Whither pogromshchina – historiographical synthesis or deconstruction? 1

This historiographical discussion piece on the implication of Simon Petliura and the Directory in the pogroms during the ill‐fated struggle for Ukrainian independence between 1917 and 1920 focuses on four core issues. Firstly, it suggests that those committed to the current Ukrainian nation‐building agenda face a crucial paradox: for the Directory’s endeavours to qualify as a precedent in nation building, one has to talk up its ability to influence the developments in the territory under its control. Yet to get Petliura and the Directory off the hook as far as the pogroms are concerned, one has to talk down their ability to influence those same developments. Secondly, it fundamentally questions the juxtaposition of “Ukrainian” and “Jewish” approaches on which Henry Abramson’s claim to have achieved a new synthesis between these two positions hinges. Thirdly, it demonstrates just how crucial conceptual transparency is for any useful debate on the significance of antisemitism in this context. Finally, it revisits the contention that it is a priori implausible to hold Petliura and his colleagues responsible because their attitudes towards Jews were generally positive as demonstrated not least by their commitment to Jewish autonomy rights.     

Internal Migration and Crime in the Soviet Union

This paper analyses the changes in ethnic self-identification of the population of Ukraine from the last (January 1989) Soviet census to the first (December 2001) Ukrainian census. It begins with a comparison of the census data and describes the remarkable changes observed. Given the incomplete nature of published data on international migrations and their differentiation by ethnic groups in the inter-census period, the paper applies a method to fill in the gaps and calculate net migration balances for each ethnic group. Also, since no data is available on the net reproductive rates for separate ethnic groups in Ukraine, it sets out a method to estimate net reproduction rates for Ukrainians and Russians in the inter-census period. Using these methods, it establishes that differences in net migration on the one hand and the differences in net reproduction on the other contributed 11.1 and 4.4 percent of the growth in the share of Ukrainians and 6.8 and 5.2 percent in the sizeable decline in the share of Russians. The remaining lion’s share is a shift in identity among members of ethnically mixed (mainly Russian-Ukrainian) families. Mothers of ethnically mixed families, identifying the ethnicity of their newly born, contributed 11.4 percent to the Ukrainian gain and 9.2 percent to the Russian loss. The remaining 73.1 percent of the Ukrainian gain and 78.8 percent of Russian loss resulted from lifetime identity shift from Russian to Ukrainian, the most likely candidates being members of Russian-Ukrainian families.     

Bridges to the past: a Lemko family history explored through letters. An ethnographic case study

The paper is a case study of one Lemko (Ukrainian) family whose members experienced emigration to Canada, ethnic discrimination, war, ethnic cleansing, dispersals, and assimilation. It is based on the analysis of almost 80 letters that were sent to Canada from Poland and the Soviet Union between 1945 and 1975. The author presents the impact of great historical events on the lives of the members of one family. She explains the content of the letters with reference to the wider cultural and historical context, and the narrative told by the owner of the letters, the son of the addressees, a Lemko of Ukrainian identity born in Canada. The analysis reveals the problematic role of family letters in the evolution of family relationships in circumstances where the correspondents live in mutually “untranslatable” realities. This is territory for the cultural anthropologist, whose work it is to translate cultures. In this case, the anthropologist tries to translate distant cultural and historical contexts for the use of the letters’ owner.     

A Change of Heart: Iurii Klen’s “Adventures of the Archangel Raphael”

Iurii Klen, one of the leading Ukrainian writers of the thirties and forties, produced perhaps his best short story “Pryhody Arkhanhela Rafaila” [Adventures of the Archangel Raphael, 1948] in the last year of his life. This article is an analysis in the light of a discourse within modernism concerning tradition, and argues that it is a key to understanding the writer’s evolution. Although Klen rejected the militant Bolshevik avant-garde, during his years in Germany he was seduced for a time by fascist avantgarde attitudes and adapted them to a nationalist modernism before breaking with this current in the forties. Klen’s story demonstrates a rejection of the radical social and cultural experimentation of Bolshevism and Stalin’s rule. In its respect for the human values of the European heritage, it can also be read as a rejection of Nazism.     

Nikolai Gogol'’s Self-Fashioning in the 1830s: The Postcolonial Perspective

This study examines Gogol'’s complex self-fashioning during the time of the creation and reception of his Ukrainian tales Vechera na khutore bliz Dikan'ki [Evenings on a Farm near Dikan'ka] (1831–1832) in light of the postcolonial concept of mimicry. Gogol'’s self-fashioning is studied through his submission to the symbolic power responsible for branding him as the Other in imperial Russian culture, as well as through his deliberate strategy of mimicry. Not only did Gogol'’s marginal social status and his Ukrainian ethnicity create a social hierarchy responsible for fashioning him as “an outsider within” imperial culture, Gogol' himself engaged in the colonial mimicry, trying to reverse the colonial gaze that imagined him as a “sly” Ukrainian. Challenging the accepted view of Gogol' as one who internalized the colonial stereotype of a “sly” Ukrainian, this study treats Gogol'’s identity as strategic, positional, and ambivalent. The first part of the study focuses on the manipulation of stereotypes of the Other within the Russian nationalist imagination in the early 1830s; the second part examines Gogol'’s ambivalent visual self-representation and social performance that simultaneously mimicked and menaced the colonial authority.     

Anti-Jewish disturbances in the North-Western provinces in the early 1880s

This article is devoted to a single wave of anti-Jewish violence in Lithuania which spread through northern Lithuania during the first half of the summer of 1900. It claims that specific incidents that took place during the first half of 1900 at Konstantinovo (news of an allegedly kidnapped girl, the so-called Jewish “procession” and a domestic dispute between Jews and the priest's workmen) were among the most important reasons for the pogroms. At the same time, it is clear that there were some more general (structural) changes in this society which facilitated the occurrence of violence (changes in the economy, growing Lithuanian nationalism, antisemitic tendencies, and pogroms in the south of the Romanov empire in the early 1880s, because they established the idea that violence against Jews was somehow legitimate). Peasants in the Panev??ys and ?iauliai districts took up violence against Jews because, as they understood it, an offence had been committed which no one else (especially the authorities) would put right and so Jews would go unpunished. Uncontrolled rumours ruled the mobs. Since Catholic peasant religious sentiments had been affected the most, it was common religious identity that drew people into a temporary community of action. When Jews were beaten in public spaces, the doors and windows of their houses smashed, the Jews were not only being punished for their alleged offences, but being shown the clearly delineated boundaries within the local social hierarchy. In public life, Jews were supposed to submit to the monopoly of power enjoyed by the Catholic community. Thus, this wave of anti-Jewish violence essentially differs from the deadly pogroms that took place in the early twentieth century in other gubernias of the Jewish Pale of Settlement.     

Internally Displaced Persons in Pursuit for Access to Justice: Ukraine

The article focuses on Eastern European region and, specifically, access to justice for the internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Ukraine, who currently form ninth largest group of such forced migrants in the world. It explains the roots and causes of the Ukrainian internal displacement; institutional and legal framework, Ukrainian IDPs operate in; their internal structure, needs and vulnerabilities. Examining access to justice, its dimensions and key components in universal and regional context, it then applies this framework to Ukrainian IDPs’ situation. Facing challenges starting from legal recognition of their IDP status to discrimination in social‐economic sphere, having a limited right to vote and no legal responsibility for violation of their specific rights and freedoms, Ukrainian IDPs have no other recourse but to pursue justice in the national courts. However, justice as result is not often achievable due to a barrier, which arguably, as a matter of policy, has been overlooked.     

Elite women in the Ukrainian Hetmanate

The history of the Ukrainian Hetmanate has been studied from the perspective of war, political struggle, and diplomacy. This article studies various aspects of women’s lives in Cossack society: their legal status, economic rights, role in society, relations with husbands and sons, the tradition of women’s presence at formal receptions, and their interference in political life. It is also about “women in politics,” “witches,” sex and premarital relations, kidnappings, and love affairs. The general argument is that the position of Ukrainian women was closer to that of women in Catholic Poland than in Muscovy.     

The Language of the Presidential Election Campaign in Ukraine

The objective of the article is to trace and analyze Ukrainian language use in the recent presidential election campaign, paying particular attention to lexical innovations, neologisms, and satirical allusions. These changes are presented as the continuation of a steady process of democratization or liberalization of the Ukrainian language, a phenomenon some researchers previously attributed only to Russian. The language practices of the "Kuchma-Yanukovych regime" is presented and analyzed. The view of Yushchenko by his supporters as the narodnyi kandydat/prezydent (the people’s candidate/President) finds its antipode in political neologisms coined by Yanukovych’s camp (e.g., nashysty/nashysts’kyi), which were designed to attribute fascist tendencies to Yushchenko’s bloc, Nasha Ukraina ’Our Ukraine’. The egg farce during the campaign showed the vulnerability of Yanukovych’s camp to satire.     

Pamvo Berynda’s Verses on the Nativity of Christ: Between Western Education and Byzantine Hymnography

The Verses on the Nativity of Christ written by Pamvo Berynda in 1616 bear witness to the first trace of an oral performance in Ruthenian by school children. The work is embedded in the author’s specific interest in terminology, but also exemplifies the educational orientation taken by civil and ecclesiastical Orthodox Ukrainian authorities in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This collection of poems, written for the Christmas week, responds to the music and the hymns of the liturgy. As such, these verses also echo a Byzantine culture that Ukrainian Orthodox scholars tentatively hoped to revive. The present analysis seeks to uncover the influence of the Byzantine element in Berynda’s Christmas poems and illustrates both the success and failure of attempts to revive the Byzantine roots of seventeenth-century Orthodox Ukraine.     

Image Myths in the 2004 Ukrainian Presidential Election Campaign

This paper discusses the phenomenon of inculcating myths into the electorate’s consciousness and analyzes the 2004 presidential campaign in Ukraine in order to conclude whether the classification of electoral myths proposed by American political scientists D. Nimmo and J. Combs, and broadened by K. S. Jonson-Cartee and G. A. Copeland, can be applied for studying political mythology in post-Soviet countries. The analysis of television political advertisements on the main state Ukrainian channel, which were broadcast during free TV time provided by the Central Election Commission, makes it possible to conclude that some of the myths described by American scientists were used in Ukraine in their original version, others were adapted to Ukrainian realities, and only elements of some were found in candidates’ ads. Close study of TV political commercials shows that some of the candidates (mainly representatives of financial-industrial and business circles) based their campaigns on a single myth, while the majority preferred to influence voters using a “myth mosaic.”     

On the Ukrainian Cinematic Tradition,the Dovzhenko Film Studio,and Ivan Mykolaichuk

Abstract

This article discusses the Ukrainian cinematic tradition as established by Oleksandr Dovzhenko in the 1920s and 1930s and revived at the Kyiv Film Studio during the short-lived renaissance of Ukrainian cinema between 1964 and 1972. The author focuses on the three figures that led national cinema out of its provincial dead end: the film directors Volodymyr Denysenko and Sergei Paradzhanov, and the actor Ivan Mykolaichuk. The author discusses their films Son [The Dream, 1964] and Tini zabutykh predkiv [Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, 1964] as best representing the turn from theatrical adaptations of literary classics to their creative cinematic rethinking. Mykolaichuk’s acting style matched this new trend perfectly because he was a carrier of the folk tradition that the two directors were seeking to harness for new ways of artistic expression.     

A visibility analysis of the scientific production of Ukrainian economists: 1969-94

Despite the prestigious contributions of Ukrainian economists in the past, most particularly with Mikhaı̈l Tuhan-Baranovsky and even more so with Eugen Slutsky, there is no single indication of the scientific production of contemporary economists either in Ukraine or in the Diaspora. This study attempts to fill that gap by using the 1969-3/1995 EconLit data-base to establish the visibility of all identified economists with Ukrainian descent active in academic, governmental or private areas. The members of the Editorial Board and the Advisory Board of the Ukrainian Economic Review were also examined in order to provide reference to a benchmark group. The method of analysis applied the usual norms of measurement, taking into account the co-authorship factor to adjust for effective productivity in refereed journals.     

Filming a Stalinist War Epic in Ukraine: Ihor Savchenko’s The Third Strike

Abstract

The article examines the production history of Ihor Savchenko’s film Tretii udar [The Third Strike, 1948], a World War II epic and the most significant project of the Kyiv Film Studio in the first post-war years. Using the example of The Third Strike, the author demonstrates how Stalinist cinema as an institution influenced Soviet film directors’ thematic and ideological choices as well as their style. Specifically, the supervision of such projects by the USSR’s political centre served to integrate Ukrainian film makers into Soviet cinema by fostering Soviet versions of the country’s political and social history and by preventing Ukrainian film makers from pursuing stylistic practices that might have become foundational to Ukrainian cinema. Filming a Stalinist war epic in postwar Ukraine was especially difficult in view of the Soviet struggle against Ukrainian nationalism. By featuring soldiers of different nationalities, The Third Strike underscored the idea of the “fraternal friendship of the Soviet peoples” during the war, which became a canonical element in Soviet depictions of the war. In this way, Ukrainian artists ingratiated themselves with the Soviet authorities and proved their loyalty to Russia.     

Soviet Negotiating Behavior: A Research Design

This article discusses the Valuev circular of 1863 that placed limits on Ukrainian-language publications in the Russian Empire. It is based on extensive archival materials from RGIA in St. Petersburg. The main focus is on Petr Valuev’s intentions and the actual impact the circular had on Ukrainian publishing. Apart from the fear of Polish and Ukrainian subversion, Valuev was motivated by a long-term desire to spread the use of Russian—at least among some minority nationalities of the empire. The officially ‘provisional’ nature of the circular was Valuev’s tactic to appease the significant opposition that he anticipated within government circles against the restrictions. In actual fact, the minister intended his circular to retain its force for a long period of time. Up to the time of the Ems decree of 1876, the central bodies of censorship considered the circular binding. However, many works that violated the circular were indeed permitted and published (especially in the years 1874–1876). This is explained mainly by the corruption of one censor in Kyiv who permitted most of these publications and was ultimately dismissed.     

Gender equality in ‘the most equal country in the world'? Money and marriage in Sweden1

This article analyses how Swedish couples perceive the sharing of money and consumption between themselves and their partner. Interviews were conducted with ten Swedish married couples. Each spouse was interviewed separately about their incomes, financial organization, patterns of consumption, views about money and decision-making. Regardless of whether they pooled their incomes or kept money separately, all were in agreement about the importance of equal sharing and access to money and consumption. Despite stated goals of gender equality, however, consumption was not perceived as being shared equally. Two factors central to understanding this were the ways that daily finances were managed and the fact that women had responsibility for the daily finances of the family. Another important aspect was the ways that items of consumption were defined. Food and children's clothes were areas that were in a ‘grey zone’ regarding which money was used to pay for them, and they often fell to the woman. This practical responsibility and associated awareness of the family economy serve as obstacles to women's sense of entitlement and access to money for personal discretionary spending, a problem not experienced by men.     

Family Financial Management and Individual Deprivation

A core assumption in conventional poverty measurement is that household members share equally in total household income. This paper focuses on heterosexual couple households and asks to what extent male and female partners may derive different benefits from total couple resources. Drawing on the 2010 Irish Survey on Income and Living Conditions module, we examined the couple financial regime, by which we mean which partners received income, whether the income was from work, the extent to which income was contributed for the benefit of other household members and responsibility for decision-making. We explored whether the couple’s financial regime was associated with different living standard outcomes for the partners. Among the findings was the beneficial impact of having income from work and of shared responsibility for decision-making. The paper concludes by pointing to some implications for our understanding of power and bargaining in couples.     

Records on Nationalist and Opposition Movements in Late Imperial Russia: The Police Fonds of the State Archives of the Russian Federation

This article examines collectivization as a crucial aspect of the Soviet state’s ambitious effort to “Sovietize” its postwar western borderlands. Given the enormity of this task, the state leaned heavily on local agitators to convince residents to join the farms, and to manage the farms and their workforce. This put heavy responsibility on local activists to get results, but it also gave them power. This article provides a microhistory of these dynamics in the Transcarpathian village of Bila Tserkva. Faced with a failing collective farm and increased state scrutiny in 1949, village activists blamed the local Jehovah’s Witness community for allegedly subverting a successful collectivization effort. In reality, religion provided convenient scapegoats for villagers and the state to disguise a broader indifference and animosity to Sovietization. This case study demonstrates that state control of its borderlands was limited and dependent upon locals for information and the projection of power.