Abstract
Since 2014, Ukraine has been engrossed in a war that the military and intellectual classes at home and abroad largely failed to predict. This failure is in many ways at the heart of Ukraine: A Nation on the Borderland by noted historian and essayist Karl Schlögel, Professor Emeritus of the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany. By May 2018, the war had claimed the lives of 3332 soldiers and 3023 civilians and had left over 9000 injured and over a million-and-a-half displaced. These numbers continue to increase to this day, with no end in sight.
Many casual observers in the West, disorientated by an active Kremlin disinformation apparatus, attributed the reasons for this war to a clash between Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking identities, while some in the academy even presented Russia as a victim of the unreasonable geopolitical appetites of the EU and the USA, which ‘encroached’ on Russia’s area of interest – Ukraine.
With Ukraine: A Nation on the Borderland, Karl Schlögel offers us a productive and highly insightful corrective to such reductive narratives, which rarely approach Ukraine on its own terms. He shies away from geopolitical theory and instead explores Ukraine from the inside out, tracing the process of Ukraine’s nation-building through a detailed account of the local histories of its people – Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Poles, Hungarians, Germans, Crimean Tatars and Romanians. He also tours the cities in which they live: Kyiv, which had ten times more inhabitants than Paris in 1240; Kharkiv, whose art deco masterpieces preceded New York’s Rockefeller Center by a decade; Odesa, the ‘pearl of the Black Sea’; L’viv and Chernivtsi, bearing the imprint of western empires; Dnipro, whose aerospace industry gave the Soviet Union a principal advantage over its rivals; Yalta, which was built in the times of Russian empire but still represented ‘everything that Russia was not: the South, freedom, a distant shore within the empire’s bounds’ (p. 143); and finally, Donetsk, ‘the city of a million roses’, which suddenly changed its colour for military khaki in 2014.
Schlögel claims that ‘the true cause behind the so-called Ukrainian crisis is a fundamental crisis of Russia’. In his view, Russia is seeking to blame its lack of modernization and corruption on an imagined external enemy, one absent on European mental maps. As an antidote, Schlögel suggests that Europeans (re-)discover Ukraine, which he calls ‘Europe in miniature’ due to its diverse, varied composition (p. 61). He appeals to his fellow Germans in particular, noting that a collective German sense of guilt before Russians for the Second World War seems to impede their support for Ukraine today. As Schlögel reminds us, it was Ukraine that (unlike Russia) was entirely occupied by Nazi forces during the war. Over two million forced labourers – out of a total three million – were taken by Nazi power from Ukraine. In Kyiv alone, 778 days of German occupation claimed the lives of over 720,000 out of 900,000 pre-war residents – almost a thousand lives a day. Yet, as Schlögel observes, the Germans, ‘who are so proud of having come to terms with their past, block out the fact that what is colloquially known as the “Russian campaign”, was also a campaign against Ukraine’ (p. 216).
Schlögel’s book does not give the reader a comprehensive history of Ukraine, but it does serve as an excellent point of reference for a general reader interested in local histories and topographies. His account of the variety of national minorities in Ukraine, for instance, is rich and detailed, but it comes at the expense of a discussion of the development of an overarching Ukrainian national identity that united all of these people into an imagined community. In many ways, the at times episodic character of this book resounds with the author’s principal message that the Ukrainian nation is inherently multi-ethnic, polylingual and multi-confessional. For Schlögel, Ukraine’s diversity is not a source of weakness; it is a cornerstone of vitality.