Vadim Kukushkin. from Peasants to Labourers: Ukrainian and Belarusan Immigration from the Russian Empire to Canada

Vadim Kukushkin. From Peasants to Labourers: Ukrainian and Belarusan Immigration from the Russian Empire to Canada. Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007. 283 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $95.00 hc. On the eve of the First World War, Ukrainian ethnographic territories were divided between the Austro-Hungarian and the Russian Empires. Even before these two solitudes were briefly united by the events of the Great War and its aftermath, in Canada eastern and western Ukrainian immigrants had come together to work in the mines of the Rockies and the industrial shops of Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg. While much has been written about the Ukrainians who arrived in Canada from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, especially those who settled on western homesteads, little attention has been directed to those who arrived from the Russian Empire. With regard to Belarusan migration to Canada, its history prior to World War II is largely unknown. The academic study of migration from the Russian Empire to Canada has been largely focused on Jewish, Mennonite, Hutterite, and Doukhobor immigrants, even though the largest numbers arriving between 1905 and 1914 were, in fact, Ukrainian and Belarusan peasants who came as temporary labour migrants, drawn by opportunities in the country's burgeoning resource and industrial sectors. It is these latter migrants that historian Vadim Kukushkin addresses in his groundbreaking work. He outlines the European and North American contexts of this migration and examines the sojourning communities from the Russian Empire, largely male and highly transient, that were established across Canada as a result. He surveys the factors promoting migration from the western frontier of the Russian Empire, identifying the geographic sources, the chronology and logistics of the outflow, as well as the social backgrounds of the newcomers, including their ages, marital status, literacy rates, and religious affiliations. These migrants arrived from the least ethnically integrated region of the European part of the Russian Empire, which was incorporated in the late eighteenth century, namely the Belarusan provinces of Grodno, Minsk, Vilna, Vitebsk, and Mogilev and the Ukrainian provinces of Podolia, Volhynia, Kiev, Chernigov, Poltava, Kharkov, Kherson, Taurida, and Ekaterinoslav, along with the Khotin District of Bessarabia Province. To illustrate who these migrants were in the old country and how their community life evolved in Canada, Kukushkin has mined the existing secondary literature, but more importantly, he has focused on relevant Russian- and Ukrainian-language periodicals as well as archival sources in Russia, the United States, and Canada. Especially revealing are collections such as the Alaskan Russian Church Archives held at the Library of Congress, which includes valuable material concerning the spread of the Russian Orthodox Church among Ukrainians and Belarusans from Nova Scotia to British Columbia. Even more informative is the Likacheff-Ragosine-Mathers collection of over 11,000 Russian consular passport and identity documents held at Library and Archives Canada. …

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