Volodymyr Kravchenko

Orest Subtelny, an American-Canadian historian of Ukrainian origin, passed away in Toronto on 24 July 2016. His research topics included Ukrainian history of the early modern period as well as historiography, national identity, and the Ukrainian diaspora, primarily in North America. Subtelny's interests were not limited to Ukrainian subjects. He approached the latter as part of the general context of the history of the East European region, with a special focus on geopolitical, imperial, and national studies, from a broad, comparative perspective. Subtelny's crowning achievement is considered to be his Ukraine: A History, first published in 1988 by the University of Toronto Press in association with the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS). Several more editions appeared in English, in Ukrainian translation, as well as in other languages.Subtelny was born in Cracow, on 17 May 1941. In 1949 he and his parents left Poland for the United States and settled in Philadel...

liberty for all will provide a better guide to the future. Chabal explores the sweeping social and economic modernization of the thirty-year period known as the trentes glorieuses (1945–75), as well as De Gaulle’s efforts to restore France to great power status. The themes that he uses to guide this discussion, grandeur and decline, provide a useful link between France’s domestic and foreign policy. Grandeur was about restoring France to first-class status in the international community. Doing so depended upon having the firm economic foundation that the Monnet Plan and the European Coal and Steel community were designed to deliver (63). Although he recounts the profound domestic changes wrought by the initiatives, Chabal believes the pursuit of grandeur by De Gaulle and his successors to be ultimately futile. Constrained by the reality of a world dominated by superpowers, the general’s foreign policy triumphs were more rhetorical than real (74). The future, moreover, seems no brighter for French grandeur. Chabal highlights recent trends that work to diminish France’s international clout, such as the rise of China and the reunification of Germany. The emergence of China as a deep-pocketed economic superpower has undercut France’s economic leverage in Africa (161). France has also been pushed out of the driver’s seat of the EU as a result of the body’s expanding membership and German unification. As the Euro crisis demonstrated, the economic agenda of the European Union is increasingly set in Berlin (164). Though Chabal wonders if Brexit will provide opportunities for a renewed Paris-Berlin axis, the reader comes away with the sense that the author views the decline of France as inevitable and that the nation had best learn to stop living in the past and accept the reality that it is a second-tier, not a first-tier, nation (23). He believes that the general public is having more trouble accepting this reality than its leaders are (156). The author does not submit the discourse of grandeur to the same rigorous analysis that he does so successfully with ideas such as resistance and republican values. Tracing the shifting ways in which the French have pursued grandeur could have yielded interesting results for Chabal. The French seem to have been able to reinvent the idea repeatedly to fit the changing international environment. Though the term is associated with de Gaulle, was not the Fourth Republic pursuing grandeur when it insisted on fighting national liberation movements in its empire? Well before de Gaulle’s return to office in 1958, French leaders believed they must fight the Viet Minh in Indochina to demonstrate to the world that France was not the sick man of Europe but, rather, a global power. After his return, de Gaulle eventually recognized that, rather than being a prerequisite of grandeur, the fight to keep Algeria French had become an impediment to it. The work of Gabrielle Hecht suggests that the meaning of grandeur was reconfigured yet again in the wake of the loss of empire. In The Radiance of France (MIT Press 1998), she shows how France turned increasingly to technological prowess as a way to assert its standing in the world. Nuclear power, high-speed trains, and the Concorde increasingly became the way that the French demonstrated that they were a leading nation. Tracing the shifting nature of French international ambitions suggests that the French have been better able to tailor their ambitions to international realities than Chabal’s account of grandeur allows. That one would like further discussion and broader application of an idea like grandeur demonstrates the power of the themes of this book as interpretive keys. Topics such as gender politics or European integration would also have benefitted from more sustained attention. Though he mentions the existence of a French version of the #MeToo movement, it would have been fascinating to hear what the author makes of its denunciation by 100 female French actors, performers, and academics, including the famous Catherine Deneuve. In a letter to Le Monde, they defended “a right to annoy (importuner), as being indispensible to sexual freedom” (January 9, 2018). However, as Chabal acknowledges, a concise study of this nature inevitably leads to worthy topics being neglected. It is a testament to the success of this short book that the reader is left wanting more. The reader would be hard pressed to find a better introduction and guide to contemporary France. One looks forward to hearing more from Dr. Chabal.

The Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) became the second academic institution in the Western world to fully specialize in exploring Ukrainian history, culture, and current affairs after the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI). Establishment of the CIUS in Edmonton was not predetermined. There were other ideas and competing projects with regard to place, profile, and institutional model of Ukrainian studies in Canada. Edmonton became a winner due to a unique combination of Western regionalism, multiculturalism, the makeup of the Ukrainian local community, and the personal qualities of that community’s leaders. Contrary to widespread opinion, the CIUS did not copy the institutional model of the HURI. The CIUS model is unique, as it embraces a broad, interdisciplinary research agenda, and community-oriented activities related to education and culture.

Why was Kharkiv assigned the role of an alternative political capital of Ukraine during the Euromaidan revolution of 2014? Why did this plan fail? In this article the author tries to answer these questions by exploring Kharkiv’s role and place in the regional context of ongoing Ukrainian nation-state building in the historical perspective, focusing on the period after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Issues of regional geopolitics on the Ukrainian-Russian border as well as the changing symbolic landscape of the city are explored. The proactive role of the central authorities as well as specific local traditions and identity played their roles in keeping Kharkiv on the sidelines of the “hybrid war” that engulfed the Donbas. The modernization matrix that promoted Kharkiv’s growth from a provincial town into a regional leader prevailed over the rhetoric of Russian nationalism employed by Putin’s regime during the annexation of the Crimea. At the same time, social apathy and nationa...