Yekelchyk, Serhy The Conflict in Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know (review)

Abstract

SEER, 94, 4, October 2016 782 Yekelchyk, Serhy. The Conflict in Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2015. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xx + 186 pp. Map. Chronology. Notes. Further reading. Index.£10.99: $16.95 (paperback). The conflict in and over Ukraine continues in various forms, and therefore this book remains as timely and as useful as ever. It is designed to appeal to those with little prior knowledge of Ukraine, and it provides a wealth of information in an accessible but never condescending or over-simplified form. The book is short, but carries quite a punch. In keeping with the broader return to eighteenth-century mannerisms popular today, the form is almost epistolary, presented in the manner of questions that an intelligent observer would ask, and that an all-knowing respondent would answer. The format works remarkably well to convey a vast amount of material in a concise and intelligible manner. It does not allow for the development of a sophisticated argument or the complex unfolding of a problem, but it does by and large achieve its aim of providing much of ‘what everyone needs to know’ about the conflict in Ukraine. Yekelchyk is Professor of History and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria in Canada. He is an expert on modern Ukrainian history, and his deep knowledge about the country shines out of every page. He notes that he has family still living in Kiev, and he makes frequent research visits to the country. The organization of the material is quite brilliant, with the complex history of Ukraine from the earliest times presented in a masterfully compressed way. Information about the current crisis is also presented very effectively, but it is here that the problems begin. Although the tone is scholarly and the material presented with commendable academic detachment, ultimately the story is told as some sort of morality tale — the heroic struggle of the Ukrainian nation to achieve autonomous statehood and its rightful place in the world. This ‘nationalist’ account of Ukrainian development is comparable to struggles of other nations for autonomy and independence, and it is certainly a profound part of the Ukrainian national experience. Yekelchyk’s study is ‘monism’ at its best. I have argued elsewhere that the modern monist understanding of Ukraine is far from the integral nationalism of the interwar years (although it draws on that tradition), and is today both pluralistic and, at its best, tolerant and open to the broad civic development of Ukrainian statehood. However, Yekelchyk’s work also reveals the limits to this approach. First, there is the methodological question about the status of knowledge in a situation where the historical foundations of the nation are the subject of profoundly different interpretations. In other words, much of what is presented here as given ‘knowledge’ in fact requires far greater problematization. Even REVIEWS 783 Yekelchyk’s moving and informative description of the Holodomor, the famine of 1932–33, comes down unequivocally on the side of those who argue that it was a deliberate genocide of the Ukrainian nation by the Stalinist regime. The effect was certainly genocidal, but in the context of the murderous destruction of the so-called kulaks across the Soviet Union and the famine that affected the whole of the country’s south-west, genocidal intent remains a matter of historical controversy. Second, the international framework of Ukrainian national development is given remarkably little analysis. It is assumed that Ukraine has a ‘European’ destiny, even though the whole notion is deeply problematic and, ultimately, dangerously voluntaristic. Few would deny that Ukraine is a European state in which the development of closer ties with the European Union is natural and appropriate. But the question is how this is to be achieved. Here the larger strategic question comes in, which is not problematized at all in this book. The EU now comes as part of the ‘Atlantic’ package, including a reorientation ultimately to the institutional expression of the security element in the package, NATO membership. This may or may not be a good thing, but the record is clear that in Ukraine opinion was divided on the issue, and thus the ‘nationalist...