Ukrainians in Canada: The Interwar Years, Book 1: Social Structure, Religious Institutions, and Mass Organizations by Orest Martynowych (review)

Twenty-five years after the publication of Orest Martynowych's Ukrainians in Canada: The Formative Years, 1891–1924 (Canadian Institute of Ukranian Studies Press, 1991), this long-awaited sequel volume is finally out. And even though the study took longer to produce than most would have expected, the wait was well worth it. With the arrival of the first of Martynowych's two volumes covering the interwar history of Canada's Ukrainians, immigration historians and general readers finally have what one may call an "encyclopaedia" of Ukrainian-Canadian social and political history from 1925 to 1939.

The book picks up where its 1991 predecessor left off: with the signing of the 1925 Railway Agreement between the Canadian government and the country's largest railway companies, spawning the second wave of Ukrainian immigration. Unlike their pre-1914 forerunners (mostly peasants from Galicia and Bukovyna), these new immigrants were more educated, nationally conscious, and socially mobile. Many of their leaders were veterans of the recent battles for Ukraine's independence, triggered by the fall of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. The impact of these war veterans on the intellectual and political life of the community is one of the central themes running through the book. These ambitious men, imbued with the sense of duty to the Ukrainian nation, quickly made their way into the old–more socially conservative and less politically active–Ukrainian-Canadian elite, creating an array of new organizations and profoundly transforming existing community institutions.

Transnationalism is another thread that is woven through the book. Martynowych convincingly demonstrates that most Ukrainian-Canadian community activists never severed the ties that connected them to the homeland, remaining part of a worldwide Ukrainian diaspora and staying in close touch with Old World intellectual currents and Ukrainian émigrés in Europe and elsewhere. Indeed, the ideological divisions within Canada's Ukrainian community were more an extension of Old World political battles than a result of any domestic developments.

Factionalism remained a constant presence in the interwar Ukrainian-Canadian community, just like it had before 1925. If anything, it increased even further. Between the two world wars, Canada's Ukrainians exhibited virtually every shade of the political spectrum, from the Communist leftists to the far-right integral nationalists. Yet the author rightly cautions the reader against the habitual tendency to see the history of the community through the rigid dichotomy of "progressivism vs. nationalism." This simplified view, he argues, "fudges the essential nature" of the "progressives" and the "nationalists," exaggerates the relative strength of the "progressive" camp and ignores the diversity that existed within its "nationalist" counterpart (xxi).

In Chapters 3 and 4, Martynowych takes us through a detailed and well-researched history of two main Ukrainian-Canadian religious denominations (Ukrainian Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox). Like other community groups, Ukrainian-Canadian churches had more than their fair share of internal conflict and fractiousness during the interwar period, yet they still remained institutions that commanded the most authority and largest membership within Canada's Ukrainian community. In Chapter 5, the author turns to the exploration of the Ukrainian-Canadian left, as represented by the Ukrainian Labour-Farmer Temple Association (ulfta). Despite its unapologetically pro-Soviet attitudes, the ulfta managed to become the largest Ukrainian secular mass organization in Canada and boasted the most extensive and "best organized network of Ukrainian-Canadian cultural/educational, benevolent, and homeland aid associations" (243). This chapter is grounded in less archival material than some of the other chapters, but this is largely compensated by the meticulous research of Ukrainian-Canadian periodicals.

The last four chapters of the book are dedicated to the various associations representing the non-Communist camp: from the traditionalist and conservative United Hetman Organization to the liberal-nationalist Ukrainian Self-Reliance League and the far right Ukrainian National Federation, which proclaimed the Ukrainian nation "above all else." These organizations...