The establishment of Communist dictatorships on the territory of the old Russian Empire after 1917, and throughout eastern Europe after 1944-5, impelled a significant number of scholars into exile in the west. In western Europe and North America these scholars, and their colleagues who were natives of the western democracies, began to produce scholarly books on the history, literature, and politics of eastern Europe. Although this process had begun in earnest in central and western Europe in the 1920s and the 1930s, it reached its apogee in North America during the last years of the Cold War, when the institutional arrangements of the relatively new discipline of “Slavic Studies” were already clearly established and the power and prestige of the Soviet Union and its clients was still considerable. Ukrainian historians were a part of this general process, and the development of Ukrainian historiography in the west, especially English-language historiography, followed the pattern of Slavic and East European Studies in general.
The war of 1939-1945 was a turning point in this process. Before 1939, the focal point of Russian and Ukrainian emigre scholarship was still in central and western Europe, especially Prague, Warsaw, Berlin, Paris, and London. In North America, there were still very few practitioners of Russian history and even fewer professional Ukrainian scholars. However, during the war there appeared in English a number of general histories of Ukraine which made a significant impact upon the western scholarly world. In spite of wartime restrictions, they were reviewed in some of the most prestigious historical journals, were widely read, and continued to be read well into the Cold War which engulfed the world after 1945. Revised or reprinted during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, they were used by students in university level history courses and cited in more general histories. Their practical use only somewhat diminished when at the end of the 1980s and the 1990s new synthetic histories of Ukraine were published which gave more up to date and different views. It is these general histories of Ukraine published during the Second World War, but widely disseminated during the Cold War, which form the subject of the present paper.^[1]
Prior to 1939, knowledge of Ukrainian history in the west was virtually non-existent. There did exist some general references in survey histories of Russia and Poland, but these tended to reflect the Russophile or Polonophile views of their various authors and did not treat Ukrainian history as an independent subject of inquiry.^[2] There also existed a substantial body of polemical literature regarding the contemporary Ukrainian question; some of this literature was sympathetic to a Ukrainian viewpoint, but in general, it made only fleeting references to Ukrainian history.^[3]
The prominence of the Ukrainian question during the international crises of the late 1930s awakened a new popular interest in Ukrainian history. On the one hand, a number of writers set to work composing popular surveys of Ukrainian history for the general public; on the other hand, a small group of more professional scholars began work on more scholarly treatments of the subject. Almost all of these histories were published within a short time of each other during the first years of the Second World War.
Three separate volumes belong to our first general category; that is, popular history. Let us first examine the most traditional treatment of the subject. This was a small volume bearing the revealing title The Ukraine: A Russian Land by Pierre Bregy and Prince Serge Obolensky. The latter co-author, Obolensky, was a moderate liberal and Francophile aristocrat and his book had first appeared in French a few years before. This work was a learned discursive study, reflective rather than scholarly, which exhibited no sympathy for the Ukrainian national idea. Obolensky stressed what he believed to be the geographical unity of all the “Russian lands” and viewed Ukraine as nothing more than a particular region of Russia. For this emigre prince, Ukrainians were merely a regional variety of Russians, Ukrainian literature did not go beyond the bounds of peasant literature, and the Ukrainian people did not exist as a separate nation. Obolensky acknowledged the decentralizing tendencies of the Ukrainian national movement of the nineteenth century but stressed their “federalist” rather than nationalist character. He was, moreover, strongly critical of what he believed to be twentieth century German influences upon Ukrainian nationalism. However, he did acknowledge that what he called the “rich and numerous” Ukrainian communities in Canada and the United States were strong supporters of national independence. Being a popular history and rather political tract, Obolensky’s book was not widely reviewed in the scholarly journals.^[4]
The second popularization to appear at the start of the war reflected a clearly Soviet viewpoint. This was Ukraine and Its People: The Essential Background of One of Europe’s Vital Problems by a little known writer named Hugh P. Vowles, who, in fact, was an English engineer who had lived and worked in Soviet Ukraine under Stalin. Unlike Obolensky, Vowles accepted the existence of the modern Ukrainian nationality and stressed the oppression of the Ukrainian people throughout the ages. He went on to praise the Bolshevik revolution and Stalin’s collectivization program, but, of course, was very critical of Polish rule in western Ukraine (He called Pilsudski “a fanatical nationalist”) and claimed that Hitler intended to make use of Ukrainian “separatist” movements in favour of a great Ukraine for the sake of his own territorial ambitions. Vowles also mentioned the importance of the Ukrainians in the United States where, he stated, they were one million strong, and in Canada, where they ostensibly formed the third largest nationality after the English and the French. Like Obolensky’s book, Vowles’ too was largely ignored by the scholarly journals.^[5]
A third popularization of Ukrainian history was written during this period and this third was the only one to reflect a Ukrainian national view. Charles Milnes Gaskell’s “A Submerged Nation: The Ukrainian Case” was authored by a liberal democratic Englishman who during the 1930s visited in person the various parts of partitioned Ukraine and dedicated his book “to the memory of Professor Michael Hrushevsky.” Unlike Obolensky, who completely denied the existence of the Ukrainian nation, or Vowles, who admitted its existence but was unwilling to contemplate its independence from the USSR, Gaskell was completely sympathetic to Ukrainian national aspirations. He stated at the outset that he believed the Ukrainians to be a distinct nation and the Ukrainian language to be an independent tongue and no mere dialect of Russian. Like his model, Hrushevsky, he traced Ukrainian history back to ancient times and discussed the glories of Kievan Rus’, the devastations of the Mongol invasions, the transference of the “leadership of the Ukraine” to Volhynia and Galicia, the subsequent troubles of Polish rule, and the military activities of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who founded “the Cossack state”, but was forced by circumstances to submit to the Muscovite Tsar. He then went on to describe the unsuccessful attempt of Ivan Mazepa to free Ukraine from Muscovite rule. But Gaskell’s real interest was in recent Ukrainian history and he devoted his most detailed chapters to the rise of the modern Ukrainian national movement, the revolution of 1917-20, where he openly sympathized with the moderately socialist but liberal democratic Central Rada led by Hrushevsky, and was very critical of the German supported reaction and Soviet republic which followed. Gaskell analyzed Stalin’s collectivization program and did not fail to mention that “millions of innocent Ukrainians” perished in a great famine caused by the forced requisitioning of cerials carried out by the Communist dictatorship. Gaskell also gave plenty of space to developments in western Ukraine under the Poles, Czechs, and Romanians. He was very critical of Polish and Romanian rule over their Ukrainian territories; less so of Czech rule. He admitted that the Germans were interested in making use of Ukrainian nationalism for their own ends but did not think that the two were inevitable partners. In general, Gaskell clearly distinguished between what he believed to be an Asiatic oriented Russia from a European oriented Ukraine. The publication of “A Submerged Nation: The Ukrainian Case” would have had a definite effect upon public opinion in the English speaking world in 1939-40 had it been published at that time, but unfortunately technical and then political difficulties prevented this from happening. Gaskell was killed in an air crash on his way home from the Yalta conference and the work was only preserved in typescript.^[6]
The various histories of Ukraine by Obolensky, Vowles, and Gaskell, in spite of their different interpretations had certain characteristics in common; namely, they were all authored by amateur historians, not specialists; they were all popularizations, not scholarly works; and they all gave special attention to recent history and current political events; that is, they all addressed the contemporary “Ukrainian question” from a historical point of view. But none of them could speak with great authority and scholarly nuance to the most fundamental questions of Ukrainian history. For such a treatment it was necessary to turn to the supposedly more scholarly histories. Three of these appeared during the first years of the war.
Let us once again take the most traditional first. This was undoubtedly W. E. D. Allen’s The Ukraine: A History published by the Cambridge University Press.^[7] Allen was a private scholar of Anglo-Irish background who could read Russian and had earlier authored a general history of the Georgian people; he also had a certain interest in the history of the Ottoman Empire. In his preface, Allen acknowledged the aid of “three or four scholars, Russian and Ukrainian [who] have collaborated in the preparation of the material... [and] wish to remain anonymous...”^[8]
Like Obolensky before him whom he approvingly cited on one or two occasions, Allen basically accepted the traditional Russian viewpoint on all the main questions of Ukrainian history, both medieval and modern. In fact, in spite of its formal title in which the name “Ukraine” appears, his book was not so much a history of Ukraine as it was a geopolitical history of eastern Europe with a focus upon what he called the “south Russian” steppe. Allen saw a geographic unity to the European part of the Eurasian plain, which he believed to be bound together by great rivers, and for him Ukraine was simply “South Russia”. However, he did give a general outline of Ukrainian history from Kievan Rus’, the Russo-Lithuanian state, Cossack times, and the Ukrainian lands within the Russian Empire to the modern era. His emphasis was not on current politics but rather on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and he discussed several traditionally important historiographical questions such as the meaning of the Treaty of Pereiaslav, which began the process of the absorption of Ukraine into the Muscovite state. At the end of each major section of his book, Allen appended extensive bibliographical notes which contained citations of numerous specialist works and he sometimes gave critical assessments of them. He even had an excursus or two on the use of folksongs as historical sources and compared the nineteenth century Ukrainian Kobzars or minstrels to Gaelic Irish balladeers of the same period. Far more detailed, and ostensibly more critical than the popular works discussed above, Allen’s book was meant to appeal to a more scholarly readership.
Given its expositions of the recurrently tangled web of east European geopolitics, with frequent digressions on Ottoman and Caucasian affairs as well as on more exclusively Polish or Russian history, and its citations from the works of major non-Slavic historians like von Hammer and Iorga, Allen’s book must have made interesting reading for anyone unacquainted with the internal history of eastern Europe, especially Ukraine. He threatened no one accustomed to traditional conservative Russian or Polish views with any novel ideas about new nationalities in eastern Europe and their historical claims. As well, Allen’s book fit well into the conservative traditions of west European history with their emphasis upon political history and the diplomatic relations between states. But to anyone familiar with the more complex questions of Ukrainian history and the divergent interpretations of them, Allen’s bias was also perfectly clear.
In historiographical questions, W. E. D. Allen was a Russophile pure and simple. For him, Kievan Rus’ was the first “Russian” state and its inhabitants the first “Russian” people. So too, the Lithuanian state was largely a “Russian” polity; Ukraine’s inhabitants of Khmelnytsky’s time too were “Russian”, as indeed, even were most of the inhabitants of pre-war Austrian Galicia. This refusal to distinguish between “Russia” and “Rus’”, or, later on, between “Russia” and “Ruthenia”, is one of the most striking characteristics of Allen’s book. Of course, it militated against any recognition whatever that Ukraine had any independent history of its own.
Equally disturbing to the modern student of Ukrainian history are Allen’s ethnic prejudices and his interpretations of various events. Perhaps his reference to “the dark minded millions” who lived between the Urals and the Vistula, and to an “addiction to extremes” and “obsession with the ideal” as “a fatality of the Slav character” (p. 82) were typical of their time and place, but they cannot be read today without a certain degree of embarrassment. His characterization of the whole of Ukrainian Cossackdom as “savage” and uncivilized is similarly oversimplified. Moreover, on all counts Allen takes the Russian side in various historiographical disputes between modern Russian and Ukrainian historians. Thus Kievan Rus’ was completely depopulated at the end of the Mongol invasions and Ukrainian historians are mistaken to stress the continuity between this polity and Lithuanian and Cossack Ukraine; neither the wars of Bohdan Khmelnytsky nor the agreements between the Hetman and Muscovy created or acknowledged the existence of a Cossack state; Mazepa was a selfish adventurer, not a Ukrainian patriot; local conditions, not Catherine II or the imperial Russian government were primarily behind the reintroduction of serfdom into eighteenth century Ukraine (p. 219); Shevchenko did not create or even strive to create “a special Ukrainian language in opposition to Russian”; rather Russian readers could easily understand “the Little Russian dialect” (p. 241) while it was Professor Hrushevsky who created the Ukrainian literary language out of “the peasant dialect of Galicia” (p. 252). Moreover, as the revolutionary Ukrainian politician, Volodymyr Vynnychenko admitted, the Central Rada had no popular support, while Skoropadsky was a puppet of the Germans and Petliura a puppet of the Poles. Petliura’s followers were, of course, the worst pogromists of 1919 (p. 309), and the whole Ukrainian national movement between the wars was tinged by its association with Germany.
As to Soviet Ukraine, Allen believed that the entire Ukrainianization program of the 1920s was somewhat artificial and in the famine of 1933, as he put it, perhaps “about ten per cent of the population of south-eastern Russia died of hunger”. (pp. 329-30) To the history of the Ukrainians in inter-war Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania, Allen gives practically no attention. Moreover, nowhere does Allen quote or paraphrase Hrushevsky and his notes are heavily tipped toward the works of various Russian authors such as Miakotin and Nolde rather than to Ukrainian historians, many of whose works seem to be listed only in a pro forma manner. Add to this, chaos in the transliteration of Ukrainian and Polish names, which are usually only given in their Russian forms, numerous factual slips and obfuscations, and we have before us a very problematic book.
Although the many factual slips and transliteration problems escaped the notice of most western readers, Allen did not completely escape criticism. For example, B. H. Sumner, a British historian of Russia with some similar interests to Allen’s, gave his book a somewhat mixed reception in the English Historical Review.^[9] On the one hand, Sumner acknowledged that the book had an unfinished quality about it, as if its numerous notes and sources were somewhat “undigested”. He wrote: “The impression is given that, despite the wealth of bibliographical references, the author himself is not fully at home with the first hand sources for any particular portion of Ukrainian history and a much fuller discussion of these would have been welcome” (p. 267). Sumner also criticized what he believed to be Allen’s insufficient treatment of Ukrainian religious and cultural history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and his lack of interest in institutional history. He also noted that Allen ignored the history of eastern or Sloboda Ukraine.
On the other hand, Sumner was a historian of Russia, not Ukraine, shared most of Allen’s Russocentric opinions, and did not think him unsympathetic to the Ukrainians. For example, Sumner approved of Allen’s tracing the origins of “Ukraine” only as far back as the seventeenth century, and of his portrayal of the weakness of the modern Ukrainian national movement, especially during the revolution. He also mentioned that he believed Allen to be right when he held that in the 1930s the peasants opposed collectivization on other than “national” grounds. On a somewhat different level, Sumner praised Allen’s juxtaposition of Turkish, eastern European, and west European history, his attention to detail, and even his use of folksongs as sources. Most telling of all, however, this British historian of Russia quoted Allen to the effect that “the destiny of all the peoples of the USSR ‘must be a Russian destiny in the sense that the fluvial network of the Great Eurasian Plain is one geographical and economic whole out of which it is impracticable and would be unreal to attempt to carve out independent national units’” (p. 387). Sumner made no criticism of Allen’s marginalization of western Ukraine under the Poles, Czechs, and Romanians.
Sumner’s carefully balanced, but generally sympathetic review of Allen was only partially countered by a much more critical assessment that appeared in the American Historical Review. In this review, Harold R. Weinstein openly accused Allen of bias and stated that his anti-Ukrainian feelings led him to ridicule the whole Ukrainian national movement and underestimate its importance. But Weinstein, who seemed to sympathize with Stalin’s USSR, restricted his specific criticisms to Allen’s unfavorable treatment of the Soviet Union and the collectivization campaign; he even accused Allen of being too sympathetic to Petliura, who had militarily opposed the Soviets. (Petliura had also been the target of Jewish attacks and had been assassinated by a Jew who quite possibly was a Soviet agent.) Weinstein concluded pointedly that Allen’s “Ukrainophobia is outweighed by his anti-Soviet feelings.”^[10]
Allen’s book was an important attempt at a scholarly history of Ukraine in English, but it was not the only one. Shortly after Allen’s book was published, there appeared Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s A History of Ukraine edited by O. J. Frederiksen of Miami University in Ohio, a state with a substantial Ukrainian immigrant population.^[11] Frederiksen’s book was a translation of Hrushevsky’s popular-style Iliustrovana istoriia Ukrainy z dodatkom novoho periodu istorii Ukrainy za roky vid 1914 do 1919 (Illustrated History of Ukraine with an Addendum on the New Period of the History of Ukraine from 1914 to1919) which had been published in the early 1920s in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in western Canada by the pioneer generation of Ukrainian settlers from Austrian Galicia.^[12] The English translation was sponsored by the Ukrainian National Association (Ukrainskyi Narodnyi Soiuz) in New Jersey, and the translators were Wasyl Halich, who during the 1930s had authored a respectable history of Ukrainians in the United States, Omelian Revyuk, who edited Svoboda (Liberty), the most widely circulated non-Communist Ukrainian newspaper in the United States, and Stephen Shumeyko, who edited the English language Ukrainian Weekly, a supplement to Svoboda, and who edited the penultimate draft before it went to the general editor, O. J. Frederiksen. The latter appended a chapter of his own on developments after 1919. Unaware of his connections with Allen, the team then approached George Vernadsky of Yale, who was the son of Vladimir Vernadsky, the first president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kiev; they asked him to write a preface. Vernadsky did this and he then submitted the whole work to Yale University Press for publication. Meanwhile, word of the project got out and Communist front groups in the United States began attacking Hrushevsky’s reputation, slandering him as a pro-Nazi anti-semite. Vernadsky had to assure the press that Hrushevsky had been a reputable scholar and could not be accused of ethnic prejudice.^[13] Vernadsky’s preface was dated March 12, 1941, and the book was published before the year was out.^[14]
This edition of Hrushevsky’s History of Ukraine, Hrushevsky-Frederiksen as we shall call it, differed in certain important respects from the Ukrainian original. Firstly, the original had been a truly illustrated history containing dozens of well selected illustrations, pictures, engravings, drawings, photographs, and maps, all of which were authentically Ukrainian, and all of which were contemporary or near contemporary to the eras discussed; that is, they were in themselves antique artifacts of a sort. These were scattered throughout the book to reinforce various points made in the text. By contrast, Hrushevsky-Frederiksen was a simple survey history without illustrations. True, the editors added a few antique maps prominently displaying the name “Ukraine” in its historical context, but the documentation and general feel for an illustrated history was lost. Secondly, the translation was not exact. In fact, it was at places so loose as to be considered a paraphrase, and a somewhat poor one at that, rather than a translation. Thirdly, Hrushevsky’s original general sections (there were seven of them) which divided his tale into various eras, were missing, and chapter headings invented by the translators were added. Fourthly, the translators added expressions and terms that were missing from Hrushevsky’s original. Some of these even intruded into the new chapter titles. Thus, for example, in their discussion of Kievan Rus’, they added a chapter title “The Kingdom of Kiev” which was missing from the original, and which Hrushevsky might not have approved. Fifthly, of course, Frederiksen added a final chapter updating the history to 1940 and appended a detailed bibliography of historical works in various European languages (with Slavic titles printed in both the original Cyrillic and English translation) and of recent political literature on Ukraine in English. The general result was that Hrushevsky-Frederiksen varied greatly from the original both in appearance and in content. It was in its content considerably less scholarly, though in form it at first glance appeared to be more scholarly.
In its general approach, however, Hrushevsky-Frederiksen did no violence to the master’s basic ideas, only strengthening and clarifying their national tendencies for the sake of an English speaking public. Continuity from ancient times to the present was its keynote. It began with the archeology of the ancient “Ukrainian” steppe and from Scythians and Greeks proceeded to what the translators called “the first Ukrainians”, that is, the Antes. From there Hrushevsky-Frederiksen proceeded to the “founding of Kiev” (local elements rather than foreign “Varangian” or Viking ones were stressed); then came the “Kingdom of Kiev” and its decline, the Tatar invasions, and the subsequent rise of Galicia and Volhynia. Thereafter occurred the Lithuanian ascendency, which Hrushevsky basically saw as benign, and the Polish ascendency which Hrushevsky painted in darker colors. Then came the rise of the “Kozaks” (the traditional English spelling was “Cossacks”) and “national revival in the steppes”. This revival took the form of a struggle over the question of church union; Hrushevsky-Frederiksen was loyal to the original in its identification of Ukrainian nationality during this period with Orthodox resistence to the union and the polemics on both sides which grew out of this dispute. The culmination of this struggle came with Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s war against the Poles and his reluctant and regretted turn to Moscow; Mazepa is portrayed in a balanced manner both as a patriot who wished to unite and free his country from foreign rule and as a self-interested autonomist. After the defeat of Mazepa came the decline of the “Kozak” host and the last rebellions. However, the nineteenth century brought a “national renaissance”; the national idea brought the beginnings of enlightened democracy. Kotliarevsky, Shevchenko, and the Cyril-Methodian brotherhood initiated a national movement which was characterized by education and progress and which eventually led to national independence in 1918. Frederiksen then added an account of the independence struggle of 1919-21, Soviet rule, the Ukrainianization program of the 1920s and the purges and “great famine” of 1932-33 costing, as he wrote, “the lives of several million men, women, and children.” Just as in earlier chapters, Hrushevsky had devoted considerable attention to the Ukrainians under the Poles and Austrians, so too Frederiksen did not ignore the Ukrainians under post-war Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. The book ends with the 1940 annexation of northern Bukovina and parts of Bessarabia to the Ukrainian SSR.
Like Allen, Hrushevsky-Frederiksen elicits a mixed response among modern readers. On the one hand, Hrushevsky was obviously a very learned scholar who wrote with great authority upon his subject. Most striking is his refusal to engage in wide-ranging generalizations. Hrushevsky was a “positivist” in method who stuck closely to the facts and was very reluctant to go beyond them to support more general theories. In fact, so striking is this trait of Hrushevsky’s that, other than a general commitment to the idea of a national Ukraine, the antecedents of which stretched back into deep antiquity, it is difficult to determine his personal political beliefs from the text. This is generally seen as positive by the community of professional historians, many of whom even today in this “post-modern” era sincerely accept the ideal of scholarly “objectivity”. On the other hand, this strict adherence to unembellished fact means that Hrushevsky’s style is not conducive to the writing of popular history. It is, quite simply put, a difficult book to read. Moreover, this problem is compounded by the roughness of the translation, which, in spite of its looseness, is rather inferior.
Other problems also arise for the English speaking reader. Perhaps the most troubling is Hrushevsky-Frederiksen’s tracing of Ukrainian history back to ancient times and calling the Antes “the first Ukrainians”. Although there might be some genetic or linguistic link between the ancient Antes and the modern Ukrainians, and the heritage of the Antes, like that of Kievan Rus’, probably belongs more to the modern Ukrainians than to any other modern people, the use of the name “Ukraine” in this ancient context is anachronistic and is therefore problematic for many western readers. (In the minds of some non-Ukrainian scholars, it is the equivalent, I would guess, of speaking of “England” under the Romans, or Roman “France”.) The fact that the translators strengthened the use of this anachronism, of course, escapes the notice of most readers.
Other innovations introduced by the translators included the use in personal names of modern Ukrainian rather than more traditional or Russian orthography (thus Volodimir instead of Vladimir), dropping the definite article “the” before the name “Ukraine” (in English the definite article is widely used before the names of regions such as “the Pampas” or “the Kuban”, but very seldom used for independent countries), and the neologism “Kozak” instead of the traditional “Cossack” (apparently – and here I am guessing – in an attempt to distinguish between Ukrainian “Kozaks” and Russian “Cossacks”). On the other hand, the translators kept to the conventional English forms for major geographical names such as Kiev (not Kyiv) and the Dnieper River (not the Dnipro River).
In general, Hrushevsky-Frederiksen gives a very mixed impression. On the one hand, it purports to be the work of a great scholar and has some of the trappings of a scholarly work. On the other hand, it surprises and sometimes irritates the modern reader with its difficult style, its neologisms, and other untoward innovations. In short, it gives neither Ukraine nor Hrushevsky their due.
Thankfully, a third general history of Ukraine appeared during the war which offered an alternative to both Allen and Hrushevsky-Frederiksen. This was Dmytro Doroshenko’s History of the Ukraine edited for the English speaking world by George W. Simpson of the University of Saskatchewan in western Canada. (Western Canada even more than Ohio was a centre of Ukrainian immigrant settlement.) This book, which we shall refer to as Doroshenko-Simpson, was sponsored by the Ukrainian Self-Reliance League (Soiuz Ukraintsiv Samostiinykiv), a Ukrainian Orthodox Brotherhood very active in Canada’s western provinces, and was translated into English by Hanna Chikalenko-Keller (1884-1964), a Ukrainian journalist, translator, and librarian at the University of Tübingen.^[15] Doroshenko himself, was a prominent Ukrainian historian and professor at Charles University and the Ukrainian Free University in Prague, and after 1936, at the University of Warsaw. He had been active in Ukrainian politics during the revolution and participated in the conservative regime of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky which had overthrown Hrushevsky’s Central Rada. In scholarship, he represented a conservative “statist” approach to Ukrainian history.^[16]
Unlike Hrushevsky-Frederiksen, Doroshenko-Simpson did not claim to be an exact translation of Doroshenko’s original Ukrainian language Narys istorii Ukrainy (Survey of Ukrainian History), which had appeared in Warsaw in 1932-34; rather it was an abridged version with the very full bibliographies and extensive historiographical sections omitted entirely. Nonetheless, it was a substantial book and the first of the general histories considered here to be published. The translation itself was fairly fluid, the job of the translator being made much easier by Doroshenko’s beautiful prose which combined fluidity with simplicity. Doroshenko himself added two new chapters on the First World War, the revolution, and events up to the early 1930s, while Simpson added a series of maps illustrating the geography of various historical eras and he penned a lucid general introduction explaining the logic of the concept of Ukrainian history and giving an account of where the name “Ukraine” had come from.^[17] Simpson also added a brief appendix on the recent momentous events in European politics in which the Ukrainian question played an important role.
In its general approach, Doroshenko-Simpson resembled Hrushevsky-Frederiksen but with certain important differences. For example, like Hrushevsky-Frederiksen, Doroshenko-Simpson traced Ukrainian history back to ancient times and began with a discussion of Ukrainian archeology, the Scythians, and the Greek colonies on the north shore of the Black Sea. It then considered the “origin of the Ukrainian state”, the Varangian contribution to this state, which the author felt was considerable, and its Christianization and fate under the Mongols. Doroshenko-Simpson stressed the difference between the total subjection of Muscovy to Tatar rule versus what he believed to be the merely partial subjection of Galicia; it took the Ukrainian side on the question of the supposed depopulation of Ukraine following the Tatar invasion and stressed the peaceful accession of the Ukrainian lands to Lithuania. Doroshenko-Simpson, like Hrushevsky-Frederiksen, then treated in detail the question of the church union and the rise of the Cossacks which culminated in the revolt of Bohdan Khmelnytsky. This great Hetman is treated in a very sympathetic manner and his dealings with Muscovy are characterized as merely an “alliance” (a rather loose translation of the Ukrainian word soiuz of the original which can also mean “union”); Hetman Petro Doroshenko’s efforts to reunite Ukraine after the Treaty of Andrusovo are stressed and Mazepa is portrayed sympathetically as a Ukrainian patriot. The abolition of Ukrainian autonomy is a tragedy, and the rise of modern Ukrainian nationalism, as in Hrushevsky-Frederiksen, associated with education and progress. During the revolution, the rise of the Central Rada was followed by a “Russian-Ukrainian war” and, of course, the “Ukrainian Hetman state of 1918" is sympathetically described. But so too are the activities of the “republican” Symon Petliura. By contrast, the Soviet regime is given very scant attention. The national achievements of the 1920s are barely mentioned, as, indeed, is the fact that “the Soviet authorities allowed millions of the population to perish from terrible hunger in 1932" (p. 648). Doroshenko-Simpson, in fact, gives somewhat more space to the Ukrainians in inter-war Poland than it does to Soviet Ukraine. The Ukrainians in Czechoslovakia and Romania are also mentioned.
To the modern student of Ukrainian history, Doroshenko-Simpson makes a somewhat better impression than does Hrushevsky-Simpson. It reads much more smoothly and contains fewer unexpected innovations. The transition from traditional Slavonic or Russian orthography to modern Ukrainian is somewhat eased in the former by the use of alternate forms in brackets; thus Vladimir (Volodimir), and so on, and the “Cossacks” are simply Cossacks and not “Kozaks”. Nevertheless, like Hrushevsky-Frederiksen, Doroshenko-Simpson omits the use of the article “the” before the name “Ukraine” in the text (if not in the book title), uses the name “Ukraine” in its discussions of ancient times, and obviously sees this country as more than a mere region and claims for it the heritage of Kievan Rus’.
On a somewhat different level, the reluctance to generalize which is so evident in Hrushevsky-Frederiksen also appears to some degree in Doroshenko-Simpson. There are occasional lapses, as for example, in its discussion of Russian national character which is supposed to have a “well developed instinct for state building” (p. 67), something which was supposedly not so clear in the Ukrainians; but, in general, Doroshenko, like Hrushevsky before him, is very guarded in the expression of his political beliefs and he obviously values the ideal of scholarly objectivity.
Since Doroshenko-Simpson, Hrushevsky-Frederiksen, and Allen all appeared within a relatively short time of each other, there was a certain amount of overlap in the scholarly reviews, which made some comparisons between them and, on occasion, reviewed them together. Perhaps the most balanced and one of the better informed reviews was that written for the Chicago based Journal of Modern History by Alfred A. Skerpan, a historian of Russia.^[18]
Skerpan reviewed both Allen and Hrushevsky-Frederiksen, but apparently, was unaware of the publication of Doroshenko-Simpson, or, perhaps, it was unavailable to him since he makes no mention of it. He began by welcoming the publication of both Hrushevsky-Frederiksen and Allen, but stated that “neither can be considered fully objective or adequate.” He criticized the former for what he believed to be its anachronistic use of the term “Ukraine” prior to the seventeenth century, and for claiming Kievan Rus’ primarily for Ukraine, when, he believed, it belonged to “all eastern Slavs”; he also accused Hrushevsky of being a typical nineteenth century romantic, and claimed that his final chapter was merely a “heated and frequently inaccurate commentary on events of World War I.” In general, Skerpan accused Hrushevsky-Frederiksen of reflecting an unobjective nationalist viewpoint.
By contrast, Skerpan recommended Allen as an “antidote to the sometimes egregious nationalism of the translation” and claimed Allen had made “a strong effort toward objectivity”. Nevertheless, Skerpan continued, the result was an overemphasis on “Russian” interpretations of events and the book was marred by numerous “glaring” errors. Allen overlooked the independence of the earlier phases of Ukrainian history, vital developments in church history and law, and the role of the influential church brotherhoods which played such an important role in the struggle over the Union. Skerpan concluded that Allen depended rather much on conventional English language accounts of eastern Europe such as the Cambridge histories, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the older English outlines of Russian and Polish history. The implication was that neither Hrushevsky-Frederiksen nor Allen should be read in isolation.
Other reviews of our three scholarly histories were less balanced. John Shelton Curtiss, an American historian of Russia wrote in the American Historical Review that Hrushevsky-Frederiksen had “an anti-Russian separatist character,” used the name “Ukraine” anachronistically, unjustly claimed the civilization of Kievan Rus’ for Ukraine, was less convincing than his opponent Kliuchevsky on the Norman question, took the side of the Cossack leaders rather than the Ukrainian peasants in Cossack times, and silently passed over events such as the Polish uprising of 1863, the economic results of the emancipation of 1861, the radicalism of the 1880s, and the rapid industrialization of the country after 1890. Curtiss concluded that Frederiksen’s update was the least impressive part of the book.^[19]
Perhaps the most unbalanced review, however, came from the pen of Michael T. Florinsky, a Russian American historian who was the son of Timofei D. Florinsky (1854-1919), one of the most outspoken opponents of the Ukrainian national movement in pre-revolutionary Ukraine. Writing in the very first issue of the Russian Review ^[20] the younger Florinsky praised what he called Allen’s “truly remarkable erudition” and “thorough knowledge of the literature” and agreed with almost all of his interpretations, especially his opinion on the recent origin of the Ukrainian nationality, its supposedly superficial and academic character, and its alleged association with Austria and Germany. Both Hrushevsky and Doroshenko are dismissed by Florinsky as “a special plea” exercised by “extreme Ukrainian nationalists”.
The supposedly comparative reviews by Florinsky and Curtiss were both strongly inclined towards a pro-Russian position. But at least one comparative review took the opposite track. George W. Simpson, Doroshenko’s Canadian editor, penned a review for the Colorado based Journal of Central European Affairs which not only evaluated Hrushevsky-Frederiksen, but also looked at three popular-style books on Ukraine which gave interpretations strongly critical of Ukrainian nationalism. These were the above discussed popular histories by Bregy and Obolensky and by Vowles, and a third book titled Republic for a Day, on the Carpatho-Ukrainian crisis of 1938-39 by the British journalist, Michael Winch.^[21] Simpson was positive in his assessment of Hrushevsky-Frederiksen, praising Vernadsky’s preface on Hrushevsky and calling the book “a mine of information”, but he admitted that “the digging is not at all times easy”. He thought Hrushevsky-Frederiksen especially valuable for the modern period and the account of the Ukrainian national movement. By contrast, Simpson was sparing, factual, and somewhat skeptical in his comments on Bregy and Obolensky, while he was downright negative on Vowles, stating that much of the book “can hardly be called history”. As to the journalist, Winch, Simpson thought him entirely biased and handicapped by his ignorance of the Slavic languages and his dependence upon a Polish translator, who, of course, would not have been sympathetic to Ukrainian concerns.
Scholarly evaluations of Simpson’s own work were less frequent than evaluations of Hrushevsky-Frederiksen, or, indeed, Allen. The most positive scholarly review, in fact, the only significant one that I have been able to find in the academic publications, was authored for the newly launched Journal of Central European Affairs by Stuart R. Tompkins, a Canadian born historian of Russia working at the University of Oklahoma.^[22] Tompkins, who seems to have been familiar with Ukrainian immigrants because of some time spent working at the Department of Education in the Province of Alberta in western Canada, thought Doroshenko-Simpson had achieved what he called “an almost super-human task” in reducing to manageable proportions the variegated histories of the different parts of Ukraine and he characterized Doroshenko as a member of Hrushevsky’s school. Tompkins’ only criticism was that Doroshenko-Simpson was weak on the economic history of eastern Ukraine, which, however, was of special import because of the current war in eastern Europe.
The reviews by Tompkins and Simpson were, of course, the exceptions. In general, the question of Ukrainian nationality and its historical claims was greeted with a certain amount of scepticism by western scholars. Several of the reviewers alluded to the problem of the origins of the Ukrainian people, which stretched into deep antiquity according to Hrushevsky-Frederiksen and Doroshenko-Simpson, but was of more recent, indeed, even modern origin according to more mainline Russocentric western authors. Much of the problem seems to have revolved around the use of the name “Ukraine” itself, as was alluded to in Simpson’s introduction to Doroshenko. Both Hrushevsky-Frederiksen and Doroshenko-Simpson used it without further question for even the earliest periods. This, it may be assumed, reflected their commitment to the idea of the ethnolinguistic continuity of the Ukrainian people throughout the ages and the claim to the heritage of Kievan Rus’ by the modern Ukrainian people. By contrast, W. E. D. Allen used the conventional term “Russia” just as extensively when referring specifically to “Ukraine”, and he used it for all periods of Ukrainian history. This, it seems, reflected the low esteem in which Allen held the Ukrainian national idea.
But the problem is more complex than this. It involves, in fact, two different but closely related problems of translation. Firstly, there is the problem of how to translate the Slavic noun “Rus’” (which is more commonly used by Slavic historians for the older periods of east European history, especially for the period of what Ukrainian scholars and some others working in English call “Kievan Rus’”), and there is the problem of how to translate the Slavic noun “Rossiia” (which Ukrainian scholars working in English translate as “Russia” and restrict to Muscovy and the imperial era which followed). In the 1930s and 1940s, Frederiksen and Simpson were fighting an uphill battle against a scholarly public that rode roughshod over these distinctions and labeled almost everything “Russia”.
The second translation problem concerned the very common Ukrainian and Russian adjectives Rus’kyi and Russkii, which when referring to the modern Ukrainian people and their ancestors had no agreed upon solution in the 1940s, as, indeed, they have no agreed upon solution today. In the 1930s and 1940s, Allen used “Russian” and Hrushevsky-Frederiksen and Doroshenko-Simpson used “Ukrainian”. More recent Ukrainian historians working in the west have used the adjectives “Ruthenian”, “Rus’ian”, and, of course, “Ukrainian” to distinguish Ukrainian history from Russian.^[23] The most recent author of a general history of Ukraine suggests solving this problem by using the word “Rus” as both a noun (“the country of Rus”) and an adjective (“the Rus people”), thus on the one hand making a clear distinction between “Rus’” and “Russia”, and on the other hand at least partially avoiding both the anachronistic use of the term “Ukrainian” and the misleading use of the word “Russian”.^[24] But no completely satisfactory solution exists. The choice of the English speaking writer, translator, or editor invariably reflects his or her views as to the independence or lack of independence of the general course of Ukrainian history. This was strikingly clear in the 1930s and 1940s.
One further point needs to be made about the reviews. This concerns the distinction between Hrushevsky-Frederiksen and Doroshenko-Simpson and the historical schools that they represent. None of the reviewers cited in this paper were able to make this distinction and one of them (Curtiss) somewhat misrepresented Hrushevsky-Frederiksen’s position. The fact of the matter is that Hrushevsky represented the populist (narodnyk) school of Ukrainian historiography, which was somewhat radical, emphasized the role of the common people in Ukrainian history, and tended to view their leaders as opportunists who were not consistently interested in the national cause. By contrast, Doroshenko-Simpson represented the conservative “statist” (derzhavnyk) school of Ukrainian historiography which stressed the positive achievements of the educated political elite and viewed the masses in a more negative light; for according to the statists, the masses were at times a drag on the national movement and the struggle for an independent, or, at least, autonomous Ukrainian state. The failure of the reviewers to see this distinction between the two schools can only be explained by the fact that both Hrushevsky and Doroshenko were very reluctant to make any wide-ranging generalizations in their histories and stuck closely to the facts. Their ideological assumptions could thus only be seen by scholars who were already acquainted with at least the broad outlines of Ukrainian historiography and its debates, and in the early 1940s, it seems, none of the reviewers concerned were so equipped. Moreover, the position of Hrushevsky changed somewhat over the many years of his long career and the Iliustrovana istoriia Ukrainy is not the best example of his populist ideology. In the west, the ideological distinction between Hrushevsky-Frederiksen and Doroshenko-Simpson seems to have been first clearly articulated by O. J. Frederiksen himself who in a pioneering Handbook of Slavic Studies edited by the emigre Russian historian, Leonid Strakhovsky, also had something interesting to say about his rival, W. E. D. Allen.^[25]
We may conclude by restating that the international political crises of the late 1930s led to the publication during the war of several important books in English about Ukrainian history. These books may be divided by genre into popular histories and scholarly works. In both the popular realm and the scholarly realm several different views were represented. These included conservative Russian, Soviet Russian, and two different Ukrainian national viewpoints. With regard to the popular-style history of Ukraine authored by Gaskell, we admit that this volume was only written and not published. But by the same token it should be noted that a book similar to Gaskell’s was, in fact, published later in the war. This was W. H. Chamberlin’s The Ukraine: A Submerged Nation, which was fullest on the Soviet period and gave an eye-witness account of the Great Famine of 1932-33. Chamberlin concluded his book with some idealistic speculations about the USSR eventually transforming itself into a democratic federation of free peoples.^[26] Moreover, even the official Soviet view of Ukrainian history changed somewhat during the war with serious concessions made toward Ukrainian national sentiment, and this was noted not only by Ukrainian immigrants in the west, both nationalist and Communist, but also by so august a publication as the American Historical Review.^[27] The final result of this flurry of research, translation, and publication was that far into the Cold War era, which began in 1945 and lasted into the 1980s, Ukrainian historiography in the English language, at least with regard to general histories, continued to be dominated by books published during the Second World War.