Suchergebnisse

"Serhy Yekelchyk analyzes the development of Ukrainian history writing from the fall of communism to the early responses to Russia's massive invasion in 2022. He emphasizes the global nature of the modern Ukrainian historical profession, the important role of the Ukrainian diaspora, and the new Western approaches increasingly taking hold in Ukrainian historiography. The author's argument about the importance of Postcolonial Studies in developing a new conceptual vision of the Ukrainian past is especially relevant now, when Ukrainian intellectuals are openly speaking about decolonizing their country's history and memory. Russia's all-out aggression against Ukraine was both justified and inspired by the Kremlin's misuse and abuse of history as a discipline. What is the history of Ukraine as an academic discipline, and how should one interpret it? This book, by one of Ukraine's leading historians, provides a unique perspective on the field of Ukrainian history from the inside. By focusing on the transformations in Ukrainian history writing and the public role of history since Ukrainian independence, it explains how both the discipline and the nation matured. Writing the Nation is a must-read book for anyone who wants to understand not only Ukraine's past but also its present."--

This volume is an updated edition of Serhy Yekelchyk's 2015 publication, The Conflict in Ukraine. It addresses Ukraine's relations with the West from the perspective of Ukrainians. It looks at what we know about alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, the factors behind the stunning electoral victory of the political novice Volodymyr Zelensky, and the ways in which the events leading to the impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump have changed the Russia-Ukraine-US relationship.

"The Conflict in Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know explores Ukraine's contemporary conflict and complicated history of ethnic identity, and it does do so by weaving questions of the country's fraught relations with its former imperial master, Russia, throughout the narrative."--Publisher description.

Book review of Joshua A. Sanborn. Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire. Oxford UP, 2014. xii, 290 pp. Maps. Sources for Maps. Works Cited. Index. $49.95, cloth.

The author proposes a new perspective on the political mobilization of ethnic Russians in the Crimea as reactive settler nationalism. After the Russian imperial conquest of the peninsula and the gradual displacement of the Crimean Tatars, the 1917 Revolution galvanized the Tatar national movement, which entered into an alliance with the Ukrainian one. A similar situation developed in the late 1980s, when the peninsula's Russian ethnic majority found itself threatened by the loss of status and land in what could become a Tatar autonomy within Ukraine. Based on the implicit approval of Stalin's genocidal deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1944, the political mobilization of ethnic Russians in the 1990s made the Crimea an easy target for Russian annexation, which, however, took place twenty years later because of Russia's internal reasons and the Euromaidan Revolution being perceived as a threat to the Putin regime.

The author argues against the widespread Western stereotype of Ukraine as a nation divided into two parts: the pro-Western, nationalistic west and the pro-Russian east. He emphasizes the importance of studying Ukraine's individual regions because their reaction during the 2014 war was determined as much by their diverse historical traditions and cultural identities as by the decisions of the local elites and grassroots political activism on both sides. Even before the conflict, the notion of a united Ukrainian "Southeast" served as a tool of Russian propaganda rather than objective analysis; once the conflict started, it was no longer possible to ignore the profound differences among the provinces usually included in it.

This article discusses the possible ways of conceptualizing the revolutionary and nation-building struggles in the Ukrainian lands between 1917 and 1921. The author argues that these processes, which stemmed from the collapse of two European empires, display features not easily accommodated within the traditional interpretive model of the "Russian Revolution." In comparison, the Ukrainian concept of "national-liberation struggle" is too reductionist and teleological. The term "Ukrainian Revolution," which was widely used by the participants of these events, is better suited for an inclusive analysis of this period that emphasizes the significance of the national factor without ignoring the others. Rather than "nationalizing" the story of the Revolution, such an approach highlights the transnational dimensions of the Ukrainian question.