Frank E. Sysyn

Martin Schulze Wessel

The book is a collection of scholarly essays about the interrelationships between religion and religious institutions, nations and nation building, and secularization. The book presents nine papers by eminent scholars from Ukraine, Austria, Canada, and the United States that examine a wide range of topics relating to the last four hundred years: religious culture and the role of clergy as agents of modernization; national identity and transnational religious phenomena; the relationship between sacred tongues and modern language formation; the interaction of secularizing trends with ritual and tradition; the interrelation of religious hierarchies and political movements; and popular belief in relation to religious dogma. The book focuses on Ukrainian territories, but attention is also drawn to Belarusian territories, inasmuch as the Ruthenian (i.e., Ukrainian and Belarusian) lands shared common religious and cultural institutions in the early modern period. The majority of the essays address Ukrainian or Eastern Christian religious formations, but other religious groups, such as Jews, are also discussed. In light of the modern-day globalization of Ukrainian religious groups and the rise of diasporas, some of the essays also cover Western Europe and the Americas. The original papers were delivered at an international conference, held in Munich in 2010, that was co-sponsored by Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (Munich); Charles University (Prague); the Ukrainian Free University (Munich); and the Peter Jacyk Centre for Ukrainian Historical Research at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta (Edmonton). Contributors: Kerstin S. Jobst, Burkhard Wöller, Michael Moser, Tobias Grill, Frank E. Sysyn, Liliana Hentosh, Oleh Pavlyshyn, Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak, Leonid Heretz.

Religion, Nation, and Secularization in Ukraine

Andrij Makuch

It was in the 1980s that the Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine became the subject of serious academic study. The publication of Robert Conquest's ground-breaking The Harvest of Sorrow in 1986 in particular focused attention on what has come to be known as the Holodomor. The pace of research accelerated in the wake of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, when archives that had been off limits became accessible. Issues that had once raised controversy such as whether the Ukrainian borders had been closed were resolved by documentary evidence. Careful demographic studies replaced intuitive estimates on population losses. In addition, the amount of survivor testimony expanded many times over. Yet many issues continue to be debated, such as the relation of the Holodomor to the general Soviet famine, intentionality, and the question of genocide. With this context in mind, the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (HREC) of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies partnered with several institutions to organize a conference examining what thirty years of scholarly work on the Famine has added to our understanding of Ukrainian history, Soviet history, communism, and genocide studies. The conference, held in September 2013 on the eightieth anniversary of the Holodomor, brought together specialists to discuss the impact in their fields of research and academic discourse on the Holodomor. This book contains the conference papers given by Norman Naimark, on genocide; Andrea Graziosi, on Soviet history; Françoise Thom, on Stalinism; Olga Andriewsky, on Ukrainian history; and Stanislav Kulchytsky, on communism. An introductory article by Frank Sysyn provides an overview of thirty years of research on the Holodomor. These papers first appeared in the journal East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, edited by Oleh Ilnytzkyj.

The Impact of Thirty Years of Ukrainian Famine Studies

Contextualizing the Holodomor

Serhii Plokhy

Religion and Nation in Modern Ukraine

Andrea Graziosi

Since the 1980s the study of genocide has exploded, both historically and geographically, to encompass earlier epochs, other continents, and new cases. The concept of genocide has proved its worth, but that expansion has also compounded the tensions between a rigid legal concept and the manifold realities researchers have discovered. The legal and political benefits that accompany genocide status have also reduced complex discussions of historical events to a simplistic binary – is it genocide or not? – a situation often influenced by powerful political pressures. Genocide addresses these tensions and tests the limits of the concept in cases ranging from the role of sexual violence during the Holocaust to state-induced mass starvation in Kazakh and Ukrainian history, while considering what the Armenian, Rwandan, and Burundi experiences reveal about the uses and pitfalls of reading history and conducting politics through the lens of genocide. Contributors examine the pressures that great powers have exerted in shaping the concept; the reaction Raphaël Lemkin, originator of the word “genocide,” had to the United Nations’ final resolution on the subject; France’s long-held choice not to use the concept of genocide in its courtrooms; the role of transformative social projects and use of genocide memory in politics; and the relation of genocide to mass violence targeting specific groups. Throughout, this comprehensive text offers innovative solutions to address the limitations of the genocide concept, while preserving its usefulness as an analytical framework.

The Power and Problems of a Concept

Genocide

Much of the analysis presented in the essays that make up this book deals with the responses of Ukraine's Eastern Christians to the challenge of the national idea. The book places the history and current status of Ukraine's Orthodox and Greek Catholic communities into the context of the modern Ukrainian national revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the resurgence of Ukrainian national consciousness in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Historian and National Awakener

Mykhailo Hrushevsky

Andrei S. Markovits

Throughout the nineteenth century the province of Galicia was noted for political conflicts and the cultural vibrancy of its three major national groups: Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews. This volume brings together for the first time eleven essays on various aspects of the last seventy-five years of Austrian Galicia's existence.

Frank E. Sysyn

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