Canadian Slavonic Papers

Culture, Nation and Identity: The Ukrainian-Russian Encounter, 1600—1945 by AndreasKappeler; Zenon E. Kohut; Frank E. Sysyn; Mark von HagenReview by: George O. LiberCanadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, Vol. 47, No. 1/2 (March-June2005), pp. 157-158Published by: Canadian Association of SlavistsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40870996 .

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Book Reviews 157

Andreas Rappeler, Zenon E. Kohut, Frank E. Sysyn, and Mark von Hagen, eds. Culture, Nation and identity: The Ukrainian-Russian Encounter, 1600-1945. Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2003. xiv, 381 pp. $39.95, cloth. $29.95, paper.

Based on four international conferences, sponsored by the Seminar for East European History at the University of Cologne, the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, and the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta, and held at the University of Cologne and at Columbia University in 1 994 and 1 995, this collection of essays builds on Ukraine and Russia in Their Historical Encounter, co-edited by Peter J. Potichnyj, Marc Raeff, Jaroslaw Pelenski, and Gleb N. Zekulin, and published by CIUS Press in 1 992. In organizing these conferences, the editors sought "to encourage scholars in traditional Russian studies to pose questions than to present ready-made answers" if they had not investigated issues dealing with culture, nation, and identity in the past and "to urge specialists in Ukrainian studies to shift their focus from the impact of Russia on Ukraine in order to consider the significance of Ukrainian issues for Russian identity, the tsarist empire, and the Soviet state" (pp. viii-ix).

As in the 1992 volume, historians constitute the overwhelming majority of contributors to this new symposium. In the current volume, Viktor M. Zhivov, David A. Frick, Zenon E. Kohut, Hans-Joachim Torke, Frank E. Sysyn discuss aspects of the early modern period; Paul Bushkovitch, Andreas Kappeier, Olga Andriewsky, George G. Grabowicz, Serhy Yekelchyk, Christine D. Worobec - the imperial period; and Dieter Pohl, Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj, Yuri Shapoval, Stanislav Kulchytsky, Mark von Hagen - the twentieth century. Marc Raeff provides the afterword to this collection of sixteen essays.

Inasmuch as the authors sought to "understand the construction, destruction, and reformulation of identities among Russians and Ukrainians of all social origins" (p. ix), they succeeded admirably. Each nuanced essay complements the others. But despite the high quality of each of these essays, the volume as a whole possesses a number of limitations. The editors and authors, for example, do not clearly define the terms "identity" or "encounter." In light of this book's chronological organization, it is unclear why Dieter Pohl's article on "Russians, Ukrainians and German Occupation Policy, 1941 - 1943" precedes other chapters in the section on the twentieth century. Although von Hagen provides an excellent, but short, summary of World War One in his overview of Ukraine in the first half of the last century, this collection remains incomplete without a thorough assessment of the Great War and of the revolutionary period, 1917-1 920, which accelerated the number of the Russian-Ukrainian "encounters" and forced Russians as well as Ukrainians to exchange their multiple identities for a single identity. This volume, moreover, might have enhanced its arguments by including maps, which would have visually represented the political changes Muscovy/Russia, the USSR, Ukraine and East Central Europe experienced over the past four centuries.

Despite these problems, this excellent collection of essays is a milestone in Ukrainian Studies as well as in Slavic Studies. Most importantly, it raises more questions than answers, especially about the field of Slavic Studies after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1 99 1 and after the emergence of its fifteen independent successor states on the Eurasian continent.

Notwithstanding the explosion of nationality studies and research on the non-Russian peoples in North America over the past two decades, many historians of Russia, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union have yet to incorporate these findings into their scholarship and teaching. One only needs to peruse the latest editions of textbooks on

Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. XLVII, Nos. 1-2, March-June 2005

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158 Book Reviews

Russian/Soviet history written by Nicholas Riasanovsky or David MacKenzie and Michael W. Curran to see how these authors have underplayed the importance of multiple loyalties and identities in multi-national states and how they have changed over the past centuries.

The dominant interpretation of "Russian" history as a unitary state with a static Russian national identity influenced the composition of this volume. More specialists in Ukrainian studies than in Russian studies and more North American scholars than German scholars accepted invitations to join this project. Inasmuch as the questions these conferences posed became politically charged in the 1990s, the organizers experienced problems "in finding colleagues from Russia willing to participate" in them (p. x). Despite these difficulties, this volume effectively challenges the prevailing way most scholars

imagine, research and teach "Russian" and East European history in North America. In light of their call for specialists on Ukraine to conduct their research in a new

comparative framework, might not the four co-editors of this volume consider the

possibility of co-authoring a textbook dealing with the Russian Empire and its development of multiple identities?

George O. Liber, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Vladimir Khanin. Documents on Ukrainian Jewish Identity and Emigration 1944-1990. The Cummings Center Series. London: Frank Cass, 2003. 350 pp. £75.00, cloth.

In Documents on Ukrainian Jewish Identity and Emigration 1944-1990, Vladimir Khanin provides an eloquent introduction to a little-known dimension of postwar Ukrainian Jewish

history, the intimate relationship between Ukrainian communists' Jewish policy and Ukrainian Jewish cultural and religious survival. This history has until recently been obscured by the inaccessibility of secret documents from the former Archive of the Communist Party of Ukraine Central Committee (CPU CC). Khanin brings together an

extraordinary collection of such documents, published for the first time within the present volume. The documents themselves, carefully translated from the Russian and Ukrainian and annotated with extensive footnotes, offer a fascinating read - whether for experts in the fields of Jewish, Ukrainian, and Soviet studies or for students new to the subject altogether - and serve as useful teaching materials. Moreover, Khanin' s smoothly written introduction firmly situates the documents within the political history of Soviet and Ukrainian Jewish policy and the social history of the Ukrainian Jewish national movement and struggle for emigration. As Khañin writes, "These documents shed new light on the distinct features of the Ukrainian communists' Jewish policy, as well as on Ukrainian Jewish life in general, including such questions as the evolution of Ukrainian Jewish

identity, the nature of Jewish emigration and the local Zionist movement" (p. 2). Following his introduction, Khanin organizes the documents into three chronological and conceptual periods: I. Assimilation, Resistance, Escape: Jewish Responses to the Holocaust and Postwar Anti-Semitism, 1944-1953; II. The Thaw and Jewish Life in Ukraine, 1953-1967; III. From the Six Day War to Perestroika, 1 967- 1 990. The documents in each section have

distinctive features, reflective of changes over time in Ukrainian Jewish policies, Ukrainian

Jewish responses, and the broader social, political, and international environment in which

the Ukrainian Communist Party and Ukrainian Jewry were operating. Khanin's introduction and the documents that follow expand our knowledge of several

important issues in the social life of Ukrainian Jewry. These issues include initial postwar

attempts in many towns and cities with surviving Jewish populations to revive Jewish

communal structures intended to address religious, cultural, economic, psychological and

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