Ivan L. Rudnytsky, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History, 1987.

Preface

At the time of his death, in April 1984, my father left uncompleted various projects upon which he had expended considerable labour. One of his most cherished hopes was to publish a collection of his English-language essays, complementing his earlier Ukrainian volume, Mizh istoriieiu i politykoiu (Between History and Politics [Munich 1973]). It is with a mixture of regret and satisfaction that I have assumed editorial responsibility for this book -- regret that he did not live to do it himself, and satisfaction at being able so tangibly to pay tribute to his memory.

As all who knew him will testify, my father was a man of cosmopolitan interests and prodigious (if always lightly held) erudition. From the ancient civilizations of China to contemporary American culture, nothing human was foreign to him, and he had likely read several books on the subject. But the breadth of his learning makes all the more remarkable the central fact of his scholarly career -- an exclusive concentration on problems of Ukrainian history, particularly of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Certainly, this dedication to matters Ukrainian did not make my father's academic advancement any easier, inasmuch as the very existence of Ukrainian history as an independent field of knowledge was not generally recognized by his American colleagues. Only with his arrival at the University of Alberta in 1971, and the founding of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies in 1976, did he find himself in a milieu truly congenial to his intellectual vocation.

It is not necessary for me to try to summarize the contents of the following essays, but a few observations may be in order. As a historian, my father had a healthy respect for the realm of the concrete, and he did not hesitate to decide an argument with an appeal to "empirical historical reality." At the same time, perhaps the deepest influence on his thought was as the philosophy of Hegel, as evidenced by his belief that "the historical process has a logic of its own which transcends the plans and wishes of the actors," his assertion that "freedom is possible only within the framework of a statist rule of law," his equation of historicity with an access of self-consciousness, and his recognition of the ineradicability of conflict in human affairs.

Within the Ukrainian tradition, my father had the highest admiration for the conservative political thinker, Viacheslav Lypynsky. He referred on a number of occasions to Lypynsky's demonstration of the pivotal role played by the nobility in the Khmelnytsky revolution of the seventeenth century in order to refute those populist historians who failed to appreciate the need for differentiation in the social structure. It is principally for his lack of a pluralistic vision that my father criticized Lypynsky's antipode, the radical theorist Mykhailo Drahomanov, whose greatness he nonetheless championed.

When essays spanning over thirty years and written for diverse occasions are assembled in a single volume, some degree of repetition is perhaps unavoidable. I hope, however, that such overlapping will be felt to be minimal, and that the effect will be rather that of a unifying intelligence trained over a wide range of interrelated topics. In the case of previously published as well as unpublished pieces, I have taken the liberty of making minor stylistic changes, always with a view to bringing out most clearly what my father intended to say. For their thematic richness, in addition to a series of programmatic essays, I would draw attention particularly to "The Fourth Universal and Its Ideological Antecedents," those on a group of nineteenth-century Ukrainophile Poles -- Terlecki, Czajkowski, and Duchihski -- and to those addressing the problem of Ukrainian-Jewish relations.

A historian, despite his devotion to study of the past, is inevitably also writing with an eye on present concerns, and in the final two essays of this book, my father turns his attention directly to Soviet Ukraine. The history of Ukraine, caught between "the Russian hammer and the Polish anvil," has been a tragic one, and the contemporary situation remains perilous. Yet Ukraine enjoys the recognition of at least nominal statehood within the Soviet Union, and the recent expressions of dissidence, in Ukraine as in Eastern Europe generally, show that the dream of independence refuses to die.

In the meantime, it is clear that activities in the West are closely followed on all sides in Ukraine, and there can be no more encouraging signs of the maturation of the emigre community than the establishment of centres for Ukrainian studies both at Harvard and the University of Alberta. By perpetuating the memory of Ukraine's past, my father sought to enhance the prospects of its future, so that the world might see, in Drahomanov's words, "one soulless corpse less, one living nation more."

Peter L. Rudnytsky
New York