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Revisiting the Histories of Ukraine Mark von Hagen In a conversation a few years ago in Kyiv with a fashionable art gallery owner, I was challenged to state what I thought made Ukrainian history distinctive and interesting. Before long I found myself refuting her notion that these distinctions were “primal” and somehow based in the genetic material of contemporary Ukrainians. This primordial reading of Ukrainian nationality is something that we scholars working in the postmodern paradigms find difficult to bear,1 but I also have to acknowledge that I achieved next to nothing in destabilizing this Ukrainian woman’s firm conviction of her nation’s genetic superiority to others, especially the Russians. (In characteristically ironic fashion, this very conversation occurred in Russian, although both the art gallery owner and I had begun our acquaintance in Ukrainian; the Russian language was necessary to accommodate two of our fellow discussants/listeners who only knew Russian, one a German and the second an American NGO representative in Kyiv!)2 Still, even as I was arguing against such notions of biological difference and uniqueness, I also realized that my own approach to Ukrainian history had nonetheless been shaped by efforts to consider what has made it the way it is and has been over the centuries in which Ukraine has been conceivable. The question of what made Ukrainian history “Ukrainian ” was no doubt behind my provocative essay title of a few years back, “Does Ukraine Have a History?”3 After all, I came to Ukrainian history (and the language) from years of work in Russian history and language and some background in Polish history and language (as well as graduate-school work in modern European history, defined as West European and mostly German, French, and British), so I have been comparing the history of Ukraine with at least those several traditions from the start.4 But my comparativist inclinations regarding Ukraine have even earlier roots. When I paid my first visit to the city that I knew as Kiev in 1975, it impressed me as a very Russian metropolis, a very Orthodox Christian one by its historical culture, and thereby linked in complicated ways to Russia itself. I was in the Soviet Union to study the Russian language that summer (at Leningrad State University’s department of Russian language for foreigners). Kiev was the last stop on our itinerary after six weeks of study in Leningrad, followed by a week in Moscow and a few days in Tbilisi, Georgia. That summer we had also visited Novgorod and Tallinn, so my comparative approach to Ukraine was already widely cast. Tallinn and Tbilisi seemed to me to be more different from Kiev than Novgorod or Moscow. But I did not give a great deal of thought to developing this comparative framework until later years. After earning a reputation as a moderately competent historian of Russia—more specifically, the early Soviet period—I came to feel that my background and training had left me unprepared to understand the Soviet Union as a multinational state—this several years before the end of the USSR. My first venture was in Turkic studies, but after two years of studying modern Turkish, I realized that I needed not just a few years but probably another lifetime to master the languages of the Turkic peoples of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. While I read widely in the histories of the Ottoman Empire and the Turko-Muslim peoples of the Russian Empire, I came upon an ultimately more sensible option, Ukraine and the Ukrainian nation. After all, Ukraine was the most populous republic after Russia, and Ukrainians the largest nation in the Soviet Union, after the ethnic Russians. It also became clear that for a military historian (even—perhaps especially—one like myself, who is more a historian of armies and soldiers, and the social and cultural consequences of war than the more conventional guns-and-battles specialists) Ukraine was a veritable laboratory of international and civil wars and other violent conflicts that promised some exciting findings. Incorrectly assuming that Ukrainian would come naturally to me after Russian and Polish, I began reading in the voluminous historiography of modern Ukraine, mostly from diaspora historians and their students. I was persuaded that there was still room for a sympathetic if critical outsider to make some contribution to this volatile field, especially given the prospects of greatly expanded archival access after 1989 and the opportunities for Ukrainian historians themselves to revise, if not...

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