Iaroslav Kovalchuk, Lecturer in History, is a historian and political scientist specializing in Soviet history and the borderlands of Western Ukraine. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy from 2010 to 2016 and an interdisciplinary master’s in Nationalism Studies at Central European University. He went on to complete a doctorate in history at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. His dissertation, “Sovietizations of Western Ukraine: The Diverse Paths of the Communist Party in Galicia and Transcarpathia, 1944-53,” offers a comparative look at party elites across two distinct regions and their roles in driving Soviet transformations after the Second World War. When we spoke over zoom this July he was in his childhood home in Uzhhorod, Ukraine in Transcarpathia, “It’s the calmest part of Ukraine,” he said. “We’re actually the only region without a curfew.” The transcript below has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Harriman: Can you tell us about your background and how that shaped your career trajectory?
Kovalchuk: I was around ten when the Orange Revolution happened. My parents went to the protests, and I remember my mother coming home with things carrying political symbols. A few years ago I even found a warm winter hat from those protests. That was really the moment I became interested in politics. I started watching the evening news and following what was happening. This ignited my interest in politics.
And then, when the Maidan protests happened in 2013–14, I was studying in Kyiv and participated myself. I actually hid that from my mother once it became dangerous. I’d tell her I was safely in my dormitory when I was really on the square.
Harriman: You started in political science. How did you move toward history?
Kovalchuk: History was always part of politics in Ukraine. People constantly explained current events through history—relations with Russia, with Poland, even contemporary issues like gas disputes. I also realized that I like having historical distance from the things I study. When events are happening in the present, you’re too involved.
Harriman: Tell us about your research.
Kovalchuk: I study Soviet Ukraine from a regional perspective. I’m interested in the peculiarities of different regions, particularly my own, Transcarpathia. Ukraine has been shaped by different empires, so it’s difficult to tell a single, uniform history.
There’s a joke in Transcarpathia that you could travel through five or seven countries without ever leaving your home village because the borders changed so many times. That experience of shifting borders tells us something much broader—not only about Ukraine, but about Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Russia, and twentieth-century Europe.
Harriman: Did studying history change how you think about it?
Kovalchuk: Definitely. In school we often learn history in national terms. But there are regional histories, social histories, and other perspectives that don’t fit neatly into national categories. Once you start thinking that way, you realize your research can be relevant far beyond your own country.
Harriman: Tell us about the courses you’ll be teaching.
Kovalchuk: This fall I’ll teach an introductory course on modern Ukraine through the framework of borderlands. I want students to understand Ukraine not just as a territory contested by empires, but from the perspective of the people who lived there. We’ll cover the nineteenth century through the present, with significant attention to independent Ukraine after 1991 because I think that’s essential for understanding the current war.
In the spring I’ll teach Soviet Ukrainian history, my main specialization. It will include politics, but also culture—music, films, and other cultural materials—because I like explaining politics through culture. I’ll also teach a graduate seminar on major historiographical debates in Ukrainian history.
Harriman: How did the full-scale invasion change your work?
Kovalchuk: I had planned to do archival research in Moscow in 2022 for my dissertation. I was almost ready to apply for a grant when the invasion happened. So I lost access to the Russian central archives.
But more importantly, I stopped working on my dissertation for about a year. I volunteered helping people fleeing the war. Here at our house we could host ten or fifteen people at a time.
I also helped a close friend from graduate school who volunteered for the army. He called me his “mule” because I was constantly sending him books and supplies and storing his belongings. He was an anthropologist and kept reading while he was at the front.
Unfortunately, he was killed in 2023 Only after that first year, when volunteer networks had become more organized, did I return to my dissertation.
[Editor’s note: Kovalchuk was interviewed about his friend Evheny Osievsky by our faculty member Keith Gessen for the New Yorker].
Harriman: Is there anything you’d like readers to know?
Kovalchuk: I’d encourage students to take my courses. I hope they won’t only learn Ukrainian history, but also gain tools for thinking about borderlands, Central and Eastern Europe, and historical processes that are relevant in many other parts of the world.
