Mark von Hagen proposes to discuss the connections between war and colonialism and the emergence of the type of state and nation that is today’s Ukraine. With a survey of Ukraine’s history as part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, of the Russian empire, of the Austro-Hungarian empire, of the interwar Polish republic and of the Soviet Union, he situates Ukraine’s history in the history of many, if not most, of today’s sovereign states. With a consideration of the world and civil wars on the eastern front, Mark von Hagen also argues that the outbreak of war provided the setting for enactment of various national and imperial scenarios in the lands claimed by the Ukrainian national movement and largely comprising today’s Ukraine. The conditions that permitted the rise of the first Ukrainian states in modern history, world war, revolution and civil war, also were the same conditions that doomed those first states to failure, but also shaped the practice of the next occupying power, the Bolshevik Soviet Union. Similarly, World War II once again reshaped the possibilities and realities of Ukrainian statehood and, once again, postwar Soviet Ukraine was not the same as before the war. To some degree, and this is something much less developed in my thoughts, a final colonial war, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, helped to open the next and latest phase in Ukrainian statehood with the dismantling of the Soviet Union and its East European empire.
Mark von Hagen teaches Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian history at Arizona State University (Tempe). He also teaches about comparative colonialism, war, revolution, and nationalism. Von Hagen has written about the Red Army in the 1920s, the Russian imperial army in World War I, and occupation regimes in Ukraine during World War I; furthermore, he has co-edited several volumes exploring empire in eastern Europe and Ukrainian-Russian relations in particular. He has served as President of the International Association for Ukrainian Studies and of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies. Before coming to Arizona, von Hagen was the Boris Bakhmeteff Professor of Russian and East European Studies, chair of the history department, and director of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. He has also served on the editorial boards of Slavic Review, Ab Imperio, Kritika, and Ukraina Moderna. He has helped trained many graduate students who now hold positions in colleges and universities in North America and Europe.
Moderation: Professor Dr. Alexander Wöll