“. . . The reemergence of Ukraine on the map of Europe is a major event, significant enough to prompt rethinking of some broader issues concerning Europe, its internal divisions and its boundaries” (Johann Arnason, “Europe's Eastern Borders: Historical and Comparative Reflections,” Australian Slavonic and East European Studies 20, nos. 1–2, 2006, 117). These words of Arnason could have been met with a grain of skepticism shortly after the Orange Revolution of 2004 when they were written. Today, when Russian aggression has escalated into a full-scale war against Ukraine, they are not seen as an exaggeration.
From the perspective of Ukrainian nation-state building, Russian and Soviet geography and history should be reassessed as well. An excellent collection of essays edited by Olena Palko and Constantin Ardeleanu and published by the McGuil-Queen's University Press in 2022 is an important contribution to this process. The publishing project brought together fourteen author-participants of the workshop “Transcultural Contact Zones in Ukraine: Borders, Conflicts, and Multiple Identities,” organized by the University of St. Gallen on the basis of the “Ukrainian Regionalism” research platform network in September, 2018. The book was submitted to the publisher before the Russian whole-scale invasion of Ukraine but this fact does not detract from the importance of the topics discussed by its authors.
The volume is divided into three parts: 1. “Negotiating Borders: Great Power Diplomacy and Ukraine's Borders,” 2. “Establishing the Borders of the Soviet Republics,” and 3. “Delineating Ukraine's Western Border.” The structure of the volume reflects an attempt to combine thematic and chronological principles even though it is hard to separate them clearly. This may be one reason for some of the inconsistency in how the topics presented by the essays were distributed among the parts of the book.
It is hardly possible here to speak of all the essays in details. Suffice it say that their authors touched all of Ukraine's current borders with Russia, Poland, Belarus, Hungary, Slovakia, Moldova, and Romania. I would especially single out the four well-written chapters devoted to the Ukrainian-Polish border (Elżbieta Kwiecińska, Jan Jacek Bruski, Damian Karol Markowski, and Serhii Hladyshuk). This topic clearly dominates all others in the book.
Comparatively, the history of Ukrainian-Russian border, which is examined by Stephan Rindlisbacher, Austin Charron, and briefly touched upon by Borislav Chernev, yields to the abovementioned quantitively. A highly informative essay on the same topic written by Tatyana Zhurzhenko in the “Conclusion” format goes beyond the chronological framework of the book. Unfortunately, none of the authors discusses specifically Ukrainian-Russian border negotiations in times of the Central Rada and Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky.
The history of the Ukrainian-Moldovan-Romanian border is highlighted in two chapters written, respectively, by Constantin Ardeleanu and Alexandr Voronovici, while the Ukrainian border with Belarus is presented by the essay of Dorota Michaluk. Finally, readers will find a brief history of the establishment of Ukrainian borders with Hungary and the Czechoslovak Republic in an essay by Iaroslav Kovalchuk. The authors of all chapters deserve special commendation for introducing new archival material.
My critical comments can be limited to a few points related mostly to the largest, introductory part of the book written by the editors. They set themselves a bold task of “familiarizing readers with the state of the field . . .” (5) but somehow forget to specify which particular area they have in mind: Ukrainian history, east European studies, border, or regional studies? All of them are presented in this book but only fragmentarily in the introduction.
I believe the Ukrainian twentieth century can be understood properly only from a broad historical perspective. In this book, Ukrainian history before that period of time is presented as follows: “In the mid nineteenth century, on Europe's political and mental maps, there was no such place as Ukraine” (5). There was neither national community, nor any officially recognized language under the same name; even though the term “Ukraine” existed, “its meaning was vague and its connotation somewhat poetic” (6). There were only territories “populated by Little Russian Orthodox peoples . . . who spoke dialects similar to modern-day Ukrainian), on both sides of the Dnieper” (5).
Such statements beg the question of where “Ukraine” came from and what happened to the “Little Russians,” as well as Ukrainian Greek-Catholics living beyond the Russian imperial border. As far as I know, no scholar familiar with the works of Zenon Kohut, Frank Sysyn, Serhii Plokhy, or Andreas Kappeler questions their findings about historical continuity between early modern “Little Russia” and modern “Ukraine.” My own research on historical terminology suggests that both of these terms (as well as some other denominations) were in parallel usage, and not specifically in “poetic” meaning. A reader would appreciate an explanation of the relationship between Ukrainian historical terminology and identity discourses.
Modern Ukraine has been in the process of making and re-making itself for a long time. No wonder “making” became somewhat a buzz word in recent literature on Ukraine. However, Ukraine did not exist as an independent nation state in its internationally recognized borders before 1991. It means that making Ukraine cannot be separated from imagining Ukraine. These are two sides of modern nation-state building. It is pity that the process of imagining Ukraine remained underrepresented in the book in general and in the introduction in particular.
A reader cannot find in the introduction names of those intellectuals who outlined the symbolic borders of the space for Ukrainian identity: Taras Shevchenko, Mykhailo Drahomanov, Ivan Franko, to name just a few. The intellectual legacy of non-Soviet Ukraine, as well as important texts published recently in Ukraine, contains a lot of facts on this topic, but many of them have been ignored. The introduction would have been more helpful if the authors had explained their interpretation of the key terms used in the volume, such as “nation” and “identity,” as well as “border,” “borderland,” “region,” and “frontier.”
Even though it is hard for me to agree with the bold statement that “this volume covers every aspect of Ukraine's borders . . .” (32), I have to congratulate the authors and editors on the publication, which is an important contribution to the growing field of Ukrainian border studies, as well as the modern diplomatic and political history of Europe.
