During the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Institute of Historical Research at Ivan Franko L’viv National University, Yaroslav Hrytsak, the institute’s director, recalled that both he and the university’s president had arrived at the idea of establishing just such an institute in Edmonton, Alberta, the northernmost of Canada’s provincial capitals and home to The Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. This provides a good example of both the intellectual and material, even physical, impact of North American Ukrainian scholarship on Ukrainian studies in post-Soviet Ukraine.
This intellectual and material impact has multiple dimensions and is present in many scholarly centers in Ukraine . Taking just history alone, there was an undisputable influx of ideas, largely through publications that became accessible and popularized in the Ukraine, but also through the formation of new trans-Atlantic networks that intensified academic exchange programs. Financial help was provided for individual research projects as well as for whole institutions. There also were some joint, largely publishing, projects, to the success of which either North American individual scholars or institutions contributed significantly. The renown journal, Krytyka, is an good example – though not a history journal per se, it contributed nonetheless to the enlivening of historical studies in the Ukraine.
There is little doubt that these encounters with people and ideas, sometimes resulting in a more sustained cooperation and networking, were beneficial for a community of historians raised in the former Soviet Ukraine that still constitute the core of historians in independent Ukraine. The strong and rapid impact of North American Ukrainian studies in the early 1990s shattered the confidence of established Ukrainian historians and undermined previously existing hierarchies within the discipline. It also opened up vistas for non-conforming younger historians. These younger historians either got an opportunity to obtain more independent positions of influence in Ukraine or left for North American academia. The example with which I choose to start my commentary is a good example of this. The influence of western Ukrainianists, which happens to enjoy great popularity in contemporary Ukraine, is evident in the work of Yaroslav Hrytsak himself,^[1] while his Institute, created with the support of Ukrainian scholarly institutions from North America, contributed immensely to the revitalization of the intellectual life (primarily of history, but also of sociology and cultural studies) and has established an impressive publishing record.
After the ten years of intensive interaction between Ukrainian historians in the Ukraine and in North America, two vectors – that of material support and intellectual influence – can be determined to be coming from North America to Ukraine. Although it has become evident that the consequences of this interaction are quite contradictory, the debates taking place under the influence of the North American school of Ukrainian historiography and its interpretation in Ukraine do not conform to one single pattern, that acceptance by some is compounded with the confrontation on the behalf of others. It is obvious that cooperation between Ukrainian and North American scholars is more intensive regarding certain topics and periods and almost non-existent for the others. Finally, there is a widespread feeling of hard–to-articulate dissatisfaction with the existing patterns of cooperation.^[2] It is not at all clear, how the influence of North American Ukrainian historians correlates with the processes taking place in global scholarship and how this influence mediates Ukraine historians’ participation in these debates and processes.
There are certain techniques for demonstrating the actuality of the issues mentioned – the frequency with which North American works on Ukraine are sited by the representatives of different generations, different institutions and different themes. Material influence and the discontent that it causes can be charted as variables of the amount of support provided to individuals and institutions per capita and see how markedly different they are for different generations, institutions, and themes. Finally, one can relate this evidence to the impact of North American Ukrainian scholarship with the influence of the ideas, institutions and people not necessarily studying Ukraine. This commentary will bypass empirical research of this kind, indicating some tendencies transparent in first-hand observations and impressions, and exploring some not-so-evident factors that are deducible from the contradictory and patterned picture of cooperation and mutual influence.
We can start by comparing the Ukrainian situation with the Russian one. As Ukraine’s and Russia’s academic connections with each other were seriously severed after 1991, both have found themselves in a similar position vis-à-vis the West. Both Russian and Ukrainian historians have started to explore North American historiography and have came across the impressive body of scholarship pertaining to their countries, often covering areas great interest both to them and their North American counterparts. Both had to coin new words to designate Ukrainian and Russian studies: russistika, ukraïnoznavstvo. Both started to interact, exchange ideas, translate and publish works originally written in English.
In both cases, North American scholarship often came to be seen and represented as a standard. It was seen as the methodological standard, the standard of style and for the mixing of theory with empirical research, and, finally, for morality – or “intellectual honesty” and intellectual independence. Usually, such recognition is explained as a story of “breaking-off” with the previous, repressive regime’s indoctrination, intellectual narrowness and shallowness, double standards and so on. This is the representation of recovering, of returning to “normal” or, at least, the beginning of that process.
Those involved and those observing somehow forget that this is also the story of hegemony, revealing the hegemonic position of the North American system of knowledge-production in contemporary world, of the hegemonic position ingrained into the contemporary configuration of the world’s economic and political system. This is the story of that hegemony being established on the territories of former Soviet Union and its former Eastern European satellites. If we accept this point of view, then we will have to acknowledge that the scholarship produced is not easily separable from the capital being invested, policies implemented, and the more or less co-modification of system in general and knowledge in particular. The hegemony of North American academia is accompanied by the larger cultural hegemony of “the West” being established in the “transition culture” of post-communist states.^[3]
It is difficult to imagine that people do not feel, do not experience and do not adapt to the inequality of power relationships running through the intellectual currents, institutions and scholars themselves. These unequal and unacknowledged power relationships could be at the center of a certain “black hole” of unspoken dissatisfaction, to employ Slavoj Zizek’s rich imagery. They could be the major structural problem, which many, on both sides of the ocean, feel but fail to articulate.
The “iron curtain” that crumbled had defended not only the Soviet political system, but also the independence and self-sufficiency of its system of knowledge production. In the new post-Soviet situation, flows of the cultural capital, on which and in which intellectuals make their living, have been as unequal as the financial flows in Western and Eastern academia. No matter how many and what kind of reciprocity and altruism on one side and sincere interest on the other side of East-West academic exchange, the spatial and structural inequality of the system of knowledge-production cannot be overcome. That inequality, used by some and damned by others, can no longer be ignored. Scholars are forced to come to terms with it, even if they do not confront it openly in their work.
In the light of this fundamental problem, some old dichotomies employed to describe the field of history in the Ukraine are immediately recognizable, acquiring new meanings. Usually, the representations of historians in the Ukraine (or any former communist country) are constructed in the following way. On the one hand, there are those eager to learn new “paradigms,” methodologies, methods, and more “objective” and “open” ways of researching and writing history. And there are those who are unable to adapt, too lazy or too conservative, too old or too rigid, too pro-Soviet or too nationalist to learn the new truths.^[4] On the other hand, there are scholars who crossed the ocean, shook off the chains of the previous system and have cleaned their minds from the communist mist. They write a new history, cooperate without difficulties with other countries’ historians, crisscross boundaries, pick up fresh thoughts and coin new words from the experiences of diversity, hybridity, and difference.
In this division of scholars into bad and good, we can discern the remaining presence of the arch-dichotomy between Western and Soviet. The opposition to some of the Western impact and attempts to rely instead on some “home-grown” wisdom^[5] can be explained as a resistance inside the hegemonic system. No wonder that such resistance is especially strong in older institutions, tightly connected with state offices, which, in turn, fear being scrutinized by Western states as well as by international political and economic institutions. But the concept of hegemony also allows us to discern and explain the variety of other practices and patterns: tactics of mimicking and mastering a different language, strategies of selling one’s own knowledge and expertise, of charging discussions by diverting accents and associations, of loading well-established discourses with hidden agendas. These geographies of power, besides enriching our gaze, also allow us to explain some major shortcomings of recent Ukrainian historiography.
They can explain some very concrete problems encountered in Ukrainian scholarship. For example, only negligent number of Ukrainianswrite non-Ukrainian history both “at home” and in the West. What may seem like an obsession with one’s own identity can be explained by more down-to-earth factors. On the one hand, there is a lack of resources in contemporary Ukraine to cover non-Ukrainian history or to get the entry-level knowledge necessary for entering Western graduate programs in other than East European areas. On the other hand, in their interaction with Western scholarship, scholars from third-rate countries like the Ukraine are forced to play the role of experts on the region filling the most appropriate niche left to them in the center of world’s knowledge-production. The try to capitalize on becoming pawns of a Western search for an “authentic knowledge” and “authentic voices.”
But my approach also highlights some of the larger problems facing Ukrainian historiography. The largest and most pervasive problem tormenting Ukrainian historians at the moment is the problem of “right methodology” or of a “missing paradigm.” Marxism is gone and its substitution with a national paradigm of history with its “statist” and “populist” schools does not satisfy many historians. Those who want to go beyond the home-grown wisdom look for the most up-to-date, ready-to-use theory or a paradigms. Some look to the “Annales’ School,” others use a variations of nationalism theories, and yet others turn to a strange combination of references to post-structuralist thinkers and post-colonial conditions. There is a widespread feeling of dissatisfaction with these clumsy attempts at a supposedly conceptually or theoretically informed history. But this dissatisfaction does not translate into probing the limits of history and the asking of fundamental epistemological questions. There are limited discussions of methodology and theory of history, but these are seen as a rather separate speculative enterprise, totally different from the practicing of proper history. Constantly complaining about the lack of theory, Ukrainian historians shy away from any reflection on their discipline and its place in the current world. Most historians seem to prefer simply staying in the business and do not undermine the credibility of their own profession. For this they find a ready example in North American Ukrainian history.
Ukrainian historians in North America preferred not to discuss the nature of historical enterprise and, and acting on an inferiority complex, instead set out to prove that Ukrainian “had a history” of its own. Ukrainian institutes in North America now invite and welcome “experts,” meaning those who can contribute bits and pieces to help complete their knowledge of Ukraine and the Ukrainians. They neither expect nor need those who would engage into theoretical debates stretching outside of the field of “Ukrainian studies”. Ukraine’s historians, in their turn, see North American Ukrainian scholars as perfect models for avoiding engagement with theory and still doing respectable and respected history.
Comparing again Ukrainian and Russian historians, many differences between the two that work to the disadvantage of the Ukrainians become obvious. While the Ukrainian road to the West was paved by the academic institutions established in North America by Ukrainian émigré communities, the Russian road led to the centers of Russian studies that were founded independently of ethnic communities, often with state support due to the politics of the Cold War. Russian institutions were therefore less “tainted” by the “ethnic” connection than were the Ukrainian ones.
The number of scholars working in Russian history without an ethnic Russian background has always been larger than in Ukrainian studies. A matter of crucial importance is that Russian interaction with the West from the very beginning was motivated by a “genuine” interest in others’ view of Russian history. Scholars from Russia have always perceived Western Russian studies as a view from the outside (even if that view has stopped seeing an exotic “Other” and started to recognize an alternative “Self”).^[6] In the Ukrainian case this encounter with Ukrainian tudies in the West looks more like a reunion of parts torn apart. In Russian case, the interaction with Western Russian studies lead to the contacts with Western scholarship in general, while in the Ukrainian case it has remained mostly focused on “Ukrainian studies.”
What Ukrainian historians found attractive in the works of North American Ukrainian studies has quite often been the furnishing of their vaguely remembered intellectual origins, the development of themes previously prohibited by an oppressive regime. The development of V’iacheslav Lypyns’kyi’s approach to the Cossack period, for example, fits nicely into that category. Much of the most interesting work on the Cossack period in North American Ukrainian studies drew on Lypyns’kyi’s ideas. One of the best known and widely translated Ukrainian historians from North America is Ivan Lysiak-Rudnyts’kyi, himself an exile, a perfect example of the transplantation of the themes and concerns from the pre-war Ukrainian historiography to the North American academic environment. Other North American Ukrainianists, having been trained at North American universities nonetheless bear the traces of the émigré community’s identity, concerns, and agendas. Ties between these institutions and the Ukrainian community remain very close and allow the community to exercise some influence over the debates taken place in these institutions.
Sharing with the Ukrainian community its independentist agenda, Ukrainian scholars in North America tried to defend Ukraine as a legitimate intellectual concern for mainstream scholarship and to de-center imperial narratives dominating North American histories of Eastern Europe. On the one hand, it seems that they succeed. On the other hand, it seems that Russian imperial narrative was de-centered not because of the scholars doing Ukrainian history, but parallel to their efforts. The decisive “de-centering” came ith Ukrainian independence in 1991 and not the establishment of Ukrainian studies as a legitimate field of academic endeavor. Ukrainian studies at universities in the West filled a niche that opened up in the 1960s and 1970s when various marginalized groups reclaimed their own history and had an opportunity to establish their outposts in North American academic institutions, without necessarily affecting the broader intellectual discussions going on there.
The same Ukrainian independence seemed to cause a major problem for North American Ukrainian studies. On the one hand, it was able to create new in-roads back in Ukraine and allowed greater interaction with Ukrainian scholars from Ukraine. On the other hand, Ukrainian studies in North America became entrapped in the “dilemmas of state-led nation-building.”^[7] Instead of growing interaction within North American academia, Ukrainian institutes in the West found themselves devoting resources and time to support a fledgling Ukrainian scholarship in the newly independent Ukraine. There would be nothing wrong with that if not for the fact that something like a closed circuit was formed between two. Since then, people doing Ukrainian studies in North America have interacted mostly with those in Ukraine covering similar topics and having very similar concerns. Ukrainian studies, instead of serving as a starting place from which those interested in Ukrainian topics could move into university departments, became an isolated place for those doing Ukrainian topics. One the other side of the ocean, Ukrainian scholars’s ideas of Western scholarship are formed first of all by those focusing on Ukrainian studies because of the powerful stream of support and interest coming from North American Ukrainian studies. In end effect, they neither desire nor need to look and move beyond these limited affiliations.
Again, interaction itself would not be bad if not for the fact that in its current form it limits the development of wider horizons of international academic life and creates illusions of self-sufficiency and self-recognition. It has negative repercussions for Ukrainian studies both in Ukraine and abroad. It encourages the proliferation of “empirical” research concerned with finding bits and pieces in a set of “common” themes explored by both sides. Many Ukraine-focused scholars have become too sure of the righteousness of their own ways, of the kind of history they write and of that history’s position in the society in general.
North American Ukrainian scholarship conspicuously shies away from some of the most interesting debates taking place in historiography and history in general. Certain themes were and still remain a taboo for new approaches in North American Ukrainian studies. World War II is a good example of this. While in Ukraine, histories of the Second World War and Ukrainian participation in it proliferate, most often in the context of ongoing attempts to create some consensus picture of the events and chart a consensus interpretation that would be accepted by the Ukrainian state and its people, North American Ukrainian studies (with some exceptions) seems to be waiting for a consensus to be established and does not even try to challenge myths or touch upon traumatic experiences so crucial to the Ukrainian émigré community in North America. The bulk of the new work done on World War II and Ukraine in the West has been carried out by by scholars hardly associated with Ukrainian institutions and largely of non-Ukrainian background.
This is not to say that Ukrainian academic institutions in North America are not trying to react to the changing situation or to modify their position. They do, but do so in a way that corresponds to the trajectory of “state-led nation-building.” They are trying to conceive of a Ukrainian state more inclusive, to deal not only with ethnic Ukrainians, not only with Galicia, but also with those who despite speaking a different language can still be claimed by a broadly defined Ukrainian identity. The “inclusiveness” of this new project of Ukrainian studies has become part of the consolidating efforts of the new Ukrainian state, reinforcing that state and its boundaries. It is all the more regretful because North American scholars and institutions, not being dependent on the Ukrainian state in any direct way and not easily reached by its agencies, could become a real dissenting and critical voice provoking discussion and change in Ukraine itself. Interacting with historians from Ukraine and being in position of power , North American diaspora intellectuals are projecting onto these historians the nationalist agenda of the diaspora community. When their position is reflected back at them, they perceive it as the genuine position of Ukraine’s intellectuals working with the same topics and issues and arriving at the same conclusions.
Thus, one more time, Ukrainian intellectuals are bound to the nationalist project. On the margins of global scholarship and Western academia, Ukrainian historians repeat the mistakes of their nineteenth century predecessors. Just like Ivan Franko from Yaroslav Hrytsak’s article,^[8] the archetype of a Ukrainian intellectual, they believe that nationalism will provide a solution to their and their nation’s problems and lift them out of their marginal position. But this preoccupation with the space of the nation-state effectively prevents Ukrainian intellectuals from serious engagement with other scholarly debates. The real concern of Ukrainian intellectuals is not global problems, but the fate of their own nation-state and their own insecure identity, which they try to hide behind a supposedly stable national past that they are constructing. But this concern itself is just another instance of the interaction occurring in the globalized world and shape by the forces stretching far beyond the boundaries of the nation-state.
Ukrainian historians fail to notice that the debate in which they voice their approvals or resentments, the space in which they are struggling for the more effective position, are empty –an intellectual appeal to “dead souls” in a dead language. Because the stake in the “current resurgence” of history is not the past as it happened, formed or shaped our present, but “an affirmation of the importance of everyday production of values against a preoccupation with reified notions of culture and civilization.”^[9] Today’s history is not about one single past, but about multiple pasts presented and manipulated in our present. And if we go beyond the commonly invoked division between more advanced “pro-Western” scholars and backward old “bulls,” we’ll see on both sides very similar and quite rigid ideas about history, culture, and civilization. The problem is not only and not so much the historians’ own identity, but the audience imagined by them and, ultimately, constructed as an effective place of action. Ukrainian scholars in both the West and Ukraine speak in the first place to the nation. That nation, either an “ethnic” or a “civic” one, remains the center around which the small community of their colleagues is formed.
Some of the most interesting discussions in the field of the Ukrainian history were launched or provoked by people who turned to Ukrainian problems form the outside of Ukrainian institutions and the Ukrainian community – Mark von Hagen, Andreas Kappeler, Terry Martin, Anna Wendland, and Amir Weiner to name a few. Many of those who have written some of the most interesting work on Ukraine in the last ten years came to Ukrainian history by bypassing Ukrainian institutions. And in the case of others partially affiliated with these institutions, the theories and people that most influenced their thinking lay outside of the field formed by the “Ukrainian studies.”
The position of those coming to Ukrainian themes and discovering Ukrainian history because of the background knowledge in Russian imperial of Soviet history seems more advantageous than the parochial position of those who have always been in the field of Ukrainian studies and defend the importance of Ukrainian themes per se. Nonetheless, even here a similar danger arises of discovering the pattern known from somewhere else in the world, of finding an already prepared niche and simply fitting into it. These people are often quite as blind to the advantages of their position and the influence they exercise over Ukrainian scholarship. Their location in the West encourages similar treatment of the rest of the world, be it India or Eastern Europe. Post-colonial theorizing turns into leaving Europe outside of the equation and encouragement of cultural essentialism. They remain blind to the fact that power relationships are still at work and are not limited to the West and the rest.
This is seen even in the best examples of conceptual history we have now on the Ukrainian case. It is plagued by the mechanistic transposition of “models” to the Ukrainian context and the application of these to the Ukrainian “case.” In many instances, we simply deal with the borrowing of certain “labels” and keywords. This is something that Markus Reisenleitner has noticed in attempts to apply postcolonial theory to the Habsburg Empire.^[10] The problem with Ukrainian history (and partly explained by its marginal position vis-à-vis others) is its unwillingness to address questions about the nature of historical enterprise, about its own connection with modernity and present, about the place of history in present struggles for social justice.
I believe that numerous strengths of the North American Ukrainian studies prior to 1991 came precisely from this sense of participation in a just cause, from the effort to articulate the voice of an oppressed nation. In a sense Ukrainian studies prior to 1991 in the global context wasa “minority project.”^[11] This social agenda was turned upside down after 1991 and North American scholarship on Ukraine, just like the whole of the North American Ukrainian community, became entrapped in the statist project of building-up and supporting Ukraine’s independence. They did not realize that a new struggle had already started: the struggle for a new democracy and social justice, not limited to the space of and sometimes contradicting the agenda of the nation-state-building project. This struggle is grounded not in the nation-state’s homogenous space, but in the experiences of present fragmentation and in the fragmented pasts inhabiting Ukraine’s present. Ukrainian institutions in North America together with the majority of Ukrainian historians in Ukraine try to hide from us and from themselves this fragmented and underrepresented character of Ukraine’s present.
Perhaps, the connection between knowledge-production and experience is more profound than many intellectuals, including the majority of Ukraine’s historians, believe. Perhaps, besides the narratives we tell to ourselves and the historizations we make on the basis of the languages we hear, our experiences include larger-than-narrative practices of violence and disciplining, consuming and resisting, bits and pieces of suppressed pasts and sensibilities, all of which constitute a practice.
Perhaps, the reason for not having something outstanding that would have grown up from the practice of Ukrainian scholars’ “displacement” lays in the suppression of the desire to explore one’s own experience in favor of the rules of the game accepted in the North American academia. Perhaps, the Subaltern studies group was so successful precisely because of this resonance between the practices of writing and experiences, because of growing out from a very particular context. They were successful because of their ability to transform Western theory and challenge it on their own ground. Postcolonial theorists from South Asia came to North America with ready-made theories which had to be mastered, appropriated, and negotiated by North American academia.
We complain that nothing really important comes out of Ukrainian history, nothing important in terms of theory and larger questions with which scholars covering other regions are grappling. This problem could be the outcome of a profound divergence between experience and knowledge-production, of the suppression of the former in favor of the latter. Even more advanced Ukrainian scholars coming to the West try to master the hegemonic language, not to subvert it with the language of their own and formed on the basis of some larger non-academic political agenda. A quite mechanistic appropriation of certain concepts and ideas can be seen as the outcome of this.
Is there any solution to these problems? Could it be that the Ukrainian version of postcolonial theory would have to be written in Moscow and Vienna, if only those cities could compete with the hegemony exercised by the North American academia? Or perhaps, the Ukrainian experience of neither being a colony nor a metropolis complicates things and precludes one’s reflection on one’s location? Or maybe, instead of the frustration with geographies of our marginality and search of the explanation beyond them, we have to expose the limits history encounters in this case and explore them.
In the conference with Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, Ranajit Guha, one of the founders of the original South Asian subaltern studies group, suggested that intersection in scholarship should go beyond “the most slender trace of analogy here, a touch of resemblance here, and a suggestion of parallelism in yet another respect.”^[12] To overcome the superficiality of comparison and straightforward “application,” Ranajit Guha suggests a model of “convergence.” This model suggests coming “together with concerns specific to our times.”^[13] These “concerns of our times,” be it modernity or post-modernity, are postmodern and could indeed become the only means to break off the circuit of self-recognition and explode the geographic limits of marginalization.