Perogies and Politics: Canada's Ukrainian-Canadian Left, 1891–1991 by Rhonda Hinther (review)

Relatively little scholarship has been completed on the Ukrainian-Canadian left; it is largely absent from popular conceptions of Ukrainian Canadian history. Insofar as scholars have written about the left, Rhonda Hinther argues that they have focused on the movement's male leadership and its connections with the Communist Party of Canada. Hinther's book takes a different approach; she applies an intersectional lens to examine how gender, class, age, and ethnicity shaped the experiences of the men, women, youth, and children who made up the movement.

Despite the book's title, which includes the bookends of 1891 (the beginning of mass Ukrainian immigration to Canada) and 1991 (the collapse of the Soviet Union), the main focus is the period from the interwar years to the 1970s. Hinther provides a detailed and engaging account of the movement's activities and how these changed in response to the needs of members and external pressures. Most chapters focus on the experiences of one or more groups (some combination of men, women, youth, and children) during a particular period. Following a brief account of the movement's origins, the first three chapters focus on the interwar years, when the movement successfully appealed to members with a combination of left-wing activism and Ukrainian cultural activities. A separate chapter, which is not well integrated with the remainder of the book, is devoted to the movement as a whole during World War II. This chapter focuses mainly on men and women, with only a very brief mention of children's activities. The final two chapters cover the post-war period, when the Ukrainian Canadian left began to decline. Hinther's engaging account of one of the movement's attempts to appeal to children and youth – its network of summer camps – suggests more research is needed on this institution, which has been popular with Ukrainian Canadian groups of various religious and ideological orientations.

Despite a male-dominated leadership, women, children, and youth had a major impact on the movement in the twentieth century. They exerted agency within their limited spheres of influence, and, in the longer term, their identities and preferences would shape the movement in significant ways. In the post-war era, the leadership could not respond effectively to the changing needs and identities of women and younger members. For example, younger women increasingly identified with the broader Canadian left and turned their activist energies outside the movement. While the decline of the movement was caused to a large degree by external factors such as assimilation and a hostile state, inadequate leadership played a major role.

One external factor leading to the movement's decline was its inability to attract many post-war Ukrainian immigrants. Hinther includes useful comparisons between the Ukrainian Canadian left and their more conservative counterparts. However, even as Hinther argues for a nuanced approach and rejects the use of the term "pro-communist" for the left, her comparisons of the movement with an undifferentiated body of "nationalist Ukrainians" imply that the organized community outside the left was monolithic. In fact, there were religious and ideological differences between many Ukrainian Canadian organizations, and they often came into conflict with each other, particularly during the interwar period. Orest Martynowych's 2016 book on interwar Ukrainian Canadian organizational life would have been a useful source in this respect.

Hinther draws on a variety of English-language sources, including interviews with members, internal movement records, and Royal Canadian Mounted Police surveillance files. Although several Ukrainian-language books and newspapers are included in the bibliography, very few of these are cited in the notes. It is likely that Hinther's account of the movement's earlier years, when Ukrainian was the dominant language, would be fuller and more nuanced if it included more Ukrainian-language sources.

The book is generally quite readable, with the exception of the theoretical sections of the introduction. It will be of interest to scholars of Ukrainians in Canada, ethnic socialism...