Introductory description

This module introduces students in the history of Ukraine and through this history in the history of its neighbours, in particular the history of Russia and Poland. It will introduce students also into theories of nation building and nationalism and emphasise the importance of symbols, history writing and culture for nation building.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Entangled or colonised? How to write a history of Ukraine?
Stories of origin: the Kyivan Rus
The ‘Mongol yoke’ and the rise of Muscovy
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
The fight for the ‘land of the Rus’
Becoming an empire: Russia’s long 18th century
Russia’s mission
Poland’s struggle
Ukraine’s self-discovery
Peasants into …: How the national message was spread
National boundaries and hybrid identities
The Great War: Hopes, aims, and expectations
The Russian and the Ukrainian Revolution
Nation building Soviet style
Poland and her minorities
Bloodlands I: Soviet rule
Bloodlands II: German rule
From Soviet to independent Ukraine
Trials, tribulations, and choices: Ukraine and her neighbours after the fall of the Soviet Union
The Russian war against Ukraine

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate a detailed knowledge of the history of Ukraine and its entanglement with Polish and Russian history, and the importance of cultural factors, shared memories and shared forgetting, common suffering and cultural artefacts in nation building .
• Communicate ideas and findings, adapting to a range of situations, audiences and degrees of complexity.
• Generate ideas through the analysis of a broad range of primary source material connected with the processes of nation building in Eastern Europe, including visual sources.
• Analyse and evaluate the contributions made by existing scholarship.
• Act with limited supervision and direction within defined guidelines, accepting responsibility for achieving deadlines.

Indicative reading list

• Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London, 2nd ed., 1991)
• Anisimov, Evgenii, The Reforms of Peter the Great: Progress Through Violence in Russia (London, 2015)
• Applebaum, Anne, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (London, 2017)
• Armstrong, John, Nations before Nationalism (Chapel Hill, NC, 1982)
• Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with late Imperial Russia (Berkeley, 2002)
• Black, J. L., Nicholas Karamzin and Russian Society in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in Russian Political and Historical Thought (Toronto, 1975)
• Brubaker, Rogers, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge, 1996)
• Chernev, Borislav, Twilight of Empire: The Brest-Litovsk Conference and the Remaking of East Central Europe, 1917-1918 (Toronto, 2017)
• Dabrowski, Patrice M., Commemorations and the Shaping of Modern Poland (Bloomington/Indianapolis, 2004),
• Davies, Norman, God’s Playground. A History of Poland, 2 volumes (New York, 2005 [1979])
• Davies, Norman, Heart of Europe. The Past in Poland’s Present (Oxford, 2001)
• Davies, Norman, White Eagle, Red Star: the Polish-Soviet War, 1919-20 (London 1972)
• Decolonization. Selected articles published in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. https://ui.org.ua/en/sectors-en/decolonization-selected-articles-published-in-the-aftermath-of-russias-invasion-of-ukraine/
• Eile, Stanislaw, Literature and Nationalism in Partitioned Poland, 1795-1918 (Houndmills, 2000)
• Eley, Geoff, ‘Remapping the Nation: War, Revolutionary Upheaval and State Formation in Eastern Europe, 1914-1923’, in Aster, H., and P.J. Potichny (eds) Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective (Edmonton, 1990), pp. 205-246
• Eley, Geoff, and Suny, Ronald G. (eds), Becoming National: A Reader (New York/Oxford, 1996)
• Figes, Orlando, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (London, 1996)
• Focusing on Galicia: Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians, 1772-1918, ed. by Yisrael Bartel and Antony Polonsky (Oxford, 2009)
• Franklin, Simon and Shepard, Jonathon, The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200 (London, 1996)
• Frost, Robert, The Northern Wars. War, State and Society in Northeastern Europe 1558–1721 (London, New York, 2000)
• Frost, Robert, The Oxford History of Poland-Lithuania: Volume 1: The Making of the Polish-Lithuanian Union, 1385-1569 (Oxford, 2015)
• Geary, Patrick J., The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, 2002).
• Gellner, Ernest, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1983)
• Hagen, Mark von, ‘Does Ukraine have a History?’ Slavic Review 54 (1995), pp. 658-673
• Hechter, Michael, Containing Nationalism (Oxford/New York, 2000)
• Hobsbawm Eric J., and Ranger, Terence (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983)
• Himka, John-Paul, ‘Construction of Nationality in Galician Rus’: Icarian Flights in Almost all Directions’, in Kennedy, Michael D., and Suny, Ronald G. (eds.), Intellectuals and the Articulation of the Nation (Ann Arbor, 1999), pp. 109-164
• Hosking, Geoffrey, Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917, (London, 1998)
• Hroch, Miroslav, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe (Cambridge, 1985)
• Hrytsak, Yaroslav, Ivan Franko and His Community (Cambridge, Mass., 2019)
• Hughes, Lindsey, Peter the Great and the West: New Perspectives (London, 2001)
• Isaievych, Iaroslav, ‘Ukrainian Studies – Exceptional or Merely Exemplary?’ Slavic Review 54 (1995), pp. 702-708
• Kappeler, Andreas, The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History, (Essex, 2001)
• Lieven, Dominic (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russia (Cambridge, 2006)
• Lieven, Dominic, Empire. The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (London, 2000)
• Lindheim, Ralph, and Luckyj, George S.N. (eds), Towards an Intellectual History of Ukraine (Toronto/ Buffalo/London, 1996)
• Lukowski, Jerzy and Hubert Zawadzki, A Concise History of Poland (Cambridge, 2019)
• Maes, Francis, A History of Russian Music: From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar (Berkeley, 2002)
• Magocsi, Robert, A History of Ukraine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996)
• Mick, Christoph, Lemberg, Lwów, L'viv, 1914-1947: Violence and Ethnicity in a Contested City (West Lafayette, 2015)
• Miller, Alexei, The Romanov Empire and Nationalism (Budapest, New York 2008)
• Murphy, A.B., The Russian Civil War: Primary Sources (London, 2000)
• Okey, Robin, Eastern Europe 1740 – 1980: Feudalism to Communism (London, 2nd edn., 1986)
• Perrie, Maureen, Ivan the Terrible (London, 2003)
• Plokhi, Serhii, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (Oxford, 2001)
• Plokhy, Serhii, Unmaking Imperial Russia: Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the Writing of Ukrainian History (Toronto, 2005).
• Plokhy, Serhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (London: Allen Lane, 2015)
• Plokhy, Serhii, The Russo-Ukrainian War (London, 2022)
• Pritsak, Omeljan, The Origin of Rusʹ (Cambridge, Mass., 1991)
• Raeff, Marc (ed.), Russian Intellectual History: An Anthology (New York, 1966)
• Sandler, Stephanie, Commemorating Pushkin: Russia’s Myth of a National Poet (Stanford, 2004)
• Saunders, David B., ‘Historians and Concepts of Nationality in Early Nineteenth-Century Russia’, The Slavonic and East European Review, 60 (1982), pp. 44-62.
• Smith, Anthony D., National Identity (Reno/Las Vegas/London, 1991).
• Smith, Anthony D., Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism (London/New York, 1998).
• Smith, Anthony D., The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford, 1986).
• Smith, S.A., The Russian Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2002)
• Snyder, Timothy, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (London, 2010)
• Snyder, Timothy, ‘The Causes of Ukrainian-Polish Ethnic Cleansing 1943’, Past and Present, 179 (2003), pp. 197-234
• Snyder, Timothy, The Reconstruction of Nations. Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (New Haven and London, 2003)
• Stefan Wiese, '"Spit Back with Bullets!" Emotions in Russia's Jewish Pogroms, 1881-1905', Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 39 (2013), pp. 472-501
• Subtelny, Orest, Ukraine: A History (Toronto, 1988) (4th edition: 2009)
• Taruskin, Richard, Defining Russia Musically (Princeton/Oxford, 1997)
• Todorowa, Maria, ‘Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Communist Legacy in Eastern Europe’, East European Politics and Societies, 7 (1993), pp. 135-54
• Todorowa, Maria, ‘The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality, and the Study of Eastern European Nationalism’, Slavic Review, 64 (2005), pp. 140-164
• Velychenko, Stephen, ’Nationalizing and Denationalizing the Past. Ukraine and Russia in Comparative Context‘, Ab Imperio, 1 (2007)
• Velychenko, Stephen, Shaping Identity in Eastern Europe and Russia . Soviet-Russian and Polish Accounts of Ukrainian History 1914-1991 (New York/London, 1993)
• Wandycz, P.S., The Price of Freedom: A History of East Central Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present (London, 1992)
• Weber, Eugen, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford, 1976)
• Weeks, Theodore R., Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863-1914 (DeKalb, 1996)
• Wilson, Andrew, The Ukrainians. Unexpected Nation (New Haven, London 2000)
• Yekelchyk, Serhy, ‘Stalinist Patriotism as Imperial Discourse: Reconciling the Ukrainian and Russian “Heroic Pasts” 1939-1945’, Kritika, 3 (2002), pp. 51-80 (electronic resource – University Library)
• Yekelchyk, Serhy, Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
• Yekelchyk, Serhy, Ukraine: What everyone needs to know (Oxford, 2nd ed., 2020)
• Yuval-Davis, Nira, ‘Gender and Nation’, in Wilford, Rick, and Miller, Robert L. (eds), Women, Ethnicity and Nationalism (London/New York, 1998), pp. 23-35.
• Zimmer, Oliver, Nationalism in Europe, 1890-1940 (Houndmills/Basingstoke, 2003).

Subject specific skills

See learning outcomes

Transferable skills

See learning outcomes