Heather J. Coleman

A roundtable on Max Bergholz’s Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community

Since 2015, our journal’s publisher, Taylor and Francis, has sponsored the Canadian Association of Slavists’ Taylor and Francis Book Prize. It is awarded annually for the best academic book in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies published in the previous calendar year by a Canadian author (citizen or permanent resident). The winner of the 2017 prize, to be awarded at the annual conference of the Canadian Association of Slavists at the University of Regina in May, is Max Bergholz of Concordia University (Montreal, QC) for his book, Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community (Cornell University Press, 2016). To mark Professor Bergholz’s achievement and to further the discussion of his important work, Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes invited three international scholars who work in the fields of Yugoslav history or the history of genocide and mass violence to comment on the book. Following interventions from Veljko Vujačić, Uğur Ümit Üngör, and Melissa Bokovoy, Professor Bergholz offers a response.

Watson Kirkconnell on “The place of Slavic studies in Canada”: a 1957 speech to the Canadian Association of Slavists

ABSTRACT This article introduces and reprints a speech by Watson Kirkconnell to the Canadian Association of Slavists in 1957. Watson Kirkconnell (1895—1977) was an influential Canadian scholar, university administrator, Baptist activist, and prodigious translator of verse. The introduction discusses his significant role in the development of Slavic and East European studies in Canada, as founder of the Humanities Research Council of Canada, and as an early promoter of multiculturalism in Canada. In his speech, Kirkconnell discussed his personal encounter with Slavic studies and the early development of the field in Canada, his role in the pre-history of the Canadian Association of Slavists, and the importance he accorded to fostering critical knowledge of the Slavic and East European societies and cultures in Canada. Slavic studies, he argued, were necessary both intellectually and politically: the Slavic and East European literatures constituted “major stones in the arch of modern civilization”; moreover, in the atmosphere of the Cold War, knowledge of the languages and societies of Soviet-dominated Central and Eastern Europe would play a fundamental role in the fight against communism.

Region and Nation in Late Imperial Russian Ukraine

Faith Hillis, Children of Rus: Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation. 329 pp. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. ISBN-13 978-9668201851.

Holy Fathers, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia, and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia, and: Vysshaia dukhovnaia shkola v Rossii v kontse XIX–nachale XX veka: Istoriia imperatorskikh pravoslavnykh dukhovnykh akademii (review)

55.00. One of the puzzles of late imperial Russian history is the fact that in Kiev, the home of the Ukrainian national movement in the Russian Empire, right-wing Russian nationalist parties held sway from 1906 until the revolution. Indeed, in the 1913 elections, all but one of the Duma delegates from the Southwest Region, composed of the Ukrainian provinces of Kiev, Volynia, and Podolia located on the right--or western--bank of the Dnieper River, represented so-called truly Russian parties. In this fascinating book, Faith Hillis argues that these rival national movements shared a common lineage in the Little Russian idea. Moreover, she contends, these right-wing Right-Bank deputies drew on Little Russian principles to play a critical role in the emergence of modern (rather than reactionary) right-wing politics in the Russian Empire and successfully pushed the multiethnic dynastic empire toward nationalizing its modes of governance. In taking up a local study of what she terms the internal political ecology of the Southwest Region from the 1830s to 1914, Hillis joins the now substantial body of scholarship devoted to understanding the borderlands of the Russian Empire and the impact of nationality issues on imperial Russian governance. (1) Historians of borderlands argue that frontiers constitute crucial sites for identity formation and statecraft--zones where local realities, in interaction with central visions, generate new conceptions that can take on broader significance in the national or imperial heartland. (2) Hillis marries such insights with observations on how regional and national identities coexisted and indeed mutually reinforced one another drawn from studies of regionalism in modern European nation-states in the 19th century. (3) Her work also fits nicely into recent provincial histories that reveal how bureaucratic creations could become infused with meaning by their inhabitants. (4) Hilliss focus on Right-Bank Ukraine is thus particularly welcome. Oddly enough, although Kiev was a major city of the Russian Empire and subsequently the capital of Ukraine, far fewer detailed local studies have been devoted to it than to St. Petersburg or Moscow. (5) More generally, the historiography of the western provinces--absorbed by Russia during the partitions of Poland in the late 18th century--is better developed in regard to the northwestern territories than the southwestern. (6) Ukrainian historiography was long governed by a nationalist teleology, tracing the development of the Ukrainian idea and the roots of Ukrainian statehood. Local social and political history concentrated on the Galician side of the border, where Ukrainian nationalism became a mass movement by the early 20th century. (7) Scholarship on imperial Russian Ukraine, where it is generally agreed that Ukrainian nationalism gained adherence only among a minority, has instead emphasized intellectual history and the story of the confrontation between bearers of the national idea and the imperial state. Yet another approach has been to study Ukrainian history from a multiethnic, territorial angle, focusing on individual ethnic groups and their relations with one another and the state, rather than on regions within the Ukrainian lands. (8) Hilliss approach differs from all of these, asking how people in Right-Bank Ukraine came to conceive of their local society in national terms. She brings together a novel interpretation of the history of the Ukrainian national movement in the 19th century with a fine-grained analysis of urban politics in Kiev from the 1870s to 1914 and of the four elections in Kiev and the three southwestern provinces to the Russian State Duma between 1906 and 1914. The result is a much clearer sense than we had previously of ideas in action and of the evolution of local political culture in Kiev and its hinterland in late imperial Russia. …

Book Review: Old Believers, Religious Dissent and Gender in Russia, 1760–1850

Looking back on the meetings of the Religious-Philosophical Society in St. Petersburg in the first years of the 20th century, the poet Zinaida Gippius recalled the extraordinary novelty of this encounter between the secular intelligentsia and the clerical world: “As we got to know the ‘new’ people better, we went from surprise to surprise,” she wrote. “I’m not even talking about internal difference but simply about habits, customs, language itself; everything was different, like a different culture. Neither origin nor direct membership in the clergy—the cloth—played a role here. A person from the church world of the era, be he an official, a professor, a writer, a teacher, or simply a theologian ... invariably bore the imprint of that other world, one unlike our ordinary, secular (as the churchmen would say) world.” Indeed, two generations after the 1860s reforms that granted Russian Orthodox clergymen’s children secular legal status and made it easier for them to enter the secular professions, imperial Russia’s clerical estate remained remarkably closed and caste-like. Priests still overwhelmingly married clergymen’s daughters and sent their children to the separate church-run school system. Transfer between the seminaries and the gymnasia, which educated the sons of Russia’s other educated estate, the nobility, remained virtually impossible. This perpetuated the social isolation of the clergy, for it was almost

Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia

sects and movements get mentioned, but I found myself often wondering, what exactly did these people believe? The second criticism is perhaps slightly churlish given the ambitious nature of what Aston has set out to cover, but the book at times lacks balance in its coverage: Italy, the Habsburg Empire and the German states often seem to get a rather summary treatment. Even allowing for the difficulty of being comprehensive when dealing with so vast a subject, there are some surprising omissions. Thus, for example, the anticlerical Tron reforms enacted in the Venetian Republic in the 1760s – reforms which rivalled, possibly even surpassed, those undertaken by Joseph II – warrant no discussion. There is also a serious error in the suggestion that Prussia after 1815 possessed a Catholic majority, when in fact, even with the annexation of the Rhineland, Catholics made up no more than two fifths of the population. Finally, despite this being marketed as a textbook ‘accessible to advanced school students and undergraduates’ alike, assumes a background knowledge of political and intellectual history far beyond that of most good third-year undergraduates. (Matters are not helped by a rather arbitrary glossary that fails to include terms which are unexplained in the text, such as Athanasian [64], Rogationtide [76], viaticum [82], dalmatic [154], Trinitarian [272], and the Chalcedonian formula [277].) These slight weaknesses aside, I would enthusiastically urge anyone with an interest in eighteenth – or early nineteenth – century Europe to read what is a quite excellent book.