Thirty years ago, Mark von Hagen asked a question that sounded rhetorical: Does Ukraine Have a History? A list of references to existing works on Ukrainian history published in the west at the time indicated that the question contained an answer. Hardly any of the participants in the discussion, including its initiator, doubted that Ukraine has a History: a master narrative that represents and affirms the nation’s biography. The discussion following von Hagen’s essayFootnote ¹ nevertheless indicated that the affirmative answer, in turn, gave rise to a host of other questions: what exactly is Ukraine’s history, to what extent does the classical Ukrainian master narrative adequately describe the past and correspond to the current level of historiographical development, what kind of history can be considered Ukrainian, and so on. Thirty years later, the question may sound different: Does Ukraine have histories?—and, given the content of the books discussed below, it may also be rhetorical.

The books under review are the product of the intellectual activity of an engaged observer. The authors describe and analyze phenomena and processes in which they were involved and still are involved; in a sense, they are themselves the protagonists of their stories, and their conclusions about fundamentals often result from self-reflection. Another aspect of involvement is that, in many cases, the actors and ideas discussed there have not yet become definitive objects of history. They are part of the present and still participate in the processes described and analyzed in the books. In this sense, Volodymyr Kravchenko is in a more favorable position because he is more focused on past developments. Keeping within analytical history is a more difficult challenge for Serhy Yekelchik, who deals more with ongoing processes. Hence, his analysis sometimes demonstrates a deal of excessive involvement: he does not always manage to separate historical politics and historiography, the position of observer and player. Examples include his over-enthusiasm in describing historical politics in Ukraine after 2014 as evidence of the formation of a political nation, his somewhat apparent description of the policy of decommunization as turning into decolonization, or his call for historians of Ukraine to recognize their work as part of decolonization processes in order to more effectively counter imperial myths and separate Ukrainian history from Soviet models. However, these publicistic passages highlight the author’s overall balanced approach to a complex and controversial problem.

It is also curious that the authors’ intellectual and career biographies are similar in many ways. They belong to the same generation that grew up in the same cultural Soviet space. Kravchenko legitimized himself as a professional historian at the beginning of the decline of Soviet Marxist historiography, while Yekelchyk’s intellectual maturation coincided with the period of its collapse and degradation. Both began as specialists in historiography. Ukrainian diaspora historiography and, more broadly, western scholarship was for both a discovery and a dramatic departure from their basic historical worldview. Both had an essential part of their biography at the University of Alberta: Yekelchyk defended his second (after Ukrainian) PhD thesis there, while Kravchenko worked with that university’s Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies in the 1990s–2000s and was director of that institute from 2012–2017. Finally, both emigrated to Canada (albeit with a temporary gap) while maintaining close ties with Ukraine, which suggests a high level of knowledge and understanding of the cultural, social, and political contexts of Ukrainian historiography both in mainland Ukraine and in the North American diaspora, often invisible to the outside observer.

It will be pertinent to mention that both authors represent the case of intellectual re-export. They both received Soviet higher education and were formed intellectually during the Soviet era. Both experienced personal transformations due to the influence of Ukrainian diaspora historiography, which contributed to the development of a more inclusive Ukrainian historical narrative that transcended traditional ethnocentric views. In the case of Yekelchyk, we can also refer to a direct intellectual genealogy: his thesis supervisor at the University of Alberta was John-Paul Himka, and his supervisor was Roman Szporluk, author of seminal works on intellectual history. The topic of intellectual re-export, in general, deserves a separate conversation. It is not difficult to notice that in recent decades, many stimulating works on Ukrainian history have been published by researchers who moved to the west during Ukraine’s independence and experienced the influence of the most advanced Ukrainian diaspora historians. Besides Yekelchyk, Kravchenko, Serhii Bilenˊky and Andrii Zayarniuk, who settled in Canada, we can mention Serhii Plokhiy, who worked in the United States.

Both books belong to the second-level historiography, a history of historiography covering numerous epistemological issues. In many respects, we are dealing with intellectual and social history: the authors examine the evolution of Ukrainian historiography in the context of intellectual and social shifts in the currents of the second half of the twentieth century, without ignoring the interaction between professional historiography and society. Kravchenko’s book deals with the institutional development of Ukrainian historiography, while Yekelchyk’s book also discusses institutional shifts in independent Ukraine.

Yekelchyk’s book chronologically covers part of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first. It deals with a wide range of issues related to the development of Ukrainian historiography in mainland Ukraine and the diaspora. It is a collection of articles and essays, six of which emerged between 1997 and 2018 but were thoroughly revised and supplemented with new data and interpretations; four essays are the result of recent research. Yekelchyk presents a broad panorama of historiographical processes in mainland Ukraine in the period of independence (not forgetting excursions to Soviet and pre-Soviet times) and pays considerable attention to historiographical processes in the Ukrainian diaspora in North America.

Kravchenko focuses on the historiographical developments in the Ukrainian diaspora in the postwar period (after 1945), bringing the narrative up to Ukraine’s independence in 1991. He considers this year (quite reasonably) as a kind of caesura in the development of Ukrainian diaspora historiography, perhaps saving space for a second volume—otherwise, given the profound changes in Ukrainian diaspora historiography in the last thirty years (partially described by Yekelchyk), one could reproach him for stopping halfway through. In both cases, the term “Ukrainian historiography” encompasses historical writings and debates on Ukrainian history and related problems of historical epistemology. Both books are about what, how, and who has written about Ukrainian history. Due to specific historical circumstances, they are primarily about historians of Ukrainian origin (both in the sense of ethno-cultural origin and citizenship). Both authors actualize their texts with Russia’s war against Ukraine, pointing to the existential nature of this war and mentioning the fact that an integral part of Russian aggression is the denial of Ukrainian history as such by Russian political and cultural elites.

The cross-cutting theme uniting both books is the adventures of the Ukrainian master narrative or canon of national history, where Ukraine is presented as a sovereign, unique subject of the European (and world) historical process. Both books treat the Ukrainian master narrative as an established phenomenon interacting with an external intellectual, cultural, social, and political environment that influences its internal development. These books discuss how Ukrainian historiography has become part of and influenced world historiographical processes.

Kravchenko examines this theme (he uses the term national grand narrative) on the example of émigré/diasporic Ukrainian historiography, tracing its evolution from the classical national narrative created at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the modernized version that emerged as a result of its interaction with intellectual currents and shifts in western, primarily Anglo-Saxon historical epistemology. He traces the evolution of the main strands of mainland Ukrainian historiography that emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century (populist, statist, National-Communist, social-economic) in the diaspora, locating their modified versions in works from the 1960s to the 1980s.

He contextualizes this development with the theme of the “struggle for recognition” of émigré and diasporic historiography by the societies in which it developed; this part of his account follows the formula “from total ignorance and rejection to belated recognition.” It is a story of representation and preservation of national history by the diasporic community in multicultural, pluralistic societies where, on the one hand, different cultures compete and coexist and, on the other, dominant cultures impose their prescriptions and limitations.

Yekelchyk adheres to the same line; for him, Ukrainian historiography is the writing of the nation in historical and historiographical retrospect. It is the evolution of the Ukrainian national narrative from a classical ethnocentric version to a more nuanced and inclusive variant of the history of Ukraine in a world of other national histories and a space of multinational and transnational versions of the historical process. He also pays special attention to Ukrainian diasporic historiography, presenting it, on the one hand, as a medium for preserving the national canon of historiography and, on the other, as a window into the world of western historiography that was opened to historians of mainland Ukraine during perestroika and the first years of independence.

Yekelchyk’s book is a reverse narrative: the story begins now with Russia’s war against Ukraine. It starts by describing the process of “the return of public history” as Ukrainian society’s reaction to the Russian policy of denying Ukraine’s historical agency. He frames his premises within the post-colonial paradigm, considering it primarily in the context of the emancipation of Ukrainian history from the Russian imperial/Soviet narrative. The theme of reappearance continues in the following essay, which deals with returning the Ukrainian classical ethnocentric master narrative to Ukraine’s intellectual and public space after independence. Yekelchyk describes this process as transitioning from one orthodoxy (Soviet) to another (national or ethnocentric). However, he does not forget that the return of the classical national narrative of Ukrainian history, although it became mainstream, was by no means uncontroversial. The fall of the Iron Curtain opened a wider intellectual space for historians of mainland Ukraine, which immediately resulted in the revision of the national master narrative, which returned to mainland Ukraine with the status of historical truth under the slogan of historical justice. The entire further evolution of Ukrainian historiography in independent Ukraine is described by Yekelchyk as the appropriation by Ukrainian historians of the cognitive practices and methods of western humanities and social sciences and the overcoming of the ghosts of Soviet historiography.

Yekelchyk justifiably attributes an exceptional role in these developments to Ukrainian diaspora historiography. The book presents puzzling evidence of how processes that took over half a century in Ukrainian diaspora historiography were repeated (or are still being repeated) in independent Ukraine. Kravchenko’s text provides a similar insight: discussions in the Ukrainian diaspora in the 1960s–70s are surprisingly reminiscent of debates about the master narrative of the 1990s–2010s in Ukraine.

Kravchenko’s book presents a more extensive and detailed picture of historiography in the diaspora, where the main intrigue at first was the preservation and development (additional writing) of the classical master narrative of Ukrainian history created in the second half of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth century, and the struggle for recognition in the North American academy. These tasks were complemented by the need to resist the Soviet version of Ukrainian history, which, in its final version, emerged by the end of the 1970s, promoting the official concept of merging all USSR nations into a new historical community—the Soviet people. The task of preserving and continuing the classical master narrative of Ukrainian history provoked an ongoing conflict with methodological innovations in western social sciences and epistemological advances of the second half of the twentieth century. The result was a series of Historikerstreits among diaspora historians of Ukraine, the confrontation between conservatives and revisionists, during which, firstly, the classical national narrative itself and its interpretations were modified, and secondly, the diaspora historians revised the classical ethnocentric national narrative.

An equally severe challenge was the Russocentrism of western, particularly North American historiography. The emancipation of the Ukrainian master narrative from the Russian-imperial one was, on the one hand, a legitimate means of self-assertion for Ukrainians as sovereign agents of history, while on the other, a compulsory strategy of the mighty “struggle for recognition” described by Kravchenko.

One could say that the complaints about Ukrainian history being in the shadow of the Russian master narrative have long been commonplace if it were not for the new level of instrumentalization of this narrative by Russian elites given Vladimir Putin’s weaponization of history, which provides arguments for the war of destruction against Ukraine. In this context, the seemingly limited topic of the struggle to recognize the separateness and sovereignty of the Ukrainian master narrative in the North American academy has become a subject of broader significance. One might ask, for example, to what extent did the decades-long disregard by the academic and political establishment in North America of the existence of a historical Ukrainian nation affect the nature of politics and the way vital decisions were made in the 1990s–2000s? How thick was the shadow of Russian studies and Sovietology to make the diasporic Ukrainian historiography of the 1960s–70s invisible and to sustain unawareness of the developments and findings that went far beyond the persistent perception of Ukrainian studies as an archaic occupation of a marginalized émigré community?

Kravchenko describes in detail the struggle for recognition of Ukrainian historiography and Ukrainian studies in North America, bringing the story to the late 1980s. He describes the process of shaping Ukrainian diaspora historiography as a story of people, ideas, and institutions. Kravchenko provides a detailed account of the methodological debates among Ukrainian diaspora historians, showing convincingly how in the 1960s and 1970s the intellectual leaders of Ukrainian historiography (Ivan Lysiak-Ruditsky, Omelyan Prytsak, Oleksandr Ohloblin, Ihor Shevchenko, Roman Szporluk) not only went beyond the classic Ukrainian ethnocentric master narrative but also created historiographical schools that met the highest academic standards of the host countries. His picture looks paradoxical: along with the archaic standard master narrative of Ukrainian history in North America, modern Ukrainian historiography corresponding to the contemporary academic excellence criteria emerged, which had to seek recognition both in the North American establishment and to overcome nativists’ prejudices in its own community. Moreover, according to Kravchenko, the development of Ukrainian Studies has had a considerable impact on social sciences and humanities in the west, particularly nationalism studies (even to the point of institutional development, as Ukrainian researchers were among the initiators of the Association for the Study of Nationalities and the journal Nationalities Papers), east European Studies, and border studies.

Yekelchyk also addresses these themes, but he is more interested in the intellectual genealogy of those ideas and generalizations that, in his opinion, represented turning points in the development of Ukrainian historiography in the twentieth century, not only in the diaspora but also in the mainland. In particular, he devotes considerable attention to the revision of the classical master narrative (statist and populist schools) in the works of Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky and the transfer of historiographical innovations from the diaspora to Ukraine through the magnum opus of Orest Subtelny (in this part we find repetitions related to the parsing of Dmytro Doroshenko’s legacy in the previous chapter).

Summarizing their findings, we find a curious picture: diasporic Ukrainian historiography was a rather heterogeneous intellectual and social phenomenon. There was room not only for the guardians of the classical ethnocentric master narrative but also for methodological innovations, and these innovations were not mere borrowing of epistemological findings of western science. Both authors directly or indirectly point out that the most productive historians in terms of methodological innovations were formed in the European scholarly tradition and arrived in North America with their intellectual baggage, which provided them with cognitive openness and a broad research horizon. Lysiak-Rudnytsky was educated at Lviv University in the 1930s, continued his education at Humbolt University in Berlin, and defended his dissertation at Charles University in Prague. Prytsak began his higher education at Lviv University and finished it at Berlin and Gottingen Universities. Shevchenko wrote his dissertations at Charles University and the University of Leuven. Szporluk defended his dissertation at Oxford University.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the achievements of diaspora historiography were transferred to mainland Ukraine. Yekelchyk colorfully describes this process and traces its impact on the overall research situation in the country, citing the phenomenal success of a famous essay by Orest Subtelny, whose translation into Ukrainian and Russian went through two editions and reached nearly one million copies. Here, Yekelchyk teases one of the most painful problems of Ukrainian historiography, which it is still overcoming. It is the dominance of the ethnocentric master narrative that predetermines the perception of historiographical developments outside its borders.

In the case of Subtelny’s book, which was generally intended as a popular course for western readers, an interpretive paradox occurred. Subtelny presented the history of Ukraine within a modernist paradigm, and the theme of the Ukrainian millennium—the continuous story of national existence through the centuries—was not the central theme. Nevertheless, in the Ukraine of the 1990s, it was read precisely as a testament to the millennial struggle of the Ukrainian nation (in its ethnic hypostasis). It became the Bible of the classic ethnocentric national narrative, and its success in this environment was the result of selective appropriation, predetermined by audience expectations and the general cultural context. It is all the more probing because Subtelny was once the target of attacks in Canada precisely by the custodians of the ethnocentric master narrative as revisionist.

However, the predetermined cultural context, political situation, and audience expectations, unforeseen by the author, were not the most crucial issues described by both authors. The more pressing concern was the relationship between the national master narrative and academic freedom, the relationship between the scholar and society. Kravchenko devotes considerable space to describing the discussions between diaspora conservatives and modernists, which, as a rule, went beyond academic exchange and turned into political attacks, defamation, and public harassment of those who allegedly encroached on the sacred foundations, that is, on the canonical ethnocentric master narrative of Ukrainian history. Kravchenko describes these collisions in detail using the example of the 1960s–70s.

Nevertheless, this theme could be continued by recalling, for example, the story of the debate over John-Paul Himka’s views on the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holodomor, which turned into public harassment of the scholar in the diaspora community in the second half of the 2000s and pushed some respected Ukrainian diaspora scholars to the arena of non-academic insinuations (this story, however, is absent from the texts, which are devoted to developments in the 2000s).

During the last decade in Ukraine, this problem has become much more acute to a great extent due to external pressure, which has turned into direct aggression against the country, justified by Russian elites with historical arguments. Russia denies the historicity of Ukraine and, thus, the very fact of Ukraine’s existence. In response, a particular part of Ukrainian society puts forward the classic ethnocentric master narrative as an ideological and political argument, turning the securitization of this master narrative not only outward but also inward. Any variants of its revision, especially those perceived as undermining historical identity understood as ethnic identity (the unity of language, origin, and imagined ethnic territory), are seen by this part of society as a betrayal and interpreted as working for an enemy narrative. Notably, both authors are highly critical of the canonical ethnocentric version of Ukrainian history. Kravchenko devotes a significant part of his text to the difficulties of overcoming this version. At the same time, Yekelchyk ends his opus with a highly critical analysis of the incarnation of it in Ukrainian school textbooks.

The excursions into historiography presented in these two books are not limited to a discussion of the peculiarities of the development of an academic discipline; they encourage reflection on the problems associated with the social and political functions of historiography—not in the vulgar sociological sense, when history is seen simply as an instrument of politics and power struggles, and historians as service personnel for the state or society.

Both books bring us back to the long-standing problem of Ukraine’s representation in Ukraine and the world. As contemporary events show, it is a matter of going beyond the Hegelian picture of history, where “historical” nations exist, and “non-historical” nations should be extinct. As it turns out, in the twenty-first century, the long nineteenth and short twentieth centuries intertwine and mutually complement each other. It turns out that Ukraine was a non-historical nation not only for Russia and its elites but also for much of the western world.

Reading Yekelchyk’s and Kravchenko’s books and placing them in the context of current developments, one realizes that they signal a new turn to an ontological, existential understanding of history. The desk exercises of historians or the elucidation of the peculiarities of national historiography are not as distanced from real life as they may seem to people of a practical nature. The absence or incompleteness of knowledge about the past of a nation, country, and/or culture can directly affect the nature of existence and the prospects of that nation: this applies not only to external actors but also to the nation itself. As both books reveal, Ukrainian history is a very illustrative example.

The uncertainty and protracted search for the “true past,” or the delay in the development of knowledge and understanding of it, or the erroneous choice of its version, which could serve as a basis not only for a common civic identity but also for representation in the world, can turn into existential challenges. One of the reasons for Russia’s attack on Ukraine was a distorted, incomplete, and prejudice-based understanding of the neighboring nation’s history, in fact, a denial of that history. This denial was based not only on prejudice or historically imperial stereotypes but also on the belief that Ukrainians themselves did not have an adequate understanding of their historical subjectivity.

In Ukraine itself, the search for this subjectivity has been protracted by the ambiguous search for an ethnocentric, exclusive version of the past that does not fit well with the present and contradicts an inclusive multicultural, multinational, and transnational history that considers all ethnic, social, religious and cultural groups living on the territory of the modern state as an integral part of the national narrative. The war exposed this dilemma with new force, on the one hand pushing the idea of a civic historical nation while on the other exacerbating tendencies towards ethnic exclusivity in interpretations of the past: tendencies noted by both authors.

If we return to the rhetorical question posed at the beginning of this essay, we can only confirm, based on the content of the books under review, that Ukraine has histories. The authors demonstrate convincingly that Ukrainian history is represented in various forms, starting with synthetic works, providing a renewed and updated master narrative, and following with numerous versions, going far beyond metahistory. Histories of Ukraine can be narrated from a national perspective and through the prism of multinational and transnational narratives. In terms of discipline, they are presented in border studies, gender history, social history, new cultural history, micro-history, historical anthropology, history of ideas, intellectual history, urban studies, agrarian history, biographical history, linguistic and literary history, history of arts, post-colonial studies and so on.

Ukrainian historiography has largely outgrown the Hegelian format of history (followed by the classical Marxist one) and fulfilled the task of proving the historicity of the Ukrainian nation. The works of Yekelchyk and Kravchenko indicate that a significant segment of Ukrainian historiography, both at the level of epistemology and institutional development, has been keeping pace with modern trends in the world’s historiographical process for at least half a century. However, they also report that due to many internal and external factors, the ideological, political, and cultural influence of the classical ethnocentric master narrative is still very significant. Perhaps the question of its peaceful coexistence with other versions of Ukrainian history, its exit from the regime of antagonistic and entry into the regime of agonistic history, is one of the main tasks of the near future. The books reviewed here are an essential contribution to conceptualizing these problems. These texts complement each other effectively and constitute an essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Ukrainian history in all its diversity and complexity.