Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there have been widespread calls to decolonize Russian history in the United States and elsewhere. Those on the side of decolonization argue that Russian history has tended to sideline Ukraine and legitimize a narrative that Putin also uses—that Kyiv is the origin of the Russian state. Those against decolonizing efforts have argued that there are plenty of Ukrainian scholars already and that Russian history has a different focus, that decolonization is a fad, and that the war does not or should not impact the writing of Russian history. This piece will focus on how Ukraine fits into and challenges the narrative of Russian history, but it should be noted that all the “post-Soviet” states have an impact on this larger issue.
The field of Russian history in the United States has tended to have a “colonization but” stance. This argues that Russian history is a history of colonization, but that it involved more non-Russians than other Western empires and integrated the peoples in it to a greater extent. This is based on an understanding of other empires that is not up to date with the latest literature. Instead, we should move to a “colonization and” framework that openly accepts that Russia was a colonizing power and so removes the aura of exceptionalism that Russia has been able to use to its advantage during the war.
I argue that the Russian emigres who founded the field of Russian history in the US rejected the tradition of Ukrainian historical writing established by Mykhailo Hrushevsky (1866–1934), whose work laid the foundation of modern Ukrainian historiography. Two of the most influential Russian emigres—Michael Karpovich (1888-1959) and George Vernadsky (1887–1973)—wrestled with Hrushevsky’s work in different ways that still influence the field of Russian history today. Karpovich rejected Hrushevsky’s work more or less outright, while Vernadsky tried to incorporate the latter’s scholarship into a larger Russian narrative arc. The former was influential immediately, from the 1940s, and the latter from the 1990s. The impact of both scholars was to reinforce the “colonization but” framework within Russian history in the US.
Russian and Ukrainian History in the United States: The Early Years
Both Karpovich and Vernadsky studied with the renowned Russian historian V. O. Kliuchevskii (1841–1911), who saw colonization as the main fact of Russian history and the Russian people as the primary agents of history on the Eurasian plain.[1] For Kliuchevsky, Russia was a nation that colonized itself; this ignored non-Russian colonized peoples while also claiming a higher moral ground for Russia compared to Western European colonial powers. Alexander Etkind notes that the historians who used this theory, including Kliuchevsky, “were not anti-imperialist thinkers” and that they merged “subject and object,” thus creating an “inverted, maybe even perverted, language that they reserved for talking about Russia and did not use when talking about other parts of the world.”[2] In other words, the language of these historians implied that Ukrainians were Russians, which paralleled attempts in the sphere of imperial policy to enforce this.
In the US, students of Kliuchevskii far outnumbered those of Hrushevsky, which meant that Ukrainian history was not widely taught. Kliuchevskii wrote in his published lectures of 1903–1904 that he had “cast a cursory glance at the fate of Southwestern Rus’” but that “we lost sight of it” to focus on the northeast. Kliuchevskii argued that he had to lose sight of Ukraine in order to “sail in the mainstream” of history and not deviate “into offshore currents.” For him, Russian history was threatened by the centrifugal currents of Ukrainian history.[3] In 1904, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, the leading Ukrainian historian and later the leader of a short-lived independent Ukraine, critiqued the “traditional grand narrative of Russian history” for adopting the dynastic paradigm, focusing on the state rather than the people, and claiming the Kyivan Rus’ heritage for Russia alone. This was mainly aimed at Kliuchevskii and shows that Ukrainian experts have long rejected Russian-state-centered narratives.[4]
In the United States, the disciples of Kliuchevskii outnumbered those of Hrushevsky, partly because the Soviets executed many of Hrushevsky’s students and followers in the early 1930s as part of what is called the Executed Renaissance of Ukrainian intellectuals. The cadre of Russian historians in the US, meanwhile, was almost entirely shaped by a student of Kliuchevskii, Michael Karpovich, who taught history at Harvard from 1937 to 1957. As historian N.G.O. Pereira put it in 2009, Karpovich “exercised the most profound influence upon the field of Russian studies in North America. His extraordinary cohort of graduate students included virtually all the historians who would dominate the discipline for the rest of the twentieth century and beyond.”[5] As a result, the history of the Russian Empire and the USSR was seen through a Russian lens in the US.
Karpovich’s contemporary, George Vernadsky, has had greater influence in the post-Soviet period. Vernadsky was committed to Eurasianism, which rejected Western liberalism and valorized the Mongol heritage of Russia. Although he had few intellectual heirs immediately after his death in 1972, Vernadsky has influenced approaches to the Russian Empire and Russian nationalism since the 1990s.[6] His Eurasian approach provided a way to engage with Ukrainian history through a multiethnic approach to the Russian Empire. This approach proved attractive to scholars as a way to incorporate more fully the Asian aspects of Russian history and to envision the larger region as having certain shared characteristics.
While Vernadsky was more sympathetic to Ukrainian history than the Karpovich school, he remained committed to Russia as the main actor in his historical narratives. Thus, for both Vernadsky and Kliuchevsky, Russia was synonymous with its empire and Russia remained the subject of the narrative, while Ukraine was merely part of the larger whole.
Russian and Ukrainian History in the United States: Recent Implications
The implications of this “sprinkle Ukraine and stir” approach were profound. Leading US historians presented Russia as a sort of organizing principle of the whole of the narrative for Russia and often for Eastern Europe. In 2021, US historian of the USSR Lewis Siegelbaum (1949-) considered why works on the Ukrainian and Russian history in the United States “made it so difficult for me to recognize my connection to that country [Ukraine].”[7] The first reason he gave was that Russia itself was the perpetual object of study, rather than the Soviet Union or its republics. Siegelbaum also identified the logical consequences of this approach, including that scholars learn only the Russian language, further perpetuating the study of Russia and making it more difficult to write wider Eastern European histories. While Siegelbaum’s essay pointed to the drawbacks of studying Russian history exclusively, it also perpetuated problematic ideas. Siegelbaum cites the important 1995 article “Does Ukraine Have a History?” by Mark von Hagen (1954–2019) as a justification for keeping an arm’s length from independent Ukraine; Siegelbaum (along with other scholars) read von Hagen as a critique of Ukrainian historiography, particularly that of the postwar Ukrainian diaspora, as nationalist.[8] This interpretation curiously assumes that Russian historiography is not nationalist by implying that Ukrainian historiography is uniquely problematic in bearing the stigma of nationalism. Moreover, it should be noted that this characterization does not accurately describe Ukrainian historiography today.
Like Siegelbaum, I and virtually all specialists have read von Hagen’s “Does Ukraine Have a History?”[9] In fact, it is the only work on Ukraine I remember reading as part of my graduate coursework. Von Hagen’s essay is complex and ambiguous, and scholars have drawn different interpretations of this article. His intent may have been to attract a wider range of scholars to the study of Ukraine, serving as a sort of Karpovich of his time (but for Ukraine) in creating a cadre of authors beyond the Ukrainian diaspora. Yet the article does seem to suggest that Ukrainian history was nationalist, at least in 1995, and in need of renovation from outside forces, while Russian history and historians remained a source of new theoretical approaches to Ukrainian history and apart from nationalism. Like Siegelbaum, I was unmoved by von Hagen’s argument that I should engage with Ukrainian history, as I had imbibed the hierarchies of the field (and understood its real-world implications). Like others, I was dissuaded from further engagement due to his framing of Ukrainian historiography as problematically nationalist.[10]
The Ukrainian historians I have spoken with see von Hagen’s article differently, and they appreciate his advocacy for Ukrainian history and particularly his willingness to learn the Ukrainian language. Von Hagen’s article, despite its ambiguities and criticisms, did attract American scholars to the field of Ukrainian history.[11] Perhaps the point is that Russianists and Ukrainianists see things differently because the training is still quite different.
When thinking about Russian specialists whose work I admire, I find that von Hagen’s life and work, taken as a whole, is probably the most significant. His later work on federalism resonates with my work on the history of Russian regionalism, particularly in Siberia and the Russian North, which were influenced by Ukrainian federalist and regionalist thinkers.[12] In addition, von Hagen as a person was known for his dedication to Ukraine; he served as a bridge between Russian and Ukrainian scholars and enriched both. Even so, his work was uneven when it comes to Ukraine.
Toward Decolonization
Decolonization is a difficult task. Some Russian history narratives have ignored Ukraine, while others have incorporated it in good faith but in ways that later turned out to be problematic. It is now clear, in light of the current war in Ukraine, that anything less than the full historiographical legitimacy of Ukraine is unacceptable.
On a practical level, a first step would be to find an institution with the funding to convene historians who work on all the countries of the former Soviet Union in order to come up with a reading list and suggested lines of new research. If this could be put on a website that could become a central hub for these discussions, it would be very helpful. One of the difficulties in this work is simply keeping up with materials on decolonization, which tend to appear and disappear on social media. Perhaps ASEEES could provide space on their website for this, while H-Ukraine and H-Russia might be another means of dissemination. Ideally, such a process could be done separately for each discipline (history, political science, literature, music, art history, economics, anthropology and others), as trying to do the work for all of them at once may be overly ambitious for one organization.
The struggle to create a narrative that includes a recognition of Russia as colonizer is key to the process of decolonizing Russian history. Many Russian historians, influenced by Kliuchevskii, have had a “colonization but” argument. That is to say, Russian history involved colonization but it was not the same kind of colonization that the UK, France, the Netherlands, and others undertook. I admit to writing similar works myself. The task is to move to a “colonization and” stance. Yes, it was colonization and we should listen to the histories of those people who have been and are struggling with it. Yes, Russian engaged in colonization and that fact needs to be centered in whatever new histories of Russia emerge in this dark time. Yes, it was colonization and we have the ability to write histories that confront power with truth.
Featured image: Vasily Surikov, “The Conquest of Siberia by Ermak.” Public domain. Available at Wikimedia Commons.
Notes
[1] Mark Bassin, “Geographies of Imperial Destiny,” in Dominic Lieven, ed. The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 2: Imperial Russia, 1689-1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 59-60. For more details on Kliuchevskii and Karpovich, see my blog for H-Russia, titled “How the Field was Colonized: Russian History’s Ukrainian Blind Spot.”
[2] Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 71, 70.
[3] Quoted in Serhii Plokhy, Unmaking Imperial Russia: Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the Writing of Ukrainian History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 102.
[4] Plokhy, Unmaking Imperial Russia.
[5] N.G.O. Pereira, “The Thought and Teachings of Michael Karpovich,” Russian History 36, no. 2 (2009): 254.
[6] Igor Torbakov, Rethinking the Nation: Imperial Collapse, Eurasianism, and George Vernadsky’s Historical Scholarship, Woodrow Wilson Center, Occasional Paper #302 (2008): 15.
[7] Lewis H. Siegelbaum, “Bumping Up Against Ukraine as a Historian of Russia,” Region 10, no. 1 (January 2021): 137.
[8] Siegelbaum, “Bumping Up Against Ukraine,” 138.
[9] Mark von Hagen, “Does Ukraine Have a History?” Slavic Review 54, no. 3 (Autumn 1995): 658-673. A stronger argument that Ukraine does indeed have a history can be found in: Omeljan Pritsak and John S. Reshetar, Jr., “The Ukraine and the Dialectics of Nation-Building,” Slavic Review 22, no. 2 (June 1963): 224-255.
[10] For a critique of von Hagen’s article and a discussion of postcolonial developments in Ukrainian historiography, see Serhy Yekelchyk, Writing the Nation: The Ukrainian Historical Profession in Independent Ukraine and the Diaspora (Stuttgart: ibidem Verlag, 2023).
[11] Serhii Plokhy, “Quo Vadis Ukrainian History,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 34, no. 1/4: 19.
[12] Mark von Hagen, “Federalisms and Pan-movements: Re-imagining Empire,” in Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700-1930, ed. Jane Burbank, Mark von Hagen, and Anatolyi Remnev (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 494-510. I wrote a blog for H-Russia that builds upon some of his ideas. Susan Smith-Peter, “Periodization as Decoloniation,” https://networks.h-net.org/node/10000/blog/decolonizing-russian-studies/12148542/periodization-decolonization.
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