From ‘Borderland’ via ‘Bloodlands’ to Heartland? Recent Western Historiography of Ukraine

It is almost axiomatic to point out that ‘Ukraine’ means ‘borderland’ in studies of the country written by Western scholars and observers.1 The first comprehensive English-language survey of the country’s history, by Orest Subtelny, initially published before the fall of Communism, begins with this observation;2 it is the title of a popular journalistic account by Anna Reid;3 and a potent leitmotif of the numerous academic articles and historical surveys that deal with the country either in whole or in part ever since—including the recent works by Alexander Prusin and Timothy Snyder (both from 2010), to be discussed in more detail here. Ukraine’s liminality for western scholars is, inevitably, a reflection of more than geography. Its late attainment of lasting, independent statehood in 1991, having spent the modern period almost entirely under foreign subjugation (Muscovite, Polish-Lithuanian, Habsburg, Russian, Polish, Nazi, Soviet, and Romanian on its western fringes), has shaped historiography accordingly. At least until the 1990s, its affairs were typically treated by Western scholars as marginal: fragmented and single-issue, or else subsumed into Sovietology and Russian Studies. Even the question of whether to use a definite article in front of the country’s name (the equivalent in Slavic languages being the question of whether one is ‘within’ or ‘on’ the territory) reflected an enduring uncertainty as to whether this was a regional adjunct of something larger, or sovereign territory per se. The Western exception until 1991 was diaspora scholarship, which worked hard to underscore aspects of Ukraine’s emotionally and intellectually separate (if institutionally intertwined) trajectory from the Russian, and later Soviet, empire. Such work has traditionally clustered in institutions in North America, notably Harvard (with the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, and its journal, Harvard Ukrainian Studies) and Toronto; the doorstopper volume by Subtelny mentioned above arguably being the most distinguished (and frequently updated) monograph emerging from this line of scholarship

Archaeology · Communism · Diaspora · Historiography · Liminality · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Slavic languages · Classics · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · History · Law · Polish Historical and Cultural Studies · Soviet and Russian History