges from all these historiographic traditions. One kind of challenge came from statist historiographies on both sides of the Russo-Austrian border. In 1853, once the shock of the Revolution of 1848 and the “spring of the nations” had receded in the Habsburg Empire, the Austrian historian and advisor to the imperial minister of education Josef Alexander Helfert undertook to formulate an official view of the meaning, role, and tasks of national history (Nationalgeschichte). In a pamphlet entitled On National History and Its Current State of Cultivation in Austria, he wrote: “It is true that mankind is divided into a great number of tribes that differ as to language and color. But according to our ideas, national history is not the history of any such group defined by its racial origin. We think that national history is the history of the population of a territory that is politically united, subordinate to the same authority and living under the protection of the same law. For us, Austrian national history is the history of the Austrian state and people as a whole.”^[9] For the vast majority of nineteenth-century Russian historians, from Nikolai Karamzin to Sergei Soloviev, their national history was also defined not as the annals of a particular ethnonational group, but of the state and those who had settled its territory.^[10]
Another type of challenge came from Russian and Polish authors who subscribed to the ethnonational principle. Russian historians such as Vasilii Kliuchevsky employed a notion of Russianness in their writings that was quite broad in scope and included the three “Russian” tribes – the Great Russians, Little Russians (Ukrainians), and Belarusians. Ukraine was a special case in the changing imperial narrative of Russian history. The Russian dynastic historical narrative, which was constructed in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, had always been based on the foundations of Kyivan history. So was the Russian national narrative. In dealing with the all-Russian historical paradigm, Ukrainian historians tried to delimit the past and establish a Ukrainian claim to many significant episodes of the imperial historical narrative, including the history of Kyivan Rus’. The problem that Ukrainian historians faced in relating their historical paradigm to the Polish one was different from the challenge posed by Russian historiography. In dealing with Poland, the task was not so much one of presenting Ukrainian history as a distinct process, separate from the Polish grand narrative (this had already been achieved by the turn of the twentieth century), as of giving the Ukrainian nation a sense of equality in relations with its historically dominant and culturally much more Westernized counterpart, which was also far more advanced in terms of nation-building.^[11]
What were the main characteristics of the Ukrainian historical narrative? In defining the time frame of Ukrainian history, the new narrative presented the Ukrainian nation as more ancient than the Russian, and thus deserving of full support in its quest for sovereign cultural and political development, unhindered by interference from its younger sibling. In order to achieve that goal, the starting point of the narrative had to be moved as far back as possible. Consequently, the new narrative, worked out according to prevailing scholarly standards, established the Ukrainian claim to Kyivan Rus’. That approach put the Ukrainian narrative on a collision course with traditional Russian historiography, creating a conflict akin to the one between Swedish and Norwegian historians over the ethnic origins of the Varangians. In territorial terms, the new Ukrainian narrative linked the history of Orthodox Russian Ukraine with that of Greek Catholic Austrian Ukraine. Hrushevsky, who managed this feat, could also be called the Henri Pirenne of Ukrainian history.^[12]
The new narrative of Ukrainian history followed the development of the Ukrainian people through a sequence of rises, declines, and revivals. Like Heinrich von Sybel and other German historians of his era, who created a myth of a German nation as a sleeping beauty awakened by the “kiss” of the wars of liberation, Ukrainian historians believed in and worked toward the “awakening” of their own nation.^[13] Not unlike the Russian narrative, the Ukrainian one was teleological, although its final destination was not the reunification of the Russian people but the emancipation of one of its parts from the oppression of another.
After the Revolution of 1917, the main competition for the Ukrainian national narrative came from various Marxist narratives of Ukrainian history. All of them were products of class-based discourse that focused mainly on the theme of social antagonism. In Marxist narratives, class figured as the main agent of history, as opposed to the state or the all-Russian nation, which had played that role in the old Russian historiography. During the 1930s, the class-based discourse of Soviet Marxist historiography was adjusted to serve the purposes of the imperial project, which meant keeping the non-Russian nations of the USSR under Russian control. Hence it was the gradual rehabilitation of the old imperial Russocentric paradigm that led the way to the creation of a new supranational Soviet narrative – the history of the peoples of the USSR. Was the emergence of the Ukrainian national narrative of any consequence for the construction of the official Soviet paradigm? Yes, it was. In Soviet historiography, the traditional Russian narrative was now divested of its Ukrainian component (except for the history of Kyivan Rus’), and a parallel Ukrainian narrative was permitted to exist within the framework of the obligatory “History of the USSR.”^[14]

MULTIETHNIC HISTORY

As the national paradigm took center stage in Ukrainian historiography after 1991, the Ukrainian nation finally emerged victorious in its historiographic competition with dynasties, states, and the dominant Russian and Polish nations.^[15] While that change in perspective corrected numerous wrongs done to Ukrainians in Russocentric and Polonocentric narratives, did it do justice to the history of Ukraine as a country and territory?
This question should be answered in the negative. Not only were significant portions of Ukrainian territorial and cultural history sidelined in the process, but large numbers of ethnic Ukrainians were allotted little space in the Ukrainian national narrative. Hrushevsky, for example, was criticized in his lifetime for replacing the early modern history of Ukraine with that of Cossackdom – an important but still a minority element of the Ukrainian population in its day. Hrushevsky also reduced the history of the nineteenth century to that of the Ukrainian liberation movement. Intellectual and cultural currents that were not part of the Ukrainian national project were left out of his narrative, which followed the rise, fall, and resurgence of the nation.^[16] Thus, neither Nikolai Gogol nor Ilia Repin, both ethnic Ukrainians born in Ukraine, made it into the mainstream of Ukrainian national history. Those who opposed the Ukrainian national movement – the so-called Little Russians such as Mikhail Yuzefovich, the instigator of the Ems Ukase (1876), which prohibited Ukrainian-language publications in the Russian Empire – became part of the story, but only as traitors and villains. The Russophiles of Galicia and the Ruthenians of Transcarpathia fared no better. On the other hand, there is a tendency to Ukrainize groups and institutions that never possessed an identity that might be called Ukrainian. Recent research on the formation of political, cultural, and national identities in the lands now known as Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus points to the danger of assigning to the masses of the population national identities that did not exist at the time and did not become “majority faiths” at least until the twentieth century.^[17]
If not all Ukrainians made it into the national narrative of Ukrainian history, that is even more true of representatives of other ethnic groups. As Andreas Kappeler has recently noted, one cannot write the history of state institutions in Ukraine, its trade and economy, or its urban centers by focusing on Ukrainians alone.^[18] They certainly dominated the countryside but were a minority in the cities, which were dominated by Russians, Jews, Poles, and Germans. It would be unfair to state that minorities are completely absent from the Ukrainian national narrative. But as a rule they have been portrayed as aggressors, oppressors, and exploiters in the struggle with whom the Ukrainian nation was born. There is little doubt that the minorities must be included in the new narrative of Ukrainian history, not just as “others” but as part of the collective “we” – an all-important element of Ukrainian history that differentiated it from the history of other lands. Today there are positive developments to be noted in the research and writing of a multiethnic history of Ukraine.
The first attempt to write such a history was made by Paul Robert Magocsi of the University of Toronto. His History of Ukraine,^[19] almost eight hundred pages in length, was published in 1996 and became a multiethnic alternative to Orest Subtelny’s more traditional narrative Ukraine: A History, which first appeared in 1988 and went on to sweep Ukraine in numerous editions of its Ukrainian translation.^[20] Magocsi managed to produce a much more complete history of Ukraine as a territory than did Subtelny, but there is certainly room for improvement. As often happens when new horizons are opened for historical research, the initiative comes from outside the profession. That is certainly the case with Anna Reid’s Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine, first published in 1997. Reid, a Kyiv-based correspondent for the Economist and the Daily Telegraph in the mid-1990s, tells the dramatic history of Ukraine through stories of individual cities and regions. She begins in Kyiv and ends in Chornobyl, using a chapter on the western city of Kamianets-Podilskyi to tell the story of the Poles and their history in Ukraine, a chapter on Donetsk and Odesa to tell the story of the Russians, and chapters on Ivano-Frankivsk and Chernivtsi to tell the story of the Jews and the Holocaust. Her chapter on the villages of Matusiv and Lukovytsia in the Ukrainian heartland tells the story of the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33. Reid does not attempt to reach a compromise or find a middle ground between the often conflicting stories told by her acquaintances. Instead, she tries to present different perspectives on the history of the land that all her acquaintances consider to be their home. What emerges from her book is a mosaic that represents the multiethnic character of today’s Ukrainian nation as much as it represents its history, conceptualized in territorial terms.^[21]
The mental mapping of Ukraine was impossible in the past and is hardly possible today without taking into account the diversity of Ukraine’s regions. Historically speaking, Ukraine took shape as territories traditionally belonging to different political, economic, and cultural zones were brought together under the banner of ethnonational unity. Understanding a particular region means not only studying it in isolation but also comparing it with other regions of a given state. It also means going beyond existing national borders to take account of the historical connections that formed its unique character and identity. Among Ukraine’s historical regions, the best-studied is Galicia in western Ukraine – the object of attention not only of Ukrainian but also Austrian, German, Polish, and American historians. One of the latest additions to the field is a book by Alison Frank, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia. This is the kind of work that combines elements of economic, social, and political history.^[22] Yaroslav Hrytsak’s recent treatment of the formative years of Ivan Franko presents a fresh look at political and cultural developments in Galicia and undermines many postulates of traditional Ukrainian historiography with regard to the national awakening of the nineteenth century.^[23] The innovative character of both books becomes more apparent if one considers that Galicia – a region that both Poles and Ukrainians have called their Piedmont – has been treated in both historiographic traditions almost exclusively within the context of the national paradigm.
The political and social history of Ukraine’s Donbas region in Eastern Ukraine has been another attractive subject for Western historians. It was treated in a number of studies, including Charters Wynn’s Workers, Strikes and Pogroms,^[24] and a superb monograph by Hiroaki Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror in the Donbass.^[25] What is lacking so far is work on the comparative history of historical regions that cross national boundaries. For one thing, Ukrainian historiography would certainly benefit from a work comparing industrialization and its impact on political, social, and cultural aspects of everyday life in Ukrainian Galicia and the Baku region of Azerbaijan.
The main challenge in writing a multiethnic and multiregional history of Ukraine is to see another ethnic group or region not as an enemy but as a neighbor – not always an easy task when the history in question is as tragic as that of Ukraine. Anna Reid writes in her book that the Ukrainians inherited a legacy of violence. Back in 1917, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, a renowned Ukrainian novelist and at that time premier of the Ukrainian government, observed that one cannot read Ukrainian history without taking valium.^[26] The time has come to change that situation, not by prescribing a different medication but by treating the problem – the nature of the Ukrainian narrative.
New approaches to the history of the violent conflicts that have punctuated Ukrainian history over the centuries have yielded some very encouraging results, which are apparent in the work of scholars both in Ukraine and abroad. Natalia Yakovenko, now the leading Ukrainian historian of the early modern era, recently challenged one of the most powerful myths of the Ukrainian national narrative, that of the Khmelnytsky Uprising. She approached it not from the perspective of Ukrainian state- or nation building but from that of its human cost, discussing the ruinous consequences of the uprising not only for its main victims, the Poles and the Jews, but also for its alleged beneficiaries, the Ukrainians. Yakovenko’s new account of the Khmelnytsky Uprising, presented in an article entitled “How Many Faces Has War?,” was met with criticism in the Ukrainian scholarly press. She was accused of promoting the Polish viewpoint on the history of the revolt. Nevertheless, there are signs that Yakovenko’s reinterpretation of the uprising, which cost hundreds of thousands of lives and left deep scars in the historical memories not only of Jews and Poles but of Ukrainians as well, will make its way into the new master narrative of Ukrainian history. After all, the second edition of her survey of Ukrainian history up to 1800 was recently issued in Kyiv and nominated as a major book of the year 2005.^[27]
The construction of a new multiethnic and multicultural narrative of Ukrainian history requires the intensification of research on ethnic and religious minorities. The situation in the field of the history of Ukrainian Jewry, the second-largest of Ukraine’s minorities before the Second World War and one of its smallest today, is indicative of the challenges facing Ukrainian historiography with regard to the history of the country’s minorities. When it comes to the Jewish role in the Ukrainian historical tradition, it has been depicted almost exclusively in negative terms. Only in the first decades of the twentieth century did the situation begin to change. Mykhailo Hrushevsky went out of his way to discuss the plight of the Jews during the Khmelnytsky Uprising, producing one of the most sympathetic twentieth-century accounts of Jewish history in Ukraine. He also supported the work of the Jewish department of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in the 1920s. But with the advance of the Soviet class-based paradigm, Jews were cleansed from the pages of Soviet textbooks. As a group they were replaced by the socially defined category of leaseholders and tavern-keepers in the early modern era and figured only as “Soviet citizens” when it came to the discussion of Nazi atrocities against the Jewish population of the USSR.
Since 1991, the Jews have remained largely absent from the Ukrainian historical narrative, but they are now being included in some aspects of it, such as the study of the Second World War.^[28] Ukrainian historians like Zhanna Kovba have been exploring the history of the Jewish community during the war, while such authors as John-Paul Himka, Marco Carynnyk, and Sofiia Grachova have placed the question of Ukrainian responsibility for the Holocaust on the scholarly agenda.^[29] At this point there are three centers of Jewish studies in Ukraine. Nevertheless, research on Jewish history in Ukraine remains in its initial phase, as compared with the achievements of Moscow-based scholars. There is a great need for the translation into Ukrainian of major Western works dealing with the history of Jewish communities in Ukraine.^[30]Writing a multiethnic history of Ukraine is of course an important way of dealing with the deficiencies of the dominant narrative of Ukrainian history. This exercise is useful from political and the scholarly points of view. It helps present a much richer mosaic of Ukrainian history and replaces the confrontation of competing ethnic narratives with their coexistence. Nevertheless, writing multiethnic history does not mean moving “beyond nationality.” It means, rather, diversifying the approach instead of abandoning the paradigm altogether. As Andreas Kappeler has noted recently, the multiethnic approach shares the same set of weaknesses as the ethnonational one, since it is liable to lapse into primordialism, a teleological approach, and the marginalization of non-ethnic groups and institutions. These problems can be overcome by means of transnational approaches to the history of Ukraine.^[31]

TRANSNATIONAL HISTORY

Over the course of its history, Ukraine has been a borderland not only of different state formations but, much more importantly, of different civilizational and cultural zones. Ukraine was always a border zone between the Eurasian steppe lands controlled by nomads and the settled forest regions. Kyiv, the future capital of Ukraine, was founded as a border post between these two worlds. The struggle for survival against the steppe nomads and the later colonization of the steppe lands constitute one of the most important themes of Ukrainian history, although the history of Ukraine’s “moving frontier” – the scene of interaction between governments, settlers, and nomads – has never found its Frederick Jackson Turner or Herbert Eugene Bolton. The Crimea and the northern Black Sea region, settled by Greek colonists in ancient times, was a peripheral but lasting part of the Mediterranean world – the territories defined by the Roman limes, which coincide, at least in the case of Ukraine, with the northern borders of Mediterranean powers, including the Ottoman Empire, and with the northern boundary of present-day Islam. Having accepted Christianity from Byzantium in 988, the Kyivan princes found themselves on the border between Eastern and Western Christendom – another all-important dividing line in Ukrainian history that the early modern Ukrainian elites tried to erase by promoting union between Christian churches.^[32]
Centuries of borderland existence contributed to the fuzziness and fragmentation of Ukrainian identity. Borders were created and policed to divide people, but the borderlands served as contact zones where economic transactions (legal and illegal) took place, loyalties were traded and identities negotiated.^[33] Ukraine’s steppe borderland called into existence a special category of steppe dwellers known as the Cossacks, and a special type of identity. They are usually presented as ferocious fighters against Islam and the nomads of the steppe. But what remains largely unexplained within the national narrative of Ukrainian history is why they gave themselves a Turkic name, why they dressed in baggy pantaloons like their enemies the Ottomans, why they shaved their heads like their enemies the Crimean Tatars, and why the most popular visual image of them is preserved in the Buddha-like paintings called “Cossack Mamai.” The answer to this question is quite simple. Not only did the Cossacks flout state frontiers, giving constant headaches to their nominal superiors in Warsaw and Moscow, but they also crossed the cultural boundaries dividing the steppe and the settled area, Christianity and Islam, Polish nobiliary democracy and Muscovite autocracy.^[34]
The cultural history of the Cossacks, and indeed of Ukraine as a cultural borderland, has not yet been written. Recent research on the iconography of the Feast of the Protection of the Mother of God indicates the importance of Ukraine as an area of multiple cultural transfers.^[35] Ideas emanating from the West were received, reshaped or misinterpreted to fit local religious and cultural traditions, and passed on farther east and south to the Orthodox lands of Muscovy and the Balkans. That was certainly the case with the set of ideas and models associated with the confessionalization of religious, social, and political life in Western and Central Europe of the Reformation era. First it was the creation of the Uniate Church. Then Kyivan intellectuals under the leadership of Metropolitan Peter Mohyla produced the first Orthodox Confession of Faith and exported models of Orthodox confessionalization developed under the influence of their relations with Catholics, Protestants, and Uniates to the rest of the Eastern Christian world.^[36] As Ihor Љevčenko has shown, Metropolitan Mohyla was a man of many cultural worlds, and one might add that in this respect he was representative of the Ukrainian elite culture of his time.^[37] The transfer of cultural models from Kyiv to the east continued in the second half of the seventeenth century and for the better part of the eighteenth. After the extension of the Muscovite protectorate to eastern Ukraine in 1654, Kyivan historians first introduced the idea of the ethnocultural nation into Muscovite historiography. It was a new idea to the Muscovite elites. As Edward Keenan has convincingly shown, prior to 1654 the Muscovites did not think of their relations with other Eastern Slavs in ethnic or ethnonational terms.^[38] In the first decades of the eighteenth century, Kyivan clergymen led by Teofan Prokopovych helped Peter I Westernize the Russian Empire.^[39]
The new interest in the history of empires in the West, as well as in the former USSR (apparent, for example, in the articles published over the last few years in the Kazan journal Ab Imperio), allows historians of Ukraine to present their research in a new comparative framework. The history of Ukraine offers unique opportunities for research on relations between centers and peripheries, as well as on interrelations between imperial peripheries, bypassing decision makers in the imperial capitals. Andreas Kappeler’s seminal book on the multiethnic history of the Russian Empire sets one to thinking of ways in which the Ukrainian experience under Moscow and St. Petersburg can be discussed and better understood against the background of the history of other non-Russian ethnic groups in the Russian Empire.^[40] Terry Martin’s Affirmative Action Empire helps explain the role of Ukraine in the formulation of Soviet nationality policy.^[41] Roman Szporluk’s articles encourage scholars to take a close look at the legacy of the Habsburg, Romanov and Ottoman Empires in Ukrainian history.^[42] Another project of Kappeler’s on the comparative history of cities along the Austro-Russian border exemplifies the comparative study of Ukraine’s economic, political, cultural, and religious institutions in the Russian and Habsburg Empires. Another interesting comparative project, directed by Guido Hausmann, studies academic life in East Central European universities, including those of Krakow, Warsaw, Vilnius, Lviv, and Kharkiv. This is one of a number of research initiatives undertaken in the last few years by German and Austrian historians with the cooperation of their colleagues in Ukraine, but so far there have been very few initiatives from Ukraine itself. Certainly, Ukrainian history would benefit from a cross-national study of the Carpathian Mountains or the Dnieper Basin. Research on Ukrainian regions that constituted parts of different empires can contribute to the ongoing discussion on, among so many topics, the typology of empires, their relation to the notion of progress, and the importance of violence in their history.
A number of American and West European historians are now involved in very productive research that is reconceptualizing the history of the Second World War in Ukraine – the site of some of its major battles and worst atrocities, including the Holocaust. New research is introducing elements of multi-ethnic and local history, as well as the history of everyday life, into the study of Ukrainian history. In his book Making Sense of War, Amir Weiner has presented a new image of the war as experienced and interpreted by the multiethnic population of Vinnytsia oblast in central Ukraine. Karel C. Berkhoff made use of rich Soviet and German archives to reconstruct everyday life in German-occupied eastern and central Ukraine in his book Harvest of Despair, while Kate Brown, in A Biography of No Place, considers the multiethnic history of Eastern Volhynia between 1923 and 1953, with the war serving as the focal point of her multilayered study. Brown’s work is especially interesting for its close attention to forced migrations from the region; for example, it follows Polish exiles to their new places of settlement in Kazakhstan. Another example of research dealing with forced migrations is Timothy Snyder’s book on The Reconstruction of Nations. It discusses, among other things, the Volhynian massacres of 1943-1944 as an example of ethnic cleansing and an outcome of the brutalization of society initiated by the Holocaust.^[43]
Most Western works on the history of the Second World War challenge the dominant national narrative of Ukrainian history, but, even more importantly, they supersede the traditional debate shaped by the confrontation between the Soviet-era narrative of the Great Patriotic War and the nationalist narrative of the liberation struggle against the Nazis and communists. This is an achievement that most Ukrainian historians and Ukrainian society at large cannot claim as their own. The public debate of the spring of 2005 about Ukraine’s role in the Second World War yielded no results, as society remained sharply divided. Attempts to reconcile organizations representing Red Army veterans and fighters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army failed and resulted in street fights between supporters of the two sides. As of today, Ukrainian historians have not managed to create a master narrative of Ukraine’s Second World War.^[44]
There is also a long way to go before the Ukrainian experience is fully incorporated into the global historical narrative, whether we consider such events as the two world wars, the Revolution of 1917, the history of communism, or ecological history, of which Chornobyl is and will remain an important part.

AREA STUDIES

The question about the role area studies should play on university campuses is contested by a variety of academic forces and open for discussion today. But as long as politicians and political commentators, and not only academic administrators, continue to perceive today’s world in terms of the Middle East, Central Asia, or Eastern Europe, the question of the broader identity of individual nations and their histories remains highly important when it comes to encounters and negotiations with the outside world.
Mark von Hagen began his recent article on Eurasia as an anti-paradigm for the post-Soviet era with the statement that the fall of the USSR “has provoked several crises of identity for historians of the region, as they try to relocate their subject in the broader intellectual contexts of a changing academic culture of historical writing.”^[45] Von Hagen suggests that one way to overcome these multiple crises is to reinvent the field as Eurasian studies, and claimed for the Eurasian paradigm most of the new research published in the West and in the region after the dissolution of the USSR. That research is characterized by a desire to move away from state- and nation-based narratives toward the history of territory. Its salient characteristics include an interest in studying the history of empires and interconnections between them, as well as the history of borderlands and diasporas.
What are the borders of the newly emerging field of Eurasian studies, and should Ukraine or East Central Europe be considered part of that field? The research reviewed by von Hagen indicates quite clearly that the Eurasian “renaissance” is largely limited to the area previously covered by specialists hired to teach Russian/Soviet history at their universities. Few historians of the former Eastern Europe are rallying to the banner of the new Eurasianism. Also controversial are the attempts of such Japanese historians as Kimitaka Matsuzato to formulate the concept of a “Slavic Eurasia.”^[46] In the eyes of many Ukrainian historians, Eurasia is little more than a new name for the territory of the USSR, manifesting an attempt by specialists trained in Russian and Soviet area studies to stake out their pre-1991 territory under a more up-to-date and politically correct designation. That goal of the new Eurasianism harks back to its intellectual sources of the interwar era. Back then, Eurasianism emerged as a trend in Russian political thought, which was searching for a way to preserve the integrity of the Russian Empire without resorting to the Bolsheviks’ supranational class ideology.^[47]
Many East European historians envision their countries as part of East Central Europe. That term replaced Mitteleuropa, coined during the First World War by the German strategist Friedrich Naumann to define the lands “between Germany and Russia,” which he expected to constitute a postwar German sphere of influence. The war in fact resulted in the disintegration of the empires that had controlled those territories, creating a zone that became known as Eastern Europe. Among those who promoted the concept of Eastern Europe was the Polish historian Oscar Halecki. After emigrating to the United States in the aftermath of the Second World War, he published a book entitled The Limits and Divisions of European History (1950). There he revised and developed some of his earlier ideas on the history of Eastern Europe and suggested a new name that stressed its close relation to the West. The name he proposed was “East Central Europe.”^[48] While politicians and the media continued to speak and write about the countries of Soviet bloc as parts of Eastern Europe, academics were more willing to adopt the new name for the region. It was promoted mainly by historians of Poland, including Halecki himself, Piotr Wandycz, and others. The University of Washington Press published a multivolume series on the history of East Central Europe, and a number of chairs in history departments of North American universities used the term in their courses.^[49] The term broke into official discourse in the countries of the region, notably in Poland, after the velvet revolutions of 1989. In the academic sphere, the strongest promoter of the East Central European concept has been the Institute of East Central Europe in Lublin. Over the last fifteen years, under the leadership of Professor Jerzy Kłoczowski, the institute has organized scores of conferences and published dozens of volumes dealing with the history of the region.^[50]
Jerzy Kłoczowski and the concept of East Central Europe have been perceived as principal targets by some participants in the “East Slavic Round Tables” organized by the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the years 2001–2003. According to the organizer of the round tables, Leonid Gorizontov, in Russia the main alternative to the concept of East Central Europe has been the idea of an all-Russian culture, which brings together Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians not on a regional basis but on linguistic, cultural, and ultimately national grounds.^[51] That concept was given scholarly formulation during the interwar period in the works of the renowned Russian linguist Nikolai Trubetskoi, one of the founders of the original Eurasian school. Although some participants in the round tables have criticized Trubetskoi’s concept, others continue to support the view that Russia and Ukraine were “reunited” in the mid-seventeenth century – an indication of the continuing belief of some Russian scholars in the primordial unity of an “all-Russian” nation.^[52] Moreover, the treatment of problems of Ukrainian history under the auspices of the Institute of Slavic Studies, within the framework established by the round tables devoted to the history and culture of the Eastern Slavs, indicates that Eurasianist ideas and concepts of all-Russian unity continue to inform present-day Russian discussions on the history of Ukraine and Eastern Europe in general.
It would appear that Ukrainian historians are generally most comfortable with a view of their country not as part of a Russian-dominated Eurasia, but as part of East Central Europe. The latter concept gained popularity in Ukraine after 1991. The Society of Historians of East Central Europe, chaired by Professor Natalia Yakovenko, was formed in the early 1990s, and in 2001 a History of East Central Europe was published in Lviv under the editorship of Leonid Zashkilniak.^[53] The current Ukrainian president, Viktor Yushchenko, also sees the future and, indeed, the mission of his country as bound up with East Central Europe. In his address to the Ukrainian parliament in February 2006, Yushchenko expressed his confidence that it was “Ukraine’s historical destiny to serve as the basis for integration processes in the central and east European region.”^[54]
Whether Ukraine establishes itself as part of East Central Europe will depend mostly on political developments in the region, but one should not underestimate the role of historians in shaping a sense of broader “belonging,” especially in new nations whose identity is still in the formative stage.
In assessing the development of the national interpretation of Ukrainian history, it should be admitted that the introduction of the national paradigm approximately one hundred years ago had both positive and negative consequences. In Ukraine, as in other nations, the deconstruction of an imperial narrative and the promotion of a national one helped change the field in qualitative terms. The advent of national historiographies in a region dominated by imperial paradigms helped shift the attention of historians and citizens alike from dynasties and states to peoples, from elites to masses, from ruling nations to submerged ones, thereby contributing to the development of the kind of historical vision that we share today. On the other hand, the insistence of twentieth-century Ukrainian historians on the national paradigm sidelined important elements of their subject, marginalizing the history of ethnic minorities, neglecting the history of social classes and groups not central to the nation-building process, and distorting the history of regions and border areas.
The post-1991 Ukrainian historical narrative is still distant from Drahomanov’s ideal of Ukrainian history as he formulated it back in 1891. It is not fully integrated into the European historical narrative, and while it now covers all periods of the Ukrainian past, it does not always pay “attention to the growth or decline of population, the economy, mores and ideas in the community and the state, education, and the direct or indirect participation of Ukrainians of all classes and cultures in European history and culture.” The current state of research on Ukrainian history may be explained by several factors. The years of Soviet control and the dominance of a Russocentric historiography could not but hinder attempts to imagine Ukraine in any other context than the history of the Ukrainian nation. The country’s lack of sovereignty turned statehood into an obsession for many Ukrainian historians in the West, leaving little time or energy for the exploration of other avenues of the Ukrainian past. Still, there are signs that the situation is changing for the better. The major positive development of the last fifteen years in the West has been what one might call the deghettoization of Ukrainian history and the appearance of young scholars not burdened by the legacy of Cold War-era historiography. Most of the new directions in research on Ukrainian history are associated with the work done by Western scholars and the new generation of scholars in Ukraine.
The history of Ukraine should be rethought in order to overcome the limitations imposed on it by the centuries-old national paradigm. This would help integrate the Ukrainian past into the history of Eastern Europe and the whole European continent. One would like to believe that the future of Ukraine lies in Europe, but its past should stay where it belongs, in the multiplicity of worlds created by civilizational and imperial boundaries throughout the history of the territory known today as Ukraine. There is little doubt that Ukrainian history can only benefit from being imagined outside the limits imposed on historical thinking by the national paradigm. Methods applied today in micro- and macrohistorical study will certainly make Ukrainian history richer, more complete, and more true to the life experience of people of various nationalities, cultures, and political persuasions who settled that territory in the past and those who live there today. This new Ukrainian history will also enrich and help reshape the history of Eastern Europe, as well as of the whole European subcontinent.