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Let me start with a most recent development and then return to my report. After a prolonged discussion of the location for the Sixth International Congress of the IAUS and after seriously considering at least one alternative candidate, the board has settled on Donetsk for 2005. I have sent letters of firm interest to the rector of Donetsk State University, the governor of Donetsk oblast, and the Prime Minister. Moreover, I have informed the Deputy Premier for Humanities Questions, Dmytro Tabachnyk, of this decision and asked for his help in organizing the next meeting. This has resulted, for the time in the history of the Association, in the Ukrainian prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, issuing a decree pledging support for the 2005 congress one year in advance of the proceedings and ordering the Academy of Science and the Ministry of Education to assign funds from their budgets (847,550 hryvnias) for the congress. At past congresses, government funding was uncertain until the last minute, usually coming a week before the opening ceremonies.
The other candidate seriously considered as host city was Chernihiv, where we had enthusiastic local support in the pedagogical university, local archives and museums, and, of course, a rich heritage of Ukrainian history and culture as a backdrop for the congress; Chernihiv is also close to both Belarus and Russia and we hoped that this might afford more opportunities for our Ukrainian studies colleagues from those countries to attend in larger numbers. Unfortunately, however, Chernihiv’s capacity to accommodate a gathering the size of the regular IAUS congresses is very limited (200-250 hotel rooms). I met with the deputy governor for humanities affairs, who proposed that IAUS consider smaller, more focused symposia in Chernihiv to take advantage of her considerable charms.
Donetsk, on the other hand, has been a candidate since the Odesa congress at least, proposed then by IAUS founding member and Donetsk native Ivan Dziuba. The proposal gathered support since the Odesa meeting and we hope it will be crowned by success. Donetsk has a major international airport, more than adequate hotel and dining facilities, and a generally strong financial base by Ukrainian standards. It also has a strong local university, which I recently visited in June 2004 with IAUS Congress Organizing Committee members Frank Sysyn, Yaroslav Hrytsak, Marta Bohachevsky-Chomiak, and Oleksandr Petrovskyi. Unique aspects of Donetsk State University are its combination of scientific research and university teaching, something that is at odds with the way that education and science have been organized in the Soviet Union since at least the 1930s, and its Ukrainian-language lycee, a university school from grades one through high school, where students are also taught by university professors. Donetsk’s relatively modern history as a city and industrial region might shape new thematics for some of our congress meetings: history of science and technology, the role of cities in nation-building, the working class, socialism and Ukrainian history. Of course, the challenges posed by a Russophone adult majority stand out, but so too do the determined efforts to build a modern Ukrainian culture for the southeast of the country. We welcome ideas for innovative approaches to our next congress’ proceedings.
In accord with the wishes expressed by many participants in formal and informal resolutions addressed to the presidium and by the organizers of the Chernivtsi meeting itself, we can already look forward to some important changes in the next congress. (I also met while still in Chernivtsi with three of my predecessors as president and discussed general plans for the future: Academician Iaroslav Isaevych, Director of the Kripiakevych Institute in Lviv, Academician Mykola Zhulynsky, Director of the Taras Shevchenko Institute of Ukrainian Literature, and Professor George Grabowicz, Dmytro Czyzhevskyi Professor of Ukrainian Literature at Harvard University. Since then board members have been communicating by email.) First, we hope to convene the congress not at the end of August, but at the end of June-beginning of July. Second, we plan three full days of conference sessions, in addition to a rich cultural program and only half a day each of official opening and closing ceremonies. Third, we hope to use this website for organizing the congress and will elaborate a procedure for the submission of papers and panels for the next congress that we hope guarantees both unparalleled access to all qualified scholars, younger, senior, local and foreign, but also helps us to influence quality to some greater degree than in the past.
Following the Chernivtsi congress of IAUS, I returned to New York and Columbia University to begin a busy and exciting year of teaching, conference organizing, and travel. The Shevchenko Scientific Society graciously invited me to take part in a panel discussion about the Congress in Chernivtsi with Society President Laryssa Onyshkevych, Society Vice-President Anna Procyk, and American Association of Ukrainian Studies President Myroslava Znayenko. We were able to report to the Society members that despite the abbreviated schedule for meetings and some organizational confusion, the level of scholarly discussions, especially among young Ukrainian scholars, was at a very high level. Society members and leadership promised to work closely with me in taking advantage of this opportunity of having a president in New York based at a major research university to raise the profile of Ukrainian studies more broadly in the nation and world.
In a development certainly in line with my goal of raising that profile but somewhat separate from my presidency of IAUS, Columbia University, the Shevchenko Scientific Society and the Ukrainian Studies Fund in fall 2002 announced a major new fundraising initiative to support teaching in Ukrainian history and culture. The Ukrainian Studies Fund itself contributed the first gifts toward this endowment, which were supplemented soon by generous awards from the Self-Reliance (NY) Federal Credit Union. And the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the US (UVAN) also joined our efforts. I’m very pleased to be able, as president of IAUS, to point to some real growth in Ukrainian studies at my home university. I thank the Ukrainian Studies Fund and the Ukrainian community in the US for their generous support over the past two years.
In November 2002, dozens of North American and European Ukrainianists attended the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in Pittsburgh, a traditional center of Ukrainian community settlement. In a jointly sponsored meeting with our friends from the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and the American Association of Ukrainian Studies, I met with the hromada and local university community interested in Ukrainian affairs.
In January 2003, I made my first trip back to Ukraine since my election and visited Kyiv for several days. While there I met with Vice-President of the National Academy of Science of Ukraine, Ivan Kuras, again with George Grabowicz (whose stay overlapped with mine) and Mykola Zhulynsky. Among the topics discussed were the coming year’s events surrounding the Holodomor, including the parliamentary hearings during spring 2003. Several conferences were being planned, including one in New York in fall 2004 to coincide with the planned introduction by Ukraine of a resolution to the General Assembly on the famine of 1932-33, new archival publications and other activities. In one of my other (but related) capacities, I took part in negotiating a microfilm collection from the Central State Archive of Public Organizations (TsDAHO) for Primary Source Microfilms (PSM) that gathers 135 reels of material on the famine from that archive. And before leaving Ukraine for Moscow, Olga Virakhovskaya (of PSM) and I spent a day visiting the Vinnytsia oblast archive for possible future projects. In Moscow I spoke for the first time as president of IAUS at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Slavic Studies, section on East Slavic Cultures, headed by colleague and friend, Leonid Gorizontov. In addition to scholars from the Academy of Sciences, I met with colleagues from the University of Moscow, where Ukrainian language is being taught. Dr. Gorizontov announced the first issue of a Ukrainian and Belarusian Studies Yearbook as signs of revitalized interest in Ukraine in Russia. The nearly 25 scholars present shared their research interests and suggestions for developing further Ukrainian studies.
In March 2003, while attending a conference in honor of my academic advisor, Terence Emmons, I discussed Stanford University’s growing interest and commitment to Ukrainian studies with faculty there. In addition to the distinguished medieval historian Nancy Shields Kollmann, at least two other historians (Amir Weiner, who studied at Columbia University, and Steven Zipperstein, treat central aspects of Ukrainian history in their teaching and writing) and two political scientists, Michael McFaul and Coit Blacker (who work on democratization and foreign relations of Ukraine) round out considerable strength there. As one of my own alma maters, I can only wish Stanford the greatest of success as it builds a West Coast extension of our Ukrainian studies project.
In April Columbia University hosted the annual convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities, another organization that attracts large numbers of Ukrainian studies scholars from across the globe. For this reason, the AAUS also regularly schedules one of its two annual meetings during the convention. President Myroslava Znayenko, Professor of Slavic literatures at Rutgers University, chaired that meeting; at least one panel on Ukraine was included in the program for every time slot of the convention. Also in April I took part in the selection committee for the American Council of Learned Societies, which supports a new fellowship program for humanities scholars in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. (The funds for this new program come from the Carnegie Foundation, currently headed by Professor Vartan Gregorian.) Andrzej Tymowski, the ACLS program officer, has been very supportive of Ukrainian studies scholarship through this program. In May we made our difficult selections and planned a fall meeting in Minsk with past and current awardees.
In mid-May I visited one of our northern “Ukrainian” capitals, Edmonton, for a dissertation defense in the history department at the University of Alberta. Andriy Zayarniuk, a doctoral student of Professor John-Paul Himka, defended a brilliant and monumental study of nineteenth-century Sambir and Stary Sambir regions. That morning I presented my new research on Hetman Skoropadsky and had lunch and good talks with the extended family of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, including the President of the Canadian Association of Slavic Studies, Natalia Pylypiuk. Just before I arrived in Edmonton, the CIUS Press announced the appearance of a collection of essays, co-edited by Andreas Kappeler, Zenon Kohut, Frank Sysyn and myself, Culture, Nation and Identity: the Ukrainian-Russian Encounter, 1700-1945 (Toronto). This volume was the result of three scholarly conferences in Cologne, Germany, and New York and was financed by the National Endowment for the Humanities (USA) and the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation (Germany), as well as several other generous sponsors.
At the end of May I left for a three-week trip to Poland, Ukraine and Russia. I arrived in a Poland on the eve of its referendum for membership in the European Union after not visiting for nearly a dozen years. In Warsaw I met with Polish colleagues Professor Stepan Kozak, IAUS Vice-President and Chair of Ukrainian Literature at the University of Warsaw, with Professor Jan Malicki, Director of the East European Studies Center at the University, and Ola (Alexandra) Hnatiuk, Professor of Ukrainian Literature at the University of Warsaw. I spoke before nearly 30 faculty and students; Professor Kozak reported that the University currently has enrolled more than 190 students in Ukrainian studies! Also attending my talk was Ukrainian First Vice-President of IAUS Yaroslav Hrytsak, Director of the Institute of Historical Studies, Ivan Franko University of Lviv, who was visiting from Lviv for the week. Earlier that week Ola, Yaroslav and I attended a packed presentation for the Polish-language translation of Iuri Andrukhovych’s novel Perversions in the Center for Modern Art and had a chance to talk with the celebrated writer over beer after his reading and interview. Later in the week, I attended a presentation for an important new book by Ola Hnatiuk, Pozegnanie z imperium, at the Stefan Batory Institute. Among the commentators were Mykola Riabchuk, Kyiv-based cultural and political commentator, Yaroslav Hrytsak, and Professor Jerzy Akser, Director of the Center for Studies on the Classical Tradition in Poland and East Central Europe (OBTA) at the University. Professor Akser is a legendary figure in higher education and liberal studies reform and is very supportive of IAUS, as well as Ukrainian scholarship and scholars more generally.
Also in Warsaw, I met with the deputy director and general director of the Polish National Archive Service, the President of the National Library, and several other cultural institutions. The high level of interest and knowledge in Ukrainian matters was not only very instructive for me, but even very encouraging. Since one of the IAUS board’s aims has been to think about new ways of internationalizing the IAUS, we began discussion in Poland for the first IAUS-sponsored symposium outside of Ukraine, to be organized together with the Polish Association of Ukrainian Studies.
From Warsaw, I traveled to Lviv for a German-Ukrainian-sponsored conference on collective memory and World War II in East Central Europe, where I was joined again by Yaroslav Hrytsak, one of the conference hosts, but also by Andriy Zayarniuk, John-Paul Himka, Professor Roman Serbyn, University of Quebec at Montreal, Professor Serhiy Yekelchyk, University of Victoria, British Columbia, and other Canadian colleagues. The conference was held at the University of Lviv and over three days compared developments in Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia and Croatia. I also visited the Lviv Central State Historical Archive (TsDIAL) to examine their collections. From Lviv I moved to Kyiv, where the Donetsk decision was finally reached. Among other visits there, I met with Mykola Zhulynsky in the Institute of Literature (and Oleksandr Petrovs’kyi), Dr. Stanyslav Kulchytsky, Deputy Director of the Institute of History, and Dr. Heorhii Kasianov, Director of the Center for Contemporary History, at the Institute of History (where I delivered a lecture on post-Soviet historiography), and finally met for the first time the new President of the National Association of Ukrainian Studies (Ukraine), Professor Hanna Skrypnyk, Director of the Institute for Folklore and Ethnology and recently inducted (together with Tamara Hundorova) into the National Academy of Sciences. As always, I spent time with colleague and friend Hennady Boriak, who arranged my trip to Chernihiv. Primary Source Microfilms and the Central State Archive of Public Organizations signed a contract on the Holodomor collections, which will begin filming promptly. This will be the largest collection devoted to the tragic events of 1932-33 available anywhere outside Ukraine.
The primary focus of the Moscow trip was a large, international conference on the teaching of comparative history of empires, which was sponsored by the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Open Society Institute, and Central European University (CEU) and organized by Dr. Alexei Miller, a historian of Ukrainian-Russian relations and the history of Austria-Hungary and Eastern Europe at the CEU. In addition to my own participation, from the IAUS board were Yaroslav Hrytsak and Professor Andreas Kappeler, Director of the Institute on Eastern Europe at the University of Vienna. Drs. Hrytsak, Gorizontov and I were invited by Academician Alexander Chubarian, Director, Institute of World History, Russian Academy of Sciences, to discuss the promotion of Ukrainian studies in Moscow. Dr. Chubarian is a member of the Russian-Ukrainian historians’ commission that formed last year and promised to lend his support to the organization of a vigorous Russian national association of Ukrainian studies. A Russian organization is vital for the further development of Ukrainian studies and for promoting more informed discussions of Ukrainian history and Ukrainian-Russian relations in Russia itself.
Walter Duranty and the Pulitzer Prize Committee
In July I was contacted by The New York Times after the Pulitzer Prize Committee decided to take up the case of Walter Duranty’s 1932 prize for the second time in ten years. The Times wanted me to evaluate Duranty’s reporting from Moscow for 1931 (for which he received his 1932 prize) to help them in their deliberations and recommendations to the Pulitzer Committee. I wrote a report which concluded that Duranty’s reporting was a disservice to the readers of the newspaper and to the peoples of the Soviet Union and sent it to the editors. I learned later that the publisher and several editors convened a lengthy meeting, at which they decided to recommend to the Prize Committee not to revoke the prize because of the precedent it would set, because Duranty had been dead for so many years and could not defend himself, and because it evoked the Stalinist practice of air-brushing individuals out of history! In October I was contacted by a reporter from the New York Sun who had been “leaked” a copy of my report and wanted to discuss it with me. When he, for the first time, asked me whether I thought the prize ought to be revoked, I answered yes, and that response made it into a front-page story the next day. Before the day was out, I had been contacted by The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times itself and I quickly became an automatic media celebrity for the next several weeks. As many of you may know, in November the Pulitzer Prize Committee decided not to revoke the prize and cited several of the arguments made in the Times letter; the Committee did, however, apologize to the Ukrainian community for Duranty’s denial of the famine in 1933 and acknowledged that his reporting was not at the highest level (!)
On September 25, Professor Lisa Anderson, Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, presented His Excellency Anatolii Zlenko with the School’s Distinguished Statesman Award. Foreign Minister (and former Ambassador) Zlenko presented Columbia in turn with a copy of his memoirs, which are currently being translated into English. Minister Zlenko (who had just been succeeded by former Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States, Gryshchenko) was a frequent visitor to Columbia during his tenure as Ambassador to the United Nations in New York.
My Duranty report was very good preparation for our day-long International Conference on the Man-made Great Famine in Ukraine of 1932-33, which was part of the larger New York and international commemorations of the 70th anniversary. On November 10, the Ukrainian Studies Program at Columbia co-hosted a conference with the Shevchenko Scientific Society, the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Ukrainian Mission, and the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America. Speakers attended from Ukraine, Great Britain, and the United States to share new research and perspectives. Later that day, the United Nations opened an exhibit on the famine downtown and our conference goers reassembled there.
A week later the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies convened its annual meeting in Toronto, Canada, where we met with our Canadian-Ukrainian scholarly colleagues and numerous hromada members (and where I had several more interviews on the Duranty affair).
My first overseas trip of the new year 2004 was to Germany, another active community of Ukrainian studies. In Frankfurt/Oder at the new German-Polish Viadrina University, I gave a seminar for students on “what Ukrainian history has taught me” and met with the President of the University, Dr. Gesine Schwann, a specialist on Polish politics who has a keen interest in East European affairs, including Ukraine. The University hosts several students from Ukraine already in their programs and is anxious to expand their opportunities. Next I spoke at the Humboldt University in Berlin on my own research in Ukrainian history, and from there went to one of the oldest and most prestigious German universities, the University of Tuebingen, where I was hosted by Germany’s premier historian of Russia and Eastern Europe, Dietrich Beyrau.
After my very positive visit to Warsaw the previous year and on the heels of our famine conference, we began planning a conference on Polish-Ukrainian relations, which was convened March 26-27 with a host of our New York-based and Kyiv and Warsaw partners. The conference treated historical controversies and contemporary issues of state-state and society-society relations, especially in the area of non-governmental organizations. The following week Professor Frank Sysyn and I presented our Culture, Nation and Identity book before a Washington, DC audience at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center. (This was repeated at the Shevchenko Scientific Society May 1 before the New York community.) And two weeks later, April 15-17, Columbia hosted once again the annual convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities, with its numerous Ukraine-oriented panels.
As this report ought to indicate, my travels have been rich in meetings and plans. I look forward to meeting with more of you in other countries in future years, but, more importantly, am eager to receive your ideas about possible innovations in the IAUS.
Until then, I wish you a restful remainder of the summer and many creative thoughts and productive moments!
Yours sincerely,
Mark von Hagen
