Here is the Wikipedia entry for Orest Subtelny
Subtelny’s departure is a great loss to Ukrainian scholarship.
My first two years living in Canada in 2001-2002 were closely tied to Subtelny, who I had only known until then from his academic work. He invited me to be the manager of a new CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) funded project that assisted in the training of Ukrainian diplomats and foreign policy experts. Based at York University in Toronto we had many visiting groups from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Diplomatic Academy in Ukraine.
My most memorable discussion during one of these training programme visits from Ukraine was comparing Ukrainian-Russian and US-Canadian relations. At first glance they seemed similar with a less populated country living next door to an elephant but as a (non-Canadian) outsider I came to understand, with Subtelny’s help, there was one very important difference.
Whereas most Ukrainians held a post-colonial inferiority complex vis-à-vis Russia, Canadians had a superiority complex towards Americans. Indeed, as Rick Mercer shows in his brilliant comedy series “Talking to Americans,” the Canadian national pastime is to poke fun at their ”country cousins” down south.
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Rick Mercer and “Talking to Americans.”
As time went on living in Canada I came to understand the complex inter-relationships among historians in Toronto.
When the chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto was seeking a chair holder in 1980, the Ukrainian diaspora, which had collected the endowment funds, had always looked to Subtelny as their favorite. Unfortunately, they had not realised that it was the university and not them who chose the chair.
The contest became very acrimonious between Subtelny and Frank Sysyn with letters to the university denouncing the other. In the meantime, the University of Toronto sought out Paul R. Magocsi who had never applied and he was eventually appointed, much to the chagrin of the Ukrainian diaspora who did not like his sympathies with the Rusyn movement.
In retaliation, the Ukrainian diaspora never provided the full funds they were supposed to for the chair of Ukrainian Studies and a few years ago it nearly closed down but was saved by a $2 million contribution from John Yaremko, Ontario’s first minister of citizenship.
The Ukrainian community assisted Subtelny’s appointment to the History Department of York University. It took literally decades and the intervention of an outsider such as myself for the relationship between the chair of Ukrainian Studies and the Ukrainian community in Toronto to heal.
The first step was to break the ice between Borys Wrzesnewskyj, who had been head of the Ukrainian Students Club at the University of Toronto and a vocal critic of the appointment, and Magocsi.
The Dopomoha Ukraini family foundation of Wrzesnewskyj, by then a Liberal member of parliament, agreed to finance the Polish translation of Magocsi’s History of Ukraine and the 2014 publication of his This Blessed Land: Crimea and the Crimean Tatars. A second step was the holding of a symposium in honour of Magocsi at St. Vladimir Institute in Toronto with the presentations republished by the journal Nationalities Papers.
For over the last quarter of a century, Toronto and specifically the University of Toronto Press has led the way in the modern writing of Ukrainian history. The first to be published in 1988 was Subtelny’s “Ukraine. A History,” which was eventually published in four editions (1988, 1994, 2000 and 2009).
The 1988 edition made a truly enormous contribution to Ukrainian nation-building. It was republished in a Ukrainian edition in 1991 in Kyiv, then in the Soviet Union, and in Russian in 1994 in independent Ukraine. The translation of the Ukrainian edition was funded by the Canadian Friends of Rukh.
Subtelny told me both versions were subsequently reprinted upwards of a total of a million copies, usually without asking permission during the Wild West capitalism of the 1990s in Ukraine. Working for a USAID consultancy project in 1994 in Donetsk, I remembered being stunned at seeing Subtelny’s “Ukraine. A History” being used in the university.
When beginning the research and writing of his “Ukraine. A History” in 1985-1986, Subtelny could not have known that Ukraine would become independent or that his book would have such a strategic impact upon the country’s nation-building.
He was literally in the right place at the right time.
When the USSR disintegrated there was a scholarly vacuum in independent Ukraine and it took the entire decade for new history’s and school textbook’s to be published. Magocsi’s “A History of Ukraine” was published in 1996 and the Ukrainian edition a year later (with a second edition in 2010 and Ukrainian edition in 2012).
Subtelny’s book filled the vacuum and was snapped up by Ukrainians eager to learn the truth about their history. If a million were printed one has to assume that millions of Ukrainians read it in Ukrainian and Russian and that it was used as the source for the writing of new school textbooks.
Subtelny and Magocsi, both working in Toronto and both of their history books published by the University of Toronto Press, nevertheless approached Ukrainian history in different ways.
Subtelny began writing his book when Ukraine was not an independent state and and therefore his work follows the same logic as the doyen of Ukrainian history, Myhaylo Hrushevsky, of a history of a stateless Ukrainian people.
Magocsi, on the other hand, began writing his history when Ukraine was an independent state and he therefore followed the traditional Western approach of writing the history of Ukrainians and other ethnic groups who lived within the borders of Ukraine. This traditional Western approach to history was also multicultural in that “A History of Ukraine” includes information about Ukrainians and also Russians, Poles, Crimean Tatars and Jews.
The histories of Ukraine written by Subtelny and Magocsi therefore complement each other by providing two approaches to analyzing the historical past of Ukraine.
The last time I worked with Subtelny was during the 2010 Ukrainian presidential elections when I organized a two-day forum of 40 leading Western academic and think tank experts in Kyiv. It was no secret that the forum was tied to the Yulia Tymoshenko election campaign as among Western experts there was no support for her main challenger, Viktor Yanukovych.
Subtelny attended the forum and was warmly greeted by Tymoshenko who had been one of the millions in the 1990s whose Ukrainian national consciousness had grown through reading his “Ukraine. A History.”
Subtelny did not mince his words about Yanukovych who he described as a “thug” and “mafia don” and he had no hesitation in endorsing Tymoshenko’s bid for the presidency.
Subtelny provided a highly important contribution to Ukrainian nation-building when Ukraine became an independent state when his book reached millions of Ukrainian and Western readers. Subtelny was not an ivory tower academic. He was an internationally acclaimed historian, civic and community activist whose roots in the Ukrainian community meant his focus was on Ukrainian national identity, the struggle for independence and achieving statehood.
