Over the last four academic years, with each year consisting of two semesters, Columbia University has offered a larger and more diverse range of Ukraine-themed courses than probably any university outside of Ukraine. These courses have included offerings in Ukrainian language (courses in elementary, intermediate and advanced Ukrainian were offered in each of the eight semesters) and in history, political science, literature, cinema and sociology.
Some courses have been offered each year, such as the seminar on “Todays Ukraine: Power Politics and Diplomacy”; and the comparative literature course “Soviet, Post-Soviet, Colonial and Post-Colonial Cinema.” Other Slavic Department courses have included offerings ranging from “The Culture of Kyivan Rus’” to “Creating Identity in Contemporary Ukrainian Culture” to “Literature and Politics in Ukraine after 1991” and “Soviet Ukrainian Modernism: Revolutions, Rebirth and Experimentation.”
History courses have included offerings in “Revolutionary Ukraine, 1917-2017, History’s Flashpoints and Today’s Memory Wars”; “Ukraine in World War II”; “Ukraine and Empire”; “Ukrainian Nationalism and Its Mythmaking from Interwar to Postwar Years”; “Between Empire and Nations: Ukraine 1772-1917”; “War and Peace: Exploring Contemporary Ukraine”; and a seminar on “Ukraine in New York.” Other political science courses have included offerings such as a course on “Ukrainian Foreign Policy: Russia, Europe and the U.S.” and a course on “Politics and Society in Ukraine.”
How did it come to be that Columbia has been offering such a wealth of Ukraine-themed courses and seminars? The story is somewhat complicated, not always linear but certainly fascinating.
There is a history of non-Ukrainian faculty members at Columbia who developed an interest in Ukraine that goes back to the first half of the 20th Century. Prof. Clarence Manning was one of the founders and a long-time member (from 1917 to 1958) of the Slavic Department at Columbia University who not only had an interest in Ukrainian literature and history but, at a time when such subjects were almost unheard of in American higher education, wrote books about Ivan Franko, Ivan Mazepa, Ukrainian literature and 20th century Ukraine. He also became a member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society of the U.S. in New York and was one of the initiators of the first English-language “Ukraine – A Concise Encyclopedia,” a project that began in 1952.
Dr. Philip Mosely was a political scientist at Columbia University who in 1946 helped to create and was the director of the Russian Institute from 1951 to 1955, which was later renamed the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. He had developed an interest in Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s, and in 1934, during his travels in the Soviet Union, he visited Kyiv to try and meet with Mykhailo Hrushevsky. It was a meeting that never took place because Hrushevsky had been moved to Moscow.
After World War II, Dr. Mosely was not only the director of the institute, but he also had wide-ranging private foundation and government contacts that enabled him to find scholarships to support young Ukrainian scholars at Columbia University, such as George S.N. Luckyj and Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky.
In addition, he directed foundation money to support the creation and publication of the “Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the U.S.A.” (also known as UVAN), which allowed some of the Ukrainian intellectuals who had recently come from Europe, such as Volodymyr Miakowsky, Yuriy Lawrynenko and Hryhoriy Kostiuk, to obtain honoraria for articles and essays published in the “Annals,” thus helping them make a living in the new world. Dr. Mosely also became a member of UVAN.
Prof. George Shevelov, a post-war refugee and perhaps the greatest Ukrainian philologist and linguist of the Ukrainian language in the 20th century, was the first Ukrainian scholar to come to Columbia University’s Slavic Department. He came in 1954 and taught there until his retirement in 1977.
Prof. Shevelov was the author of over 600 articles and essays and was the author of monographs in English, Ukrainian and German, including “The Syntax of Modern Literary Ukrainian,” “A Historical Phonology of the Ukrainian Language” and “The Ukrainian Language in the First Half of the 20th Century.” One of his most important contributions consisted of his demonstrating how and why the Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian languages had developed separately.
Prof. Shevelov taught for a few years at Harvard University before coming to Columbia. Ihor Sevcenko was a Ukrainian scholar who moved in the opposite direction. He taught for eight years at Columbia before ultimately settling at Harvard for the remainder of his career. At Columbia, he taught courses in Byzantine and Slavic studies between 1957 and 1965.
Two influential Columbia professors who did not have any direct ties to Ukrainian studies but whose presence and teaching helped create a more hospitable intellectual atmosphere for the discussion of Ukraine or Ukrainian issues were two Polish-American political scientists, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Seweryn Bialer.
Mr. Bialer had been a member of the communist Polish government who defected to the West in 1956 and subsequently became a leading Sovietologist. Mr. Brzezinski needs no introduction. Both were very well acquainted with Eastern European history and politics.
The genesis of the current Ukrainian program that exists at Columbia University can be traced back to the late 1980s. At that time, the Harriman Institute’s Nationality and Siberian Studies program came to dedicate a significant amount of its resources to the non-Russian republics in general and to Ukraine in particular. A key individual in this project was Dr. Alexander J. Motyl, a political scientist who served as director of the program from 1988 to 1992. The program funded Ukrainian language and literature courses, invited Dr. James Mace, the leading specialist on the Holodomor at the time, as a visiting scholar, and sponsored many presentations on Ukrainian topics. These efforts led to the establishment of a permanent Ukrainian studies program at the university in 1993.
Prof. Motyl also played a second, although perhaps unexpectedly, important role in the history of Ukrainian studies at Columbia. At some point in the late 1980s, Prof. Motyl approached Prof. Mark von Hagen, a colleague at Columbia University who had up until then been a specialist in early Soviet military history, to do a presentation on the Ukrainian military of the same period.
Prof. von Hagen demurred, replying that he knew next to nothing about Ukraine, to which Prof. Motyl responded, “so why don’t you learn?” It is unclear what prompted Prof. von Hagen to take on Prof. Motyl’s challenge, but he did.
As the director of the Harriman Institute in the 1990s, Prof. von Hagen played a very helpful role in the further development and expansion of Ukrainian studies at Columbia. As a scholar, he learned Ukrainian so as to be able to utilize Ukrainian language sources, and he was the author of a number of important articles in North American scholarly journals about how to understand Ukrainian history and its further development. As someone who was unusually generous with his time, Prof. von Hagen later became the president of the International Association of Ukrainian Studies and the dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the Ukrainian Free University in Munich.
The activization of Ukrainian studies prompted members of the Ukrainian American Professionals and Businesspersons Association of New York and New Jersey to organize a fundraiser at Columbia University in 1994 at which the keynote speaker was Robert Conquest, the noted British Sovietologist and the author of the “Harvest of Sorrow,” his 1986 book on what he referred to as the 1932-1933 terror-famine in Ukraine.
This initiative, named Friends of Columbia University Ukrainian Studies or “FOCUUS I,” helped establish a number of medium-sized endowments to support Ukrainian studies, and in 2004 a follow-up fundraiser, FOCUUS II, was organized at Columbia at which alumnus Dr. Bohdan Vitvitsky delivered the keynote address.
The first major donation to the program was made by the Canadian philanthropist Petro Jacyk. Two Ukrainian institutions in New York City that provided important support included the Shevchenko Scientific Society of the U.S. and the Ukrainian Selfreliance Federal Credit Union. Over the last two and a half decades, the Ukrainian Studies Fund has been the major supporter of the Ukrainian studies program at Columbia University.
The Harriman Institute at Columbia University has for decades been the host of the annual world convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities, which usually takes place in May. This year, as each year, the convention drew scholars from dozens of different countries, including Ukraine, for three days of panel discussions and book panels to discuss recent monographs in the field. This year the convention hosted 35 Ukraine-themed panels, including seven book panels on recent books on Ukraine or Ukraine-related topics, such as U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine.
In addition to its history of Ukrainian studies, Columbia has been the elite American university at which a disproportionately large percentage of scholars who have either gone on to pursue Ukrainian-themed scholarship or who have published on Ukrainian topics and/or who have played leadership roles in the Ukrainian American or Ukrainian Canadian communities earned their doctoral degrees or did extensive graduate work. For example, Mr. Luckyj (Ph.D., comparative literature) went on to become a founding father of Ukrainian studies in Canada; Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky (history) is considered to have been in the 20th century one of the most influential writers about Ukrainian history in the world. Peter Potichnyj (Ph.D., political science) was the initiator and editor of “Litopis UPA.” Prof. Motyl’s (Ph.D., political science) role in the development of Ukrainian studies at Columbia University has already been described above. He is also a prolific writer, a public intellectual and an artist.
Scholars who earned doctoral degrees in Slavic studies include Myroslava Znayenko, who was a student of Prof. Shevelov and taught Ukrainian at Columbia in the 1990s; Michael Naydan, who is the long-time holder of the chair in Ukrainian literature at Pennsylvania State University; and Rory Finnin, who established the first Ukrainian studies program in Great Britain, at the University of Cambridge, which he now heads.
Other alumni who earned doctoral degrees at Columbia University and wrote on Ukrainian topics include the historians Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak, Miroslav Labunka, Oleh S. Fedyshyn, Anna Procyk, Yaroslaw Pelensky and George Liber. Two musicologists who earned doctoral degrees at Columbia University and who have written on Ukrainian topics are Adriana Helbig and Maria Sonevytsky. Bohdan Vitvitsky earned a doctoral degree in philosophy and has written on legal, historical and philosophical topics that relate to Ukraine. And an alumnus of the university who as a public intellectual has written extensively on Ukraine in the context of current affairs is Adrian Karatnycky.
The current strength of the Ukrainian studies program at Columbia is demonstrated by, for example, the extraordinary breadth of the course offerings described above, by the very extensive guest lecture program organized by the Lecturer and Administrator of the Ukrainian Studies Program Dr. Mark Andryczyk, and by the unique role of Ukrainian cinema cultural ambassador played by Dr. Yuri I. Shevchuk and his Columbia Ukrainian Film Club.
A recent writer in residence at Columbia has been Andriy Kurkov. Other guests have included Yuri Andrukhovych, Volodymyr Rafeyenko, Lyuba Yakimchuk, Ostap Slyvynsky, Yulia Musakovska and Olena Stiazhkina. These are the strengths. But the main weakness of the program lies in the absence of any endowed, tenured faculty dedicated to Ukrainian studies. Course offerings are currently taught by visiting professors, adjunct professors, lecturers and post-graduate fellows. As outstanding as many of these have been, none has the institutional influence needed to be able to provide strategic leadership, an internal authoritative voice in discussions or negotiations with university administration, and continuity in instruction and mentoring. That situation constitutes an important shortcoming in the program. Perhaps it will be possible – if persons and institutions that understand the need to strengthen and expand Ukrainian studies might step forward with support – to remedy that in the not-too-distant future.
Afterword: I have either participated in or been a witness to many of the events described above and have had a long and multifaceted relationship with Columbia University: as a student (M.A., Ph.D. and J.D.); as a fundraiser (co-chair of FOCUUS I and II); as an advisor (member of the Ukrainian Studies Advisory Committee); and as an outside supporter (president of the Ukrainian Studies Fund). The account of the very early years at Columbia University is based on the memoirs of George S.N. Luckyj and the diaries of Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky plus conversations with Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak, Anna Procyk and Myroslava Znayenko. Alexander Motyl and Frank Sysyn were kind enough to read a draft of this article and offer comments. Any factual errors and all opinions are mine alone.
READ