SUMMARY:

Tatiana Tairova-Iakovleva is director of the Centre for Ukrainian Studies at St. Petersburg University in Russia, and a renowned historian of Ukrainian lands during the Early Modern period. Amid the escalation of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and despite dominant Ukrainophobia in the Russian public sphere, she initiated production of the collective monograph The History of Ukraine (St. Petersburg: Aleteia, 2015). Ukrainian readers met with suspicion the self-declared new objective survey of the history of Ukraine from the early medieval period to the twenty-first century coming from Russia. Some contributors to the book seemed to be meeting the worst expectations of Ukrainian colleagues by a conscious or inadvertent display of political bias, thus compromising the work of others. In her interview to the Ukrainian historian Vladyslav Iatsenko, Tairova-Iakovleva tells about her work on this project, responds to criticism of her own chapters, and presents her current research projects.