In Search of “Good Russians”: Ukrainian-Russian Encounters in the United States During the First Cold War

Abstract

The article is devoted to the topic of Ukrainian-Russian intellectual encounters in exile during the Cold War. The author focuses on Ukraine’s and Russia’s mutual representations in historical narratives in connection with their respective discourses of national identity. The article also describes sporadic attempts at establishing Ukrainian-Russian public dialogue in exile starting in the early 1960s. All of them were initiated and conducted by Ukrainian public activists and intellectuals. The author concludes that participants on both sides ascribed opposing meanings to historical terms. Russian authors, on the one hand, consistently used the modern designation “Ukrainian” as a synonym for “Little Russian,” which automatically situated Ukraine within the “pan-Russian” historical framework. Ukrainian historians, on the other hand, tried to reinterpret “Russian” as a modern national designation rather than an imperial one. Hence the Ukrainian-Russian dialogue had no chance of succeeding unless Russian participants agreed to rethink their discourse of national identity. It is no wonder that many American observers remained confused about the nature of Ukrainian-Russian debates: to them, they looked like a dead-end situation. Thus, rather than trying to find alternative interpretations of Ukrainian and Russian history, most Western specialists followed either one or the other respective national narrative.