Ukraine: An Illustrated History (review)

Readers interested in Ukraine will remember nostalgically Professor Magocsi’s excellent Ukraine: A Historical Atlas, which has long been out of print. With the publication of Ukraine: An Illustrated History, those looking for historical maps of this country will finally obtain an easily available and reliable source for their genealogical or historical research. Yet this book serves a much greater audience than just enthusiasts of historical cartography. Each of the forty-six historical maps serves as the centrepiece of a short chapter discussing the relevant period of Ukrainian history. The book is also embellished with hundreds of well-chosen illustrations, from regional landscapes to historical monuments to portraits of prominent individuals. In other words, this attractive volume can serve as an introduction to Ukrainian history for the general reader. It can also be used as a textbook.

In this latter capacity, the book under review is ideal for those readers who find it challenging to make it through the eight hundred pages of Magocsi’s monumental Ukraine: A History. The present volume is essentially a very good, updated distillation of the larger historical survey; most maps also originate from the same source. The shorter work lacks a bibliography or a list of recommended reading, but readers can always find these in the longer survey. Ukraine: An Illustrated History has also inherited its predecessor’s main strength when compared to other histories of Ukraine – detailed coverage of Ukraine’s national minorities. Even in the shorter work, the author provides the best treatment of the history of the Jews, Mennonites, and Crimean Tatars in what is now Ukraine. His analysis of Soviet ‘nativization’ policies during the 1920s is also much more balanced than that of other historians, who focus exclusively on the ‘Ukrainization’ component, while giving short shrift to other ethnic groups. Another notable strength of Magocsi’s work is the attention to detail in border changes. Ukraine’s western border, in particular, was altered a number of times during the turbulent twentieth century. This is the only survey of Ukrainian history that clearly guides the reader through these (and previous) territorial changes.

While narrating the millennia-long history of the land, which eventually became the Ukrainian state, Magocsi never misses an opportunity to tell a good story: for example, the one about the bubonic plague entering Europe in 1341 through the port of Caffa (present-day Feodosiia) or about Ukrainians recalling the navigational skills of their itinerant salt traders by naming the Milky Way after them as Chumaks’ Road (Chumats’kyi Shliakh). The author’s interpretations of well-known historical events are also refreshing. For example, he proposes to analyze the seventeenth-century Khmelnytsky Rebellion not simply as a Polish-Ukrainian confrontation but as a ‘civil conflict among the Rus (Ukrainians) themselves – couched in terms of religion and ethnicity.’

For a work covering almost two millennia in the space of three hundred pages, Magocsi’s book is remarkably error-free. I have my doubts about the positioning of Nikolai Gogol’s portrait in the section on ethnic Russians; it would probably be in its rightful place in the section on ethnic Ukrainians somewhere before the images of Taras Shevchenko and Lesia Ukrainka. Neither Pavel Postyshev nor Stanislav Kosior appears with Stalin on photo 38.9 as stated in the caption. I hope that in the next edition of this valuable text Magocsi will include a separate chapter on the 2004 Orange Revolution, possibly accompanied by a map of territorial voting patterns in that controversial presidential election. As it stands now, the Soviet collapse and the history of independent Ukraine are covered in a single chapter, and the Orange Revolution – the event which greatly increased interest in Ukraine among Western readers – gets only two short concluding paragraphs.

The author, his cartographers and research assistants, and the staff at the University of Toronto Press all deserve credit for producing a very handsome volume that will surely be popular as a gift among Ukrainian Canadians.