The Ukrainian‐Russian Borderland: History vs. Geography by Volodymyr V.Kravchenko. Quebec: McGill‐Queen’s University Press, 2022. 352 pp. $90.00. ISBN 978‐0‐2280‐1199‐6

In this book, Volodymyr V. Kravchenko examines the interplay between historic and geographic understandings of Ukrainianness and Russianness along the Ukrainian-Russian borderland, specifically in the historic region known as Sloboda Ukraine. Kravchenko upends several of the larger historiographical debates waged between Ukrainian and Russian studies scholars, who tend to emphasize the tensions between empire and nation, which increased over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He sidesteps this decades-long historiographical debate, predicated on assumptions of organic Ukrainian nationality and Great Russian chauvinism. As opposed to taking sides in the increasingly charged either-or debates surrounding this borderland, Kravchenko instead opts for a both-and approach. He treats Sloboda Ukraine as a Ukrainian and Russian contact zone and a nested geography. In doing so, Kravchenko expertly illustrates how both Ukrainian nation-building projects and Russian imperial ambitions have turned this contact zone and much of the historical terminology surrounding it into “object[s] of rivalry” (p. 5). This approach allows for a more nuanced understanding of the Ukrainian-Russian borderland, where the forces of nationalism, imperialism, and what Kravchenko dubs “imperial nationalism” jockeyed for supremacy within the Russian-Ukrainian borderland and extended far beyond any real administrative and temporal boundaries. These borderland discourses became part and parcel of Ukrainian-Russian discourses past and present. Kravchenko structures the book into two parts, each with a separate introduction. The first part focuses on the intellectual genealogies of the Ukrainian-Russian borderland. This section hones in on the contested nature of historical terminology in Ukrainian-Russian discourses, where language and words have served and continue to serve as battlegrounds of imperial and national contestations. Kravchenko takes up a series of geographic and national terms in this section, ranging from “South Russia” to “Great Russia,” locating Ukraine both geographically and intellectually within the turbulent linguistic landscape of the borderland. His address of the term Malorossiia (Little Russia) is particularly strong, as he teases out the contemporary connotations of the term and historical ones, which almost universally understood the identity to be something distinct from Rossiia (Russia). Intellectuals and nobles from within Malorossiia had their cultural discourses which were simultaneously distinct from Rossiia and part of Rossiia at the same time. This distinctiveness became the cultural fodder for Romantic nationals like Taras Shevchenko to build the Ukrainian nation in the century that followed. Even non-Malorossiia scholars, like Mykola Markevych, grasped this phenomenon, in which “one patrimony—rodina ‘motherland’—and Russia as another—otechestvo ‘fatherland’—did not contradict one another, but neither did they merge” (p. 81). In the second part, Kravchenko uses the historic city of Kharkiv and Kharkiv University as case studies to understand the mappings and re-mappings of Sloboda Ukraine in the Russian Empire, Soviet Union, and independent Ukraine. He traces the language of the nation to the making of the nation in the borderlands, where the geographic and ethnic borders between Malorossiia, South Russia, and Sloboda Ukraine overlapped and blurred, forming a somewhat cohesive Ukrainian national space in response to imperial and national discourses. Kravchenko’s chapter on Kharkiv University is of particular note. According to traditional nationalist narratives, Vasilii Karazin founded Kharkiv University as one of the first truly Ukrainian universities. However, Kravchenko contends that Kharkiv University initially grew out of Tsarist imperial centralization policies. Much like the borderlands region as a whole, over time the university increasingly turned toward Ukrainian topics as professors developed interests in the local, students and professors began to think systemically about the Ukrainian language and its roots, and the university increasingly published materials about Ukrainian peoples and in the Ukrainian language. Nonetheless, according to Kravchenko, the university never developed a truly Ukrainian identity, as it always remained on the border of nation and empire. This text is a work of intellectual history, focusing on major thinkers, particularly those interested in language, culture, and geography. Kravchenko’s sources certainly fit this method, as he draws heavily on established secondary scholarship and theoretical approaches to nations and the nation-state, most notably the work of Miroslav Hroch. He rarely consulted archival materials, opting instead for printed materials, including historical and ethnographic studies, literature, poetry, and the like—the stuff from which romantic nations are made. As with most works of intellectual and national history, particularly those that deploy Hroch’s framework, Kravchenko places the agency in the hands of the intellectual, military, cultural, and class elites; they provide the raw materials for national development, and they develop the national identity itself. Given the demographics of Ukraine well into the twentieth century and the significant impact of rural identities on Ukrainian national development, past and present, this consolidation of agency in the hands of intellectuals seems somewhat misplaced. The book would have been much stronger had Kravchenko addressed discourses from both the top down and the bottom up. The Ukrainian-Russian Borderland: History vs. Geography is a must-read for all Russian and Ukrainian studies scholars, particularly those interested in the roles of imperial and national borderland ambitions in shaping historic and contemporary discussions about Ukrainian-Russian relationships at the cultural, social, and political levels.

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