Canada and the Ukrainian Question, 1939-1945: A Study in Statecraft by Bohdan S. s> Kordan (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
158 SEER, 8i, I, 2003 repression.Only those who had been politicallyactivewere sent to the Gulags. There were no immigrantworkersamong those executed by the NKVD, and it seems that most of the arrestedwho were not members of the Communist Partywere allowed, eventually,to leave the country. Ultimately, however, the impact of the volume is diminishedby Mensing's lackof analysis.He makeslittleattemptto engage with the impressiveamount of data he took such trouble to collect. A thorough examination would certainly have been more illuminating for the reader than the extensive catalogue of short biographies given, and it would undoubtedly have contributed to a better understandingof the Stalinistterrormachine. Whilst the publication of the data in itselfis important,offeringa valuable record of the experiences of individuals who became victims of Stalinism, the stories are, in themselves, somewhat repetitive, and readers are likely to become overwhelmed by the mass of biographical details. One is left, therefore,with the feeling that thisis more a commemorativevolume than a scholarlystudy. Hohen Neuendorf WOLFRAM VON SCHELIHA Kordan,BohdanS. Canada andtheUkrainian Question, I939-I945. A Study in Statecraft. McGill-Queen's Studies in Ethnic History, Series 2. McGillQueen 's University Press, Montreal and Kingston, 200I. XiV + 270 pp. Notes. Index. CAN$27.95 (paperback). PROFESSOR BOHDAN S. KORDAN of the Universityof Saskatchewanhaswritten an illuminating and richly detailed study of Canada's 'Ukrainian problem' during WorldWar II. In interwarEurope, the 'UkrainianQuestion' referred to the stateless situation of Ukrainians who, after a brief period of national government in I917-20, found their ethnic lands divided between the Soviet Union and Poland. For Canada, the 'Ukrainian problem' was much more than the country's officialposition on national self-determinationin Eastern Europe. It also involved the question of dealing with Canada's substantial Ukrainian minority, which had campaigned for Ukrainianindependence. As the authordemonstratesconvincingly,concernsaboutforeignpolicy, national security, and popular loyalties became entangled in Canada's official treatment of the UkrainianQuestion. Drawing extensively on Canadian archives with the addition of some British,American, and Russian materials,ProfessorKordan reconstructsthe complex interaction between the Ukrainian Canadian community and the Canadiangovernmentfrom I939-45. In theirmemos and appeals,Ukrainian nationalist activists emphasized the right of national self-determinationas a fundamental value of liberal democracy and one of the sacred principles Canada was fighting for in World War II. While not openly opposing such rhetoric, the government professedpolitical 'realism'privilegingthe national interest over the ideals of universal justice. Until I943, Canada's official position on the Eastern European imbroglio had been to support the restorationof pre-war borders;afterwards,Ottawa moved towards acknowledging Soviet domination in the region. REVIEWS I59 Neither position was satisfactoryfor the Ukrainian community in Canada, leading to deteriorating relations between the nationalist organizations and the state officials.To complicate mattersfurther,the government'sexpertson EasternEurope, such as Tracy Philippsand ProfessorGeorge Simpson, were often more sympatheticthan their superiorsto Ukrainian concerns. Both lost theirjobs in I944 when Canada began building friendly relations with the USSR, and the nationalistappealsfromCanadian Ukrainiansforthe creation of an independent Ukraine became a subjectof Soviet diplomaticprotestsand a source of embarrassmentfor the Canadian government. More important, the bureaucracy dismissed Philipps'sidea of accommodating the minorities' special interests. The view that ethnic organizationswere primarilysecurity concerns triumphed.The police repeatedly,if unsuccessfully,investigatedthe Ukrainian nationalistassociationsfor their suspectedGerman connections or Nazi sympathies.Canadian officialsignored the Ukrainian appeals and tried to prevent anti-Sovietpublic statements. By the war's end, it was clear that the government had failed to 'manage' the Ukrainian problem. Its sponsorship of the creation of an umbrella organization,the UkrainianCanadian Committee, backfiredby providingthe nationalistswith a coordinating body. The work of the Nationalities Branch of the Department of National War Services came to a standstillbecause of the absence of a clear officialpolicy on the minorities.In 1944, the Canadian bureaucracyeven considered grantingdiplomatic recognition to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic as a way of undermining the nationalists' demand for Ukrainian independence. However, this idea was abandoned afterthe Soviets attemptedto tie Canada'srecognition of Soviet Ukrainewith the Sovietrecognitionof Canada as a separatecountry.Feelinginsecureabout Canada's own internationalstatus,Ottawa shied away from the discussionof Ukraine'sstatehood.Likewise,by I945 Canadianauthoritiesweredetermined to keep their distance from ethnic politics. During the following decade, the Cold War and the mass influx of Ukrainian 'displacedpersons' into...
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".