Table Of ContentThe Frontline
Ukrainian Research Institute
Harvard University
Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies 81
HURI Editorial Board
Michael S. Flier
George G. Grabowicz
Oleh Kotsyuba, Manager of Publications
Serhii Plokhy, Chairman
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Serhii Plokhy
The FronTline
Essays on Ukraine’s Past and Present
Distributed by Harvard University Press
for the Ukrainian Research Institute
Harvard University
The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute was established in 1973 as an
integral part of Harvard University. It supports research associates and
visiting scholars who are engaged in projects concerned with all aspects
of Ukrainian studies. The Institute also works in close cooperation with
the Committee on Ukrainian Studies, which supervises and coordinates
the teaching of Ukrainian history, language, and literature at Harvard
University.
Publication of this book has been made possible by the generous sup-
port of publications in Ukrainian studies at Harvard University by the
following benefactors:
Vladimir Jurkowsky
Ilarion and Donna Kalynewych
Myroslav and Irene Koltunik
Peter and Emily Kulyk
Dr. Evhen Omelsky
Paul Sawka
You can support our work of publishing academic books and transla-
tions of Ukrainian literature and documents by making a tax-deductible
donation in any amount, or by including HURI in your estate planning.
To find out more, please visit https://huri.harvard.edu/give
© 2021 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the U.S. on acid-free paper
ISBN: 9780674268821 (hardcover),
ISBN: 9780674268845 (epub),
ISBN: 9780674268852 (PDF)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021939912
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021939912
Cover illustration: Kazimir Malevich, “Red Cavalry Riding” (1928–1932).
Collection of the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
Cover and book design by Mykola Leonovych, https://smalta.pro
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
A Note on Transliteration viii
Preface ix
1. Quo Vadis Ukrainian History? 1
I. COSSACK STOCK
2. Placing Ukraine on the Map of Europe 17
3. Russia and Ukraine: Did They Reunite in 1654? 37
4. Hadiach 1658: The Origins of a Myth 55
5. The Return of Ivan Mazepa 65
II. THE REd CEnTURy
6. How Russian Was the Russian Revolution? 87
7. Killing by Hunger 95
8. Mapping the Great Famine 105
9. The Call of Blood 131
10. The Battle for Eastern Europe 163
11. The American Dream 169
III. FAREWELL TO THE EMPIRE
12. The Soviet Collapse 181
13. Chornobyl 183
14. Truth in Our Times 191
15. The Empire Strikes Back 225
16. When Stalin Lost His Head 241
17. Goodbye Lenin! 257
IV. EUROPEAn HORIZOnS
18. The Russian Question 283
19. The Quest for Europe 299
20. The New Eastern Europe 325
21. Reimagining the Continent 335
Notes 349
Index 387
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to those who contributed most to the
appearance of this collection. Oleh Kotsyuba convinced me
to publish the book with my home institution, the Harvard
Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI). My colleagues on the
HURI Editorial Board, Michael S. Flier and George G. Grabo-
wicz, supported the idea and provided valuable advice on how to
improve the manuscript. Myroslav Yurkevich edited new chap-
ters and standardized the editorial aspects of those chapters that
were published previously. Kostyantyn Bondarenko prepared the
maps used in this volume. Oleh Kotsyuba, with the assistance
of Michelle Viise, guided the book through the editorial and
production process from start to finish. Finally, I am grateful to
the editors of the publications in which the texts included here
first appeared for granting permission to publish them in this
collection. I alone am responsible for any shortcomings, of which
I hope there are not too many.
vii
A Note on Transliteration
In the text of this collection, a modified Library of Congress
system is used to transliterate Ukrainian and other East Slavic
personal names and toponyms. This system omits the soft sign
ь й
( ) and, in masculine surnames, the final “ ” (thus, for example,
Hrushevsky, not Hrushevs´kyi). The exception to this is the trans-
literation of the name of the medieval princedom of Rus´ and of
personal names where the soft sign indicates the softness of a
consonant before a vowel, for which "i" is used (thus Khvyliovy
rather than Khvyl´ovy). Furthermore, well-known personal names
such as Yeltsin, Yushchenko, and Yanukovych appear in spellings
widely adopted in English-language texts, while the spelling of
several other names of living authors follows their own preference.
In bibliographic references, the full Library of Congress system
(ligatures omitted) is used. Toponyms are usually transliterated
from the language of the country in which the designated places
are currently located. As a rule, personal names are given in forms
characteristic of the cultural traditions to which the given person
belonged. The Julian calendar used by the Eastern Slavs until 1918
lagged behind the Gregorian calendar used in the Polish-Lithu-
anian Commonwealth and Western Europe (by ten days in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and by eleven days in the
eighteenth century).
Preface
In the fall of 2013 Ukraine made a dramatic entry into world
politics and news media with the events that became known as
the Euromaidan Revolution, or the Revolution of Dignity. Hun-
dreds of thousands of Ukrainians protested against the govern-
ment’s refusal to sign the long-p romised association agreement
with the European Union. The protests later turned against gov-
ernment corruption and police brutality, unleashed by the regime
on the peaceful demonstrations. The resulting popular uprising
in February 2014 saw the ouster of the authoritarian president
Viktor Yanukovych who fled to Russia.
Soon after, Ukraine found itself at the frontline of a series of
even more dramatic developments: illegal seizure of the Crimea
by Russia and the Kremlin-p rovoked, inspired, funded, armed,
and often manned war in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
On two occasions—in the summer of 2014 and in the winter of
2015—Russia sent its regular armed forces into battle in order to
assure the survival of the two puppet regimes it established in
the area. The war soon acquired the traits of a regional conflict
with global ramifications and with no end in sight. At stake was
the future of the global post-C old War order and the fate of
democracy in the post-S oviet space—the factors that motivated
the attention to the events in Ukraine worldwide.
The interest in Ukraine received a new boost in the sum-
mer of 2016 when Paul Manafort resigned from his position as
the chairman of Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign. Later
on, Manafort was found guilty and went to prison for a number
ix
Plokhy. The Frontline
of financial violations, including undisclosed payments received
from the ousted Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. In the
summer of 2019, Ukraine reemerged in the news because of Pres-
ident Trump’s attempts to coerce Ukraine’s new president, Volo-
dymyr Zelenskyi, into undermining Joe Biden—seen as the lead-
ing Democratic contender in the presidential race—by opening
a criminal investigation into his son, Hunter Biden, and his ac-
tivities in Ukraine. In exchange, war-t orn Ukraine would receive
the much- needed military assistance from the US—a temptation
that the young democracy successfully withstood. In December
2019, the claim that President Trump had abused his power in
dealing with Ukraine was confirmed and he was impeached by
the US Congress. As a result, in the course of 2020, Ukraine
remained at the center of a presidential campaign that propelled
Joe Biden to victory.
Throughout these events, I found myself obliged to answer
numerous questions about Ukraine from both journalists and the
general public. Although those questions were informed by the
contemporaneous developments, a great many of them probed
into the country’s history and culture to understand its present
and future. My colleague Mary Sarotte and I sought to answer
some questions about the recent history of American- Ukrainian
and Russo-U krainian relations in an article for the Foreign Affairs
while the impeachment hearings were still going on.
This collection of essays strives to answer the very same set
question by looking at key moments in Ukraine’s history and how
the country relates to its own history today. As many of the essays
show, history is central to Ukraine’s current war with Russia and
its relations with the West. As a genre, essay collections produce
new knowledge and understanding by the collocation of individ-
ual texts, which places them in dialogue and reveals connections
of which the author or the reader were not previously aware.
The heuristic potential of this collection became evident to me
in the process of selecting, revising, and editing the studies that
comprise this volume.
Most of the essays collected here were written and published
in the last decade, which witnessed enormous change in Ukraine
and Eastern Europe in general. During that period, Ukraine un-
derwent the Maidan protests, a radical change of government,
x
