Suchergebnisse

I met Natalia Baranovska, a Ukrainian historian who is one of the characters in Kate Brown's book, last summer. I also read her work on the Chernobyl (in Ukrainian, Chornobyl) nuclear disaster, but I did not know her personal and academic story until I read the Manual for Survival. Baranovska began to study the Chernobyl catastrophe before any of her fellow historians in Kyiv considered it a legitimate topic for historical research. She made dozens, if not hundreds, of visits to the Chernobyl exclusion zone and saved hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pages of documents on the disaster that she brought from the area. Natalia Baranovska is also a cancer survivor.

More than twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, the region is still grappling with the problem of its new identity and the choice of an appropriate name to reflect it. There has been considerable talk about a "return to Europe," as well as the emergence of a "new Europe" and, as a consequence of the latter, the birth of a "new Eastern Europe." Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova are often viewed as the core of the "New Eastern Europe." These countries have recently found themselves in a unique geopolitical position, sandwiched between the extended European Union in the west and Russia in the east. They had never been thought to constitute a distinct region and thus had no established group identity. This article explores the question of whether looking at the history of Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova as that of one region can help us better understand its past and explain its current situation.

"Getting history wrong is an essential factor in the formation of a nation," wrote Ernest Renan, basing this observation on his analysis of the nation-building experience in nineteenth-century Europe (qtd. in Eric Hobsbawm,On History.New York: New York Press, 1997: 270; for a different translation of the same sentiment, see Ernest Renan, "What is a Nation," inNationalism in Europe from 1815 to the Present: A Reader.Ed. Stuart Woolf. London: Routledge, 1996: 50). Many historians today tend to agree with Renan's statement and are doing their best to "get history right" as they search for alternatives to national history. More often than not they face an uphill battle in that regard, both within and outside their profession.

SUMMARY:
В статье, которая открывается замечанием Эрнеста Ренана о том, что "создание ошибочной версии истории является важнейшим фактором формирования нации", С. Плохий рассматривает имеющиеся сегодня у историков возможности переписывания и переструктурирования восточноевропейских исторических нарративов. Непосредственно предметом анализа служит украинская историография. В статье критически рассматриваются становление национальной парадигмы украинской истории, а также альтернативы национализирующему подходу, прежде всего – мультиэтническая и локальная истории, а также транснациональные и региональные подходы. В заключении автор обращается к перспективам встраивания украинской истории в контекст истории большого наднационального сообщества, каковым может являться "Восточно-Центральная Европа" или "Евразия". В своем анализе автор исходит из убеждения, что если будущее Украины связано с Европой, то ее прошлое принадлежит пограничным цивилизационным и имперским пространствам и пограничным пересечениям, которые в течение веков определяли ход и интерпретацию событий на территории, известной сегодня под именем "Украина".

Ever since the dissolution of the USSR the fate of the Black Sea fleet and its main base, the port and city of Sevastopol, remains at the centre of Russian-Ukrainian relations. The current dispute between the two largest of the former Soviet republics is deeply rooted in history, as the Russian side often uses historical arguments in its attempts to claim the Russian Federation's jurisdiction over the Crimea in general and the city of Sevastopol in particular. In doing so the Russian politicians often make use of highly developed historical mythology that presents Sevastopol as a symbol of Russian national glory and portrays Ukrainian jurisdiction over the city as a historical misunderstanding. This article discusses the development of Sevastopol mythology in Imperial and Soviet Russia from the times of the Crimean War till the dissolution of the USSR. It does so by placing Sevastopol mythology in the broader context of the development of Russian national identity and follows the changes in the functioning of the myth through more than a century. The article examines the atmosphere in which the myth of Sevastopol as a city of Russian glory was formed and how it managed to survive the dramatic changes that occurred in the former Russian Empire after the Revolution. It also discusses the ways in which the old imperial myth was transformed in order to meet the requirements of Soviet ideology and, within the last decade, of the ideological and political goals pursued by the new Russian state.