John A. Armstrong's contribution to the study of nationalism and Ukrainian nationalism

Abstract

John A. Armstrong ([1955] 1963) published his first major study of nationalism using Ukraine as his case example. This was published at Columbia University where Russian and Soviet studies had been launched in 1946. These programmes would eventually become consolidated in 1982 in the Harriman Center. Armstrong’s ([1980] 1990)’s groundbreaking study of Ukrainian nationalism was republished on the eve of transformative changes in the Soviet Union and the triumph of Ukrainian nationalism through the creation of an independent Ukraine and the spread of Ukrainian nationalism to central Ukraine during the 2004 Orange Revolution (Kuzio 2010) and 2013–2014 Euromaidan and war with Russia. Armstrong’s study of Ukrainian nationalism was published only three years after the Ukrainian nationalist movement (Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists [OUN]) ended its underground partisan fight in Western Ukraine. The groundbreaking book was important for three reasons. Firstly, experts on the former USSR focused exclusively on Russia and were Kremlinologists; study of the non-Russian half of the Soviet population and Soviet nationality policies was a minority subject in Western European academia (US and Canada were always better) until the 1980s (Subtelny 1994). This was my experience studying in the mid-1980s for an MA in Soviet Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University Of London. Secondly, Armstrong’s work was a step into an under-researched scholarly area of Ukrainian history and politics. In the 1950s, American and Canadian academic centres on Ukraine did not exist, and Ukrainian diaspora scholars were not yet established in their professions; the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute was founded in 1973 and Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies in 1976. Further studies of Ukrainian nationalism would have to wait until Yaroslav Bilinsky (1964, 1983) and Alexander J. Motyl