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Post-Maidan Europe and the New Ukrainian Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Andrii Portnov
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Type
Critical Forum on Ukraine
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Slavic Review , Volume 74 , Issue 4 , Winter 2015 , pp. 723 - 731
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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2015

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References

This essay is partly based on my public talks given at the Free University of Berlin, the Free University of Brussels, the University of Tartu, the Institute for Advanced Study Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin), and a series of lectures presented in April 2014 at the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, Columbia University, Princeton University, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. My understanding of the current events has been influenced by the insightful and original comments of my colleagues, most of all Susanne Frank, Natalia Gumenyuk, Ilya Gerasimov, Oleksandr Osipian, Yuri Ruban, Irina Sherbakova, Thorsten Wilhelmy, and the late Boris Dubin. I am very grateful to all of them and especially to Froma Zeitlin and Joseph Livesey, who read the manuscript of this essay critically and made a lot of valuable comments. I am fully responsible for all the conclusions proposed below.

1 von Hagen, Mark, “Does Ukraine Have a History?,” Slavic Review 54, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 659–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the existing stereotype of “essential Ukrainian anti-Semitism,” see the important insights in Abramson, Henry, “The Scattering of Amalek: A Model for Understanding the Ukrainian-Jewish Conflict,” Eastern European Jewish Affairs 24, no. 1 (Summer 1994): 39–47 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Petrovsky-Shtern, Yohanan, The Anti-Imperial Choice: The Making of the Ukrainian Jew (New Haven, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 See the brilliant commentary on such claims in Rory Finnin, “Ukrainians: Expect-the-Unexpected Nation,” Centre for Research in the Arts, Sciences and Humanities, December 20, 2013, at http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/blog/post/ukrainians-expect-theunexpected-nation (last accessed July 30, 2015). On the German context specifically, see Davies, Franziska, “Zur Debatte tiber die Ukraine: Deutschland und der Euromajdan,“ Merkur 69, no. 790 (March 2015): 32–43 Google Scholar. Compare Timothy Snyder's important observation that “no synthetic history of the Holocaust written in English spells the names of localities correctly.” Timothy Snyder, “Commemorative Causality,” Eurozine, June 6, 2013, at http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2013-06-06-snyder-en.html (last accessed July 30, 2015).

3 For German-language publications on Ukraine, see, for example, Hausmann, Guido and Kappeler, Andreas, eds., Ukraine: Gegenwart und Geschichte eines neuen Staates (Baden-Baden, 1993)Google Scholar; Wendland, Anna Veronika, Die Russophilen in Galizien: Ukrainische Konservative zwischen Österreich und Ruβland 1848-1915 (Vienna, 2001)Google Scholar; Vulpius, Ricarda, Nationalisierung der Religion: Russifizierungspolitik und ukrainische Nationsbildung 1860-1920 (Wiesbaden, 2005)Google Scholar; Boeckh, Katrin, Stalinismus in der Ukraine: Die Rekonstruktion des sowjetischen Systems nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Wiesbaden, 2007)Google Scholar; Kappeler, Andreas, ed., Die Ukraine: Prozesse der Nationsbildung (Cologne, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Golczewski, Frank, Deutsche und Ukrainer 1914-1939 (Paderborn, 2010)Google Scholar; and Hofmann, Tanja, Literarische Ethnografien der Ukraine: Prosa nach 1991 (Basel, 2014)Google Scholar. German histories of the Russian empire and Soviet Union's ethnic and national complexity include Kappeler, Andreas, Ruβland als Vielvölkerreich: Entstehung, Geschichte, Zerfall (Munich, 1992)Google Scholar; in English, Kappeler, Andreas, The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History [London, 2001]Google Scholar; and Simon, Gerhard, Nationalismus und Nationalitätenpolitik in der Sowjetunion: Von der totalitären Diktaturzur nachstalinistischen Gesellschaft (Baden-Baden, 1986)Google Scholar.

4 “Helmut Schmidt wirft EU Gröβenwahn vor,” Zeit Online, May 16,2014, at http://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2014-05/helmut-schmidt-ukraine-eu-weltkrieg (last accessed August 16, 2015). See also the detailed, provocative critique of the German expert community's views on the Ukraine crisis in Anna Veronika Wendland, “Hilflos im Dunkeln: 'Experten’ in der Ukraine-Krise: Eine Polemik,” Osteuropa, nos. 9-10 (2014): 13-34.

5 Gerd Koenen, “What Drives Putin,” Zeit Online, March 20, 2015, at http://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2015-03/russia-vladimir-putin-ucraine-imperialism/seite-2 (last accessed July 31, 2015).

6 See the important critical comments on this notion in Kulyk, Volodymyr, “The Politics of Ethnicity in Post-Soviet Ukraine: Beyond Brubaker,” Journal of Ukrainian Studies 27, no. 1 (2001): 197–221 Google Scholar. Compare Brubaker, Rogers, “Nationalizing State Revisited: Projects and Processes of Nationalization in Post-Soviet States,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 34, no. 11 (2011): 1785–814CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 For more on the complex language situation in Ukraine, see Hrycak, Alexandra, “Institutional Legacies and Language Revival in Ukraine,” in Arel, Dominique and Ruble, Blair A., eds., Rebounding Identities: The Politics of Identity in Russia and Ukraine (Baltimore, 2006), 62–88 Google Scholar; Kulyk, Volodymyr, “Normalisation of Ambiguity: Policies and Discourses on Language Issues in Post-Soviet Ukraine,” in Törnquist-Plewa, Barbara, ed., History, Language and Society in the Borderlands of Europe: Ukraine and Belarus in Focus (Malmö, 2006), 117–40Google Scholar; and Moser, Michael, Language Policy and the Discourse on Languages in Ukraine under President Viktor Yanukovych (25 February 2010-28 October 2012) (Stuttgart, 2013)Google Scholar. On the history of the Ukrainian language in the twentieth century in the context of Russian imperial and Soviet politics, see Shevelov, George Y., The Ukrainian Language in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (19001941): Its State and Status (Cambridge, Mass., 1989)Google Scholar.

8 On the role of Russian and the specifics of speaking Russian in Ukraine, see Wilson, Andrew, “Redefining Ethnic and Linguistic BoundAriès in Ukraine: Indigenes, Settlers and Russophone Ukrainians,” in Smith, Graham, Law, Vivien, Wilson, Andrew, and Bohr, Annette, eds., Nation-Building in the Post-Soviet Borderlands: The Politics of National Identities (Cambridge, Eng., 1998), 119–38Google Scholar; and Kulyk, Volodymyr, “What Is Russian in Ukraine? Popular Beliefs Regarding the Social Roles of the Language,” in Ryazanova-Clarke, Lara, ed., The Russian Language outside the Nation: Speakers and Identities (Edinburgh, 2014), 117–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also a special monograph in Ukrainian, V. 0. Vasyutyns'ky, ed., Rosiis'komovnaspil'notavUkraini:Sotsiarno-psykholohichnyjanaliz(Kyiv, 2012); and a collection of statistical data in M. B. Pogrebinskii, ed., Russkii iazyk v Ukraine, bks. 1-2 (Kharkiv, 2010).

9 For an overview of the church's situation and its role in Ukrainian politics, see Wawrzonek, Michal, Religion and Politics in Ukraine: The Orthodox and Greek Catholic Churches as Elements of Ukraine's Political System (Cambridge, Eng., 2014)Google Scholar. On the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, see Bociurkiw, Bohdan R., The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State (19391950) (Edmonton, 1996)Google Scholar. On evangelical communities in Ukraine, see Wanner, Catherine, Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism (Ithaca, 2007)Google Scholar. The literature on memory issues in post-Soviet Ukraine is extensive. One of the most balanced and nuanced syntheses is Rodgers, Peter, Nation, Region and History in Post-Communist Transitions: Identity Politics in Ukraine, 1991-2006 (Stuttgart, 2008)Google Scholar. See also Dietsch, Johan, Making Sense of Suffering: Holocaust and Holodomor in Ukrainian Historical Culture (Lund, 2006)Google Scholar. See also the brilliant anthropological study by Richardson, Tanya, Kaleidoscopic Odessa: History and Place in Contemporary Ukraine (Toronto, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 For a fuller version of this argument, see Portnov, Andriy, “Memory Wars in Post- Soviet Ukraine (19912010),” in Blacker, Uilleam, Etkind, Alexander, and Fedor, Julie, eds., Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe (Basingstoke, 2013), 233–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Christian Geinitz, “Ukraine braucht Industrie des Separatisten-Gebiets,“ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 7, 2014, at http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/ukrainische-wirtschaft-ist-auf-industrie-im-osten-angewiesen-13252074.html (last accessed July 31, 2015).

12 For more examples of and elaboration on this topic, see Andriy Portnov, “Ukraine's 'Far East': On the Effects and Genealogy of Ukrainian Galician Reductionism,” trans. Joseph Livesey, NYU Jordan Center, August 15, 2014, at http://jordanrussiacenter.org/news/ukraines-far-east-effects-genealogy-ukrainian-galician-reductionism/#.U_ErnaPEQUU (last accessed July 31,2015).

13 Cited in Hrytsak, Yaroslav, “National Identities in Post-Soviet Ukraine: The Case of Lviv and Donetsk,” in “Cultures and Nations of Central and Eastern Europe,” ed. Gitelman, Zvi, Hajda, Lubomyr, Himka, John-Paul, and Solchanyk, Roman, special issue, Harvard Ukrainian Studies 22 (1998): 263–81Google Scholar. It should be noted that in interpreting the results, Hrytsak's article tends to overcome simplified, stigmatizing claims about the “identity“ of Donets’ k residents.

14 See more in Crowley, Stephen F. and Siegelbaum, Lewis H., “Survival Strategies: The Miners of Donetsk in the Post-Soviet Era,” in Siegelbaum, Lewis H. and Walkowitz, Daniel J., Workers of Donbass Speak: Survival and Identity in the New Ukraine, 1989-1992 (Albany, 1995), 61–96 Google Scholar, esp. 62-68.

15 Daniel J. Walkowitz, “'Normal Life': The Crisis of Identity among Donetsk's Miners,“ in Siegelbaum and Walkowitz, Workers of Donbass Speak, 172.

16 Kuromiya, Hiroaki, Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Russian-Ukrainian Borderland, 1870s-1990s (Cambridge, Eng., 1998), 337 Google Scholar.

17 Here I follow the highly valuable suggestions in Brubaker, Rogers and Cooper, Frederick, “Beyond ‘Identity,'” Theory and Society 29, no. 1 (February 2000): 1–47 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the history of the term identity, see Gleason, Philip, “Identifying Identity: A Semantic History,“ Journal of American History 69, no. 4 (March 1983): 910–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also the argumentation in favor of using identity to study Russia and Ukraine in Dominique Arel, “Introduction: Theorizing the Politics of Cultural Identities in Russia and Ukraine,” in Arel and Ruble, eds., Rebounding Identities, 1-30.

18 There are no consistent histories of the Crimean events so far. For details, see journalist accounts: Sergei Goriashko and Ivan Safronov, “Oni vtorgalis’ na rodinu,” Kommersant, March 3,2015, at http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2688725 (last accessed July 31,2015); and Sonia Koshkina, “Pochemu my ‘sdali’ Krym?,” LB.ua, March 27, 2015, at http://www.lb.ua/news/2015/03/27/299874_pochemu_sdali_krim_./html (last accessed July 31,2015).

19 The Kyiv-appointed governor of the Donets'k region, Serhii Taruta, later confirmed in an interview that Ukraine had “lost an opportunity to localize the conflict and to defend the constitutional order.” See Evgenii Shvetz, “Sergei Taruta: Rinat bol'she ne oligarkh. A ia-bankrot,” LB.ua, January 5, 2014, at http://lb.ua/news/2014/01/05/290927_sergey_taruta_rinat_bolshe.html (last accessed July 31, 2015).

20 Mazower, Mark, “Violence and the State in the Twentieth Century,” American Historical Review 107, no. 4 (October 2002): 1158–78Google Scholar; Collins, Randall, Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory (Princeton, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Baberowski, Jorg, “Gewalt verstehen,” Zeithistorische Forschungen 5 (2008): 5–17 Google Scholar. See also an overview of the recent, mostly German-language publications on the history of violence in the twentieth century in Behrends, Jan C., “Gewalt und Staatlichkeit im 20. Jahrhundert: Einige Tendenzen zeithistorischer Forschung,“ Neue Politische Literatur 58, no. 1 (2013): 39–58 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Cf. the important observations in Tatiana Zhurzhenko, “From Borderlands to Bloodlands,” Eurozine, September 19, 2014, at http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-09-19-zhurzhenko-en.html (last accessed July 31,2015).

22 See more in Andriy Portnov, “'The Heart of Ukraine'? Dnipropetrovsk and the Ukrainian Revolution,” in Andrew Wilson, What Does Ukraine Think? (2015), 62-70, at http://www.ecfr.eu/page/-/WHAT_DOES_UKRAINE_THINK_pdf.pdf (last accessed July 31, 2015).

23 Von Hagen, “Does Ukraine Have a History?,” 670, 673.

24 Snyder, Timothy, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (New Haven, 2003)Google Scholar; Yekelchyk, Serhy, Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation (Oxford, 2007)Google Scholar; and Plokhy, Serhii, The Origins of the Slavic Nations: Premodern Identities in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus (Cambridge, Eng., 2010)Google Scholar. For an effort to write a history of Ukraine that includes all the major ethnic groups on the territory of present-day Ukraine, see Magocsi, Paul Robert, Ukraine: An Illustrated History (Seattle, 2007)Google Scholar. The problem with multinational history is that it remains nation-centered and often reproduces the discourse of fixed identities.

25 Kasianov, Georgiy and Ther, Philip, eds., A Laboratory of Transnational History: Ukraine and Recent Ukrainian Historiography (Budapest, 2009)Google Scholar.

26 See Volodymyr Sklokin, review of A Laboratory of Transnational History: Ukraine and Recent Ukrainian Historiography, ed. Kasianov, Georgiy and Ther, Philip, Ukraina Moderna 17, no 6 (2010): 301 Google Scholar.

27 Gerasimov, Ilya, “Ukraine 2014: The First Postcolonial Revolution. Introduction to the Forum,” Ab Imperio 15, no. 3 (2014): 22 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Gerasimov, Ilya, Glebov, Serguei, Kaplunovsky, Alexander, Mogilner, Marina, Semyonov, Alexander, “From the Editors: Emancipatory Hybridity,” Ab Imperio 14, no. 4 (2013): 21 Google Scholar. See also Mizutani, Satoshi, “Hybridity and History: A Critical Reflection on Homi K. Bhabha's Post-Historical Thoughts,” Ab Imperio 14, no. 4 (2013): 27–46 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 As Yaroslav Hrytsak has put it, Maidan had an important national component, but the phenomenon of such a mass movement cannot be reduced to it. See Hrytsak, Yaroslav, “Ignorance Is Power,” Ab Imperio 15, no. 3 (2014): 226 Google Scholar.

30 The very first book about the Ukraine crisis in English was Wilson, Andrew, Ukraine Crisis: What It Means for the West (New Haven, 2014)Google Scholar. See also Yekelchyk, Serhy, The Conflict in Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, 2015)Google Scholar; Stepanenko, Viktor and Pylynskyi, Yaroslav, eds., Ukraine after the Euromaidan: Challenges and Hopes (Bern, 2014)Google Scholar; Marples, David R. and Millis, Frederick V., eds., Ukraine's Euromaidan: Analyses of a Civil Revolution (Stuttgart, 2015)Google Scholar; and Raabe, Katharina and Sapper, Manfred, eds., Testfall Ukraine: Europa und seine Werte (Frankfurt am Main, 2015)Google Scholar.