Ukraine’s History, Revisited

Ukraine in Focus

Taking Ukraine as a starting point gives us a new perspective on events and ideas that are commonly written about from the “center”: How does our understanding of the Cold War, to take just one example, change when we foreground Ukraine? The same holds in the opposite direction: just as stories that go beyond Ukraine are enriched by bringing Ukraine in, so is the history of Ukraine made more meaningful by breaking out of the national paradigm. A new “global history of Ukraine”, for example, points to the tight embeddedness of the lands of today’s Ukraine in global processes: colonialism, migration, mass violence, and the emergence of a language of human rights, to name just a few.

Cultivating a deeper, more complex understanding of Ukraine’s history – and recognizing the interconnections between it and – is essential if we are to make sense of Ukraine’s present and the role the past plays in today’s war.

Through its Ukraine in European Dialogue program, the IWM offers a platform to foster this understanding. We have hosted outstanding historians of Ukraine as visiting fellows, and conferences such as Revolutionary Ukraine: A Reflection on 1917 and Its Aftermath and Between Kyiv and Vienna: People, Ideas, and Objects in Circulation and Motion have brought together historians from across Europe and North America to reflect on new approaches and narratives.

This fall, IWM Permanent Fellow Timothy Snyder has launched a new lecture course at Yale University, The Making of Modern Ukraine. The lectures will be publicly available on YouTube.

Watch the course’s introductory lecture, “Ukrainian Questions Posed by Russian Invasion.”

 


The course syllabus can be found here.