We are now moving into a different stage of our discussion. Our panel was announced as a round table; it has functioned so far as a panel, with presentations and a commentator, and now we will have our moment of the round table, which I would like to limit to 15–20 minutes. I would ask each of the members of the panel to speak up to three minutes in response to what they heard, and to the comments made by Taras Kuzio.
I also would like to add one more challenge to Ukrainian studies—again, here in Canada, but in general in the world—saying that the project that was started by the founding fathers turned out to be a very successful one for a number of reasons. One of those achievements is that today, if you have a good or even a semi-good article on Ukraine, or a book on Ukraine, you can go into any publishing house, to the most prestigious journal, and publish it there. When the institutes were founded, their publishing arms were created, the journals were created, with the idea that you could not publish Ukrainian research anywhere else because it was not considered respectable scholarship. It has changed now, and this kind of success story poses new questions to the institutes: where are we, what is our function, what is our publishing arm doing, what are our journals doing? Again, that is something that maybe was not mentioned here, and I really would like it to be part of the discussion, in terms of discussion here by the panel but also in questions from the audience.
I am back to our round-table mode, and I would invite [each presenter] to speak up to three minutes.
Manoly Lupul:
I think it is very significant that the community was not mentioned much or at all in what you heard. This may be because people did not understand what I was saying, or it was irrelevant, I am not sure. In any case, there it is. I would just simply remind everyone that without the community there would have been no CIUS. There are no two ways about it. The community made possible a [Ukrainian] member on the U of A board of governors that I mentioned. It was the P & B Club in Edmonton that applied pressure, such as it was. I do not know exactly where it was, but there were people from the community in the government, or else these people in the community had worked in the Progressive Conservative Party. And the Institute, I would remind you, was absolutely a political act—in recognition of the fact that there was something called “the Ukrainian fact” in the country, in the province, and they had heard from us. It was not people from Willingdon [Alberta], where I was raised. It was right here in Edmonton, and it was the P & B organization, which had enormous respect—as P & B organizations have, whether they are of Ukrainian background or not, because that is the nature of business and the professional community. They are articulate, they are politically involved quite often, and they also hold power. And believe me, you cannot get things in Ukrainian studies without power in what you might call the mainstream of our culture and institutions.
I know it is difficult to address this when you have panellists who are—I hesitate to say this—perhaps not even Canadian citizens. Nonetheless, this is a fact that we face. People who come here, members of the community elsewhere, somewhere, they know its importance, its significance, and they are to serve it. We have one here too, in Canada as a whole. So why ignore them? You want them to buy your books? You have got to talk to them. You have to advertise it. Take up the issues of Ukraine. They are interested in the issues of Ukraine, let me assure you of that. But they also live here as a group, and they have life as a group, and they have immense problems as a group, trying to make sense of surviving as a group in a society that really marginalized them constantly. So this is all I would say off the top of my head.
Paul Robert Magocsi:
By the way, as a citizen of Ukraine—pardon, as a citizen of Canada, note that Freudian slip—as a citizen of Canada I am very happy to be not in Edmonton but here in Strathcona, where I understand the University of Alberta is located, and therefore I can become not only a Canadian but also a Strathconian patriot. For those of you who even have sensitivities in that area of differentiation, which some of us really like, a few comments on the basis of what I have heard.
First of all, we were invited here from various parts of the world to a setting that, quite frankly, I do not like. Why do I not like it? From an intellectual point of view, just stop and think about this: the amount of money that has been invested to bring people literally from all over the world, to speak for fifteen minutes. I mean literally. So what can one say in fifteen minutes? One has to be very selective. Actually, in my presentation and even some of the other presentations, there was a lot of commentary about the Ukrainian community in the United States and Canada and their role in making everything possible. I mean, I do not know where this was absent in the presentation. This is a fact, and we all know this.
Also, there was a comment about how after Ukraine came into being as an independent country, that actually courses on Ukraine and interest of students in Ukraine collapsed. Now, this may be the case. It was said here, but it may be somewhat of a myopic view from the standpoint of Strathcona and Edmonton, because I can tell you that this is exactly the opposite of what occurred at the University of Toronto in the 1990s and well into the 2010s. The general course in Ukrainian history had 35 to 40 students every year, which made it one of the largest courses in Ukrainian history anywhere in North America. So much for the alleged collapse. It may be in one part but not necessarily in others, if one is aware of that. Also, interacting with the Ukrainian community: when it is possible, it is done, and it has been done. There was an allusion that Taras Kuzio made to the Chair of Ukrainian Studies and Borys Wrzesnewskyj. We work very closely with James Temerty and are heavily engaged in community affairs.
Another thing: we have been successful in drawing in non-Ukrainian foundations. One of the biggest supporters of the [U of T] Chair of Ukrainian Studies is the Jackman Foundation of Ontario, which is one of the leading philanthropists at the University of Toronto and in the arts generally. There was also a comment that Dr. Kuzio made [pertaining to my] fantasizing of creating five institutes, and that we should be thinking of political science. Well, this is exactly what the institute of Ukrainian statehood would be concentrating on, and allowing not only talking about the past evolution of Ukrainian statehood but also how it should function at present. This is where political science definitely could become involved.
The other thing about combating Russophilism and discussing what kind of subjects would be used—and one might say, “Why art, and why music?”—this is really the battleground of Russophilism. There is no Ukrainian art and there is no Ukrainian music in the outside world. Where was Malevich from, as one example? And who were some of the other great composers that are all described as Russian? This is literally part of the combat—to show that Ukraine is on the level of any other culture in Europe and not just interested in classic history or folklore. No one knows about this; first and foremost Ukrainians do not, and not only Ukrainians in Canada and the United States but in Ukraine. That is what I would comment in terms of my reaction to some of the things that were said. Thank you.
Frank Sysyn:
There are many topics, and I will just name a few that I think have been central. First, the role Ukraine and Ukrainian independence played in the development of Ukrainian studies here. I would say that when the Institute of the early 1990s moved towards Ukraine, it was also moving in concert with the Ukrainian community here. It became their major interest, and certainly in terms of the endowments and monies that came in there was great interest in dealing with Ukraine. By now, we face an entirely different issue. The existing Ukrainian community, in both Edmonton and Toronto, includes a prominent fourth wave [of immigration] that has made a whole new community. The community has shifted in its interest, and Ukraine has played a role in it.
Then there is the issue of the fields we dealt with. One thing that we left out of the presentations—particularly for history but not only, also for most of the social sciences—was the move away from the “national.” That is, when we—at least three of us here—began our careers, everyone accepted that national history was a normal field of study. Trends changed, views of nations changed; they affected the way departments are structured and how those studies go. I can give an example from Columbia: the attempt to establish a chair of Polish history has had tremendous difficulties simply because history departments do not want this kind of history anymore, and that has influenced what we have.
Then there is the issue of social sciences, as opposed to what might be called the three “traditional” fields. I think that the turn away from the “national” has also affected sociology, anthropology, and political science particularly. In many areas, when the Soviet political scientist retires at universities, he or she—usually he, it has been—the retirement is not replaced; that is, political science departments moved away from what might be called “area studies.” There are exceptions, but that has been a constant problem in continuing the field and supplanting it. There is no one doing anything dealing with that bloc in many places.
One exception, for instance, is the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, which plays a very important part in the development of regional studies. There are, of course, differences between Canada and the US While in Canada, in many universities, and particularly in the Prairie Provinces, the enrolments and the teaching have declined in numbers, that is not true of the US, and not only because of the community formation. That is, the University of Kansas began a Ukrainian program after Ukrainian independence; last year the University of Texas and the University of Illinois hired lecturers in Ukrainian language. Columbia’s interest in Mark Von Hagen’s work came partly because Ukraine became independent, but it has taken funding from the Ukrainian community. Not just the Harriman has put money in. I do not wish to exaggerate the increase, but the situation is somewhat better in the US than in Canada.
And finally, what do we do with our definition of Ukrainian studies when, and particularly, people in the social sciences do not tend to concentrate on a single area? Many more people are involved in the field and study Ukraine because they can go there now. You now have Pittsburgh doing anthropology in Ukraine, which you never had before. Zenon brought up the problems of our generation. I was also rejected from the exchange and could not do my thesis research in the Soviet Union. So we did face that, but now you have all these people who do their work in Ukraine, and so suddenly fields like anthropology or sociology have people studying whom they would not have had before Ukrainian independence.
Zenon Kohut:
I will amplify what Frank has just brought up, since Taras challenged me on that—why did the Institute [CIUS] not develop political science somehow? There are a number of reasons. At the University of Alberta there was no one interested in that, there was no political science department, there were no area studies at all at that time, and I do not think there are even today. All the political science people were doing theories and structures that were supposed to solve problems for any nation anywhere, in a comparative way. You could not even get a discussion going about that.
At the Institute we had David Marples doing research on contemporary Ukraine, so at least we had something. The only way we could encourage political science was to give grants to various political scientists for specific projects, as we did not have the wherewithal to do [anything else]. I actually was engaged in discussions about perhaps getting some seed money for CIUS for a political scientist. We always had political science in mind in creating any new positions, but new positions were never really created and those discussions went nowhere.
Taras Kuzio:
Professor Plokhii, the European perspective is actually in some ways more interesting because Britain, since the 1990s, has had three readers on contemporary Ukraine—in London, Birmingham, and Essex—funded by the British government. There was a big wave of creating new positions in areas that were not previously covered when the USSR was around. They were created around 1996–97. But the biggest concentration for the study of contemporary Ukraine is in Warsaw. There are at least ten-plus people working in two or three think tanks in Warsaw who write excellent material, very objective as well, on Ukrainian nationalism.
I would just echo one thing about teaching that Professor Magocsi said. I brought teaching on contemporary Ukraine to the University of Toronto when I arrived in Canada after 2001. I launched courses there in 2002–3. I think Professor Kohut’s approach is wrong. One can do things. You do not have to create, for example, a chair or a professorship; you can create lectureships and other areas. My courses were created on the basis of getting small seed money from the Danyliw Foundation and from the Wrzesnewskyj [Family] Foundation. I had huge numbers of students, undergraduates and graduates, because topics such as NATO, EU, Russia, Ukraine, and the Orange Revolution were attractive, and that was also true at George Washington University, where I taught and had the same kind of numbers.
The question of political science I understand, but how does that excuse the fact that CIUS has published only one book on Ukrainian politics in twenty-five years—Professor Harasymiw’s book? One book. You might not have the positions, but why can you not publish the material? And why has the CIUS journal, since 2014, completely ignored what is going on in Ukraine?
Questions
Derek Fraser:
I am looking at this question from the point of view of a practitioner, as a former Germanist, Kremlinologist, and Ambassador to Hungary and Ukraine, among other places. I would like to add to Professor Sysyn’s remarks about the decline of area studies. It seems to me there is potential for a return to area studies. We have been faced with the problem in the last few years of being made fools of by Putin, by not understanding the Middle East, and being not too sure exactly how to handle China. A good many of those problems can be attributed to the fact that the structure of area knowledge built up during the Cold War has been allowed to decline, and it seems to me that a good case can be made that centres for Ukrainian studies should consider the future requirements of the Canadian government, certainly the Department of Defence, and certainly the Department of Global Affairs. In addition, the Department of Defence used to finance regional strategic centres at various universities. Calgary was a very good example. A case can be made that the Canadian government should have an interest in supporting area studies. And it seems to me that what is required is a certain degree of dialogue between centres of area studies at various universities in Canada and the Canadian government in order to work out the needs of the Canadian government and also of other organizations, such as the press, for experts on certain areas in the world.
David Marples:
I would like to make a comment on my own Department of History and Classics [U of A], and since I am chair now, I have got pretty much a handle over the statistics we have. It has been a fairly pessimistic morning, to be honest, not only with the weather, so I thought maybe I would say something a little positive. We have roughly 60 graduate students, including the classics side as well. Almost one-third of our graduate students are doing MAs or PhDs on either Ukraine, Belarus, or Moldova; and Belarus and Moldova applies to one student each. In other words, just under one-third of our graduate students are working on Ukraine. Most of them are from Ukraine, but there is also a significant contingent of Canadian students. To me, if you look at the balance of the world and Ukraine’s place in the world, it is actually far overrepresented among the graduate students, more than any other area. And why is that? It is partly because—with greatest respect—John-Paul Himka began this process of bringing graduate students from Ukraine to Canada. It was continued by me, although I also focus on Belarus as well as Ukraine, and it is continued now by the addition of Heather Coleman, whose recent work has also been based on Ukraine. Between the three of us, we have such an enormous load and are able to fund these students. I think this is a positive development.
Bohdan Klid:
Just a note about the Institute over the last few years. We have activated a Contemporary Ukrainian Studies Program. Dr. Bohdan Harasymiw headed it until just recently. We held a number of events, one or two in which Dr. Kuzio participated, and of course you know this is one of our areas of priority. In addition, as of 2014 we have also instituted two post-doc fellowships focused on contemporary or modern Ukraine. We also have been working closely with Professor Yaroslav Hrytsak in Lviv on problems of modern Ukraine, and I know that through my work in HREC—the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium—we are working not only on a historical problem, that is, the Holodomor specifically, but also on topics of concern to the contemporary world, and one of them is an upcoming conference on the Holodomor and colonialism. So it is not as black as you paint it.
Serhii Plokhii:
Maybe it is black and white, or maybe grey.
Mark Von Hagen:
I am Mark Von Hagen, and I wear a lot of hats. One of them is half in the Political Science Department at Arizona State University—for my sins, I suppose. My other half is, strangely enough, not in history these days but in the School of International Letters and Cultures. But that is another story.
On the topic of political science, I will start with my own example. I gave a talk to my faculty seminar in political science on my own research project, which is about the creation of the Ukrainian state out of World War I and [Russian] Revolution, from 1914 to 1922. The graduate students in international relations came. One junior faculty person who does research on Eastern Europe came. No senior person in any other field, no tenured person, came to my talk. I am used to being ignored by historians because I study Ukraine, but it was even more apparent that political science was not interested in the world outside the United States, and that is part of our “Las Vegas complex” concerning Ukraine (what happens in Ukraine stays in Ukraine), which is of course foolish and a delusion.
I will not leave it at my example. My presumed successor, or possible successor, as director of the Melikian Center (Russian, Eurasian, and East European centre at Arizona State) is Sam Green; he currently teaches at King’s College, London. He is a political scientist with a British degree from University College London and spent about eight years at the Carnegie Moscow Center studying Russian politics. He came out with a book on the protest movement. For his talk two weeks ago, I was the only person from political science of a senior rank. But for the poor junior person I just mentioned, not a single person came, even though his talk was a very creative adaptation of the field of political psychology from American political science. Arizona State has two specialists on political psychology. Not one of them showed up to his talk. It seems that if you do not do numbers, and if you do not do US politics, you do not attract much attention, and that is too bad for political science.
When I was at Harriman a couple of weeks ago for their 70th anniversary (another anniversary we can talk about), I spoke with Alex Cooley, a political scientist, who said he has given up on trying to get his colleagues in political science to care about Central and Eastern Europe, because political scientists care about numbers. They do not care about peoples, they do not care about their cultures. You are blaming the victim, I think, in some sort of way, because political science has abandoned us; it is not that we have abandoned political science. I started as an undergraduate at Georgetown in international relations. I read political science, or what was then called “government and politics,” and international politics, and now I really find it difficult to read anything that my political science colleagues write because it is all about numbers and graphs and charts, and very little to do with the real world and real-world problems. But the situation in the social sciences is such that “Putin is not Russia”: political science is not social science. Thank goodness we have anthropologists and sociologists, who were mentioned, who are doing wonderful work, who still believe in talking to people, who still believe in listening to their stories, who still believe in studying their languages and cultures—and they can be our allies until political science comes back from wherever it landed, an area of almost irrelevance. I have my own theory about this: that political scientists [had] a sort of economics envy and wanted to make the salaries and have the potential influence that economists had, and so they went into this rational choice for political science, [in which] the most important qualification is multivariate statistical analysis. That is what language means to them: numbers. If numbers have overtaken people, we cannot expect political science to come back to us soon. It is going to take a reconstruction of political science before they can come back to us.
Bohdan Harasymiw:
The situation in political science is not quite so bleak or black and white, because at the same time as the main body of political scientists does do the kind of inscrutable and apparently irrelevant work that Mark Von Hagen just described, there is a whole cohort of young American academics, many of whom have no genetic connection to Ukraine, who are specialists in the politics of Ukraine. I have in mind primarily people like Henry Hale from George Washington University, and they are publishing and researching and uncovering Ukraine from a political science point of view. In addition to those, there are, as Mark said, various people in anthropology and related disciplines who are doing the same thing as well. There is a cohort of scholars, but unfortunately they are Americans, and we do not have many Canadians in this field, unless we include people like Lucan Way at the University of Toronto, and maybe he should have been invited here as well.
Dominique Arel:
Well, Bohdan [Harasymiw] already said what I wanted to say, and I am going to be speaking tomorrow, but it is good that we have provocative comments. But Mark, when you say political scientists have run away from us, or kind of distanced themselves from us, well, the “us” actually includes the political scientists who study Ukraine—that is, it is internal to political science. I will provide the figures tomorrow, but just off the top of my head, in the last twelve years we probably had 60 political scientists who actually do fieldwork and generally do not publish in the inscrutable journals that you mentioned. I will provide more details tomorrow.
Oleksandr Melnyk:
Just a brief comment regarding the general context of Ukrainian studies and possible future direction. It seems to me that it is important to keep in mind the broader context in which this is taking place, whether it is political, cultural, or economic. And I think, from my experience this past year meeting a lot of people outside academia, I understand the economy in Canada and the United States is shifting radically. There is a generational sort of growth. Everybody in business circles talks about millennials and reaching out to them. There is also an economic change. It is not just in Ukrainian studies or the humanities: the university itself is potentially coming into a greatly diminished role in the future, because in certain types of professions you no longer require a university degree to perform the job efficiently.
The other point is about Ukraine. Related to this larger context, a lot of people in this field talk about the importance of interdisciplinary teams for solving real problems. Ukraine has a lot of problems, but Ukraine’s problems are not unique to Ukraine. Many problems that Ukraine is experiencing today—whether statehood, security matters, or nation-building—apply to many places all across the world in different ways. The world is interconnected, and what happens in Ukraine, the Middle East, and Africa affects the world at large. It has consequences for the US and Europe, to an even larger degree at this moment. It seems to me that Ukraine’s problems can be looked at as an opportunity for Ukrainian studies potentially to engage in this broader complex and to mobilize different constituents. To echo some of the comments that Professor Lupul has been making, these constituents are within the Ukrainian community as well as in Canadian society at large, possibly government organizations, and international structures. We can advance Ukrainian studies not only by pushing the field in different directions but also by serving the larger community.
Answers and comments
Manoly Lupul:
I want to follow up on what David Marples said. There has been talk here about optimism and pessimism, and it is nice to hear that there are so many students in the Department of History and Classics. I also know who brought them there—people like Drs. Marples and Himka, and there are others. How long will they last? As you know, they are either retired or about to retire. That is one comment. We do not have replacements at the present time. Now, if the replacements are going to come, since he also mentioned the fact that a good number of them are now from Ukraine, then they should follow, in my opinion, the example of our own moderator, Serhii. One certainly would not be mistaken in urging perhaps at least six months if they have an idea in mind to teach in Canada. If they are going back home, it is irrelevant.
If you are a professor raising these future scholars, I would think that if they intend to function in this country, then at least introduce them to the history of Canada, especially its political and cultural aspects. Especially introduce them to the Ukrainian problematic. They need to know that these people do have problems, and they appreciate someone talking to them about those problems. Especially, for example, at the present time, and for the last decade at least, they should have been talked to about the nature of changing university life, especially university administrative life, because it has changed radically from when I was a director. I had freedom, precious freedom. It does not exist now. Instead there is too much worry about simply picking up the money and even getting students who are not very likely to remain here. What about those who are going to remain? They should be aware of the situation in North America and especially in Canada, or they will have a very difficult time dealing with, as I said, the nuanced maze of the culture of academia when it comes to dealing with authority, where there is political and senior authority. They are cute and they are good: they know just how to fox minorities or non-mainstream interests, to make a specialty of it, because you are so marginal.
Paul Robert Magocsi:
Very briefly, it seems that one kind of thread that has been going on in this discussion is concrete institutions that in this case happened to focus on the study of Ukraine and the rest of the world, including in Ukraine. Just because an institution is physically located in one place does not mean that it should not be concerned, as part of its mandate, with the entire world. This may come as a surprise to some people who are focused on one particular geographic area, but I mean, if I heard correctly just now, why should we be concerned with students who come here to the University of Alberta for a couple of years and then do not stay here and go back to Ukraine? Well, that is primarily what we should be concerned about. If you are interested in sharing and expanding your expertise, [taking part in] transforming a society that needs to be transformed in a post-Soviet world, that is part of our job as well. You know, institutions are in one place, but their concern, if they are studying a particular subject, is worldwide.
Frank Sysyn:
To Ambassador Fraser’s point—I think yes, the return to area studies is important. Where area studies institutes have been maintained, the fields have been largely protected. I pointed out Columbia and Harriman. The others would be, of course, the Munk [School of Global Affairs] at the University of Toronto, and the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies. Without them, I do not think there would have been a great change. At the University of Alberta, what that largely has meant is the existence of CIUS plus the Kule Folklore Centre and the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies. These are really what constitutes the area studies community, and that is a place they can be worked on.
Then there is a point to be made on strategies. One of the most important strategies has been post-docs. Bohdan Klid brought up the post-docs here, at the University of Alberta. By the way, the Institute has had considerable funds that Department of History students receive because they have been endowed at the Institute for carrying on such work. But we also have experience from the Jacyk post-doc at the University of Toronto: in the seven years that they have been given, five of those people have gone on to tenure-track positions. I grant you that that was remarkably fortunate. I do not say that is going to hold. That is the difficulty of academic jobs, but by giving younger people in the field at least a chance, a year or two or three, we see whether they fit into the field. There are also post-docs at Columbia and other such places. I agree that one cannot do all the fields, but the institutionalization that has been done for Ukrainian studies [has helped] in some ways. […] There are more possibilities for maintaining ourselves, at least for a while, by dealing with Ukraine with these post-docs and the institutions created. [In contrast,] there are great problems for Polish studies at the moment (Spain was also brought up, or Romania), so our institutions do create a certain structure, you know. Whether it fulfills all needs and will fit with the teaching faculties remains a problem.
Zenon Kohut:
I would like to reassure Professor Lupul that CIUS, at least, was and is going to continue to be very closely linked with the community. The problem is that the community has changed: the P & B organizations that were so powerful then are virtually non-existent now, and we have to refocus our links with the community. For example, CIUS’s pivot toward Ukraine was not only a natural outcome of Ukrainian independence but also a demand of the community. Most of the money coming for endowments was for projects that dealt with Ukraine, and not only studying Ukraine but doing work in Ukraine, such as the Kowalsky Program for the Study of Eastern Ukraine. We have established a whole number of institutions in Ukraine, and this was a demand of the community, because it was funded by the Kowalskys, who gave $2 million for this. Thus, that was also a community thing, and we have been working very hard with the community throughout the period. Then, the other pivot to Ukraine was also working with the community and government there. In the 1990s, for almost a decade we had a program for legislative reforms in Ukraine. Looking back at it, you might think this was extremely naïve at that time, but the community was also demanding that we do something there, and we obliged. We got a major CIDA[1] grant and a subsequent CIDA grant, and worked for about eight years with that. So there has always been a relationship with the community, and I think serving the community was and will continue to be a major avenue of activity for CIUS.
Taras Kuzio:
Just on that particular final point. My friends in Boston say that one of the major differences between HURI and CIUS is that HURI does not reach out to the community in Boston. At least that is what my Boston friends said.
Professor Von Hagen, you are right about political science in America. The Economist did a very detailed analysis of why political science completely failed to see Trump coming or predict his success. Political scientists were writing him off all the time, and in that sense they are irrelevant to this discussion.
On the question of Bohdan Klid’s conferences, I personally think those kinds of conferences are a waste of money. Why? Because they do not exert any influence in academic discussion. Unless you have people writing conference papers and then getting them published, it does not matter. Without getting them published, there is no influence. What lasting influence do you have from those conferences? I am sorry, you do not. The problem we have today is that when Ukrainian studies were founded, there was no interest in newspapers for op-eds, or blogs, or social media; that did not exist. Now it exists, and it is the battleground with Russophilia or Putinophilia, however you want to call it. It is not just in academia, and maybe people missed the number, but since 2014 nearly 300 articles have been published dealing with the Ukraine-Russia crisis, and on the Donbas and the Crimea—three hundred! Ukrainian studies are not really part of that debate, and that’s the problem we have, because Ukrainian studies are dominated by historians, not political scientists. Historians do not go on TV and radio, as Professor Sysyn did in Toronto in 2014. Historians do not write blogs or do Facebook, and they do not do op-eds. In fact, in the whole of North America there are really only four people doing op-eds on Ukraine: Karatnycky, Motyl, Marples, and Kuzio. That is it.
To give you one example of fostering influence, the rather loathsome and unpleasant British academic Richard Sakwa (whose book on the Ukraine-Russia crisis is kind of “Putin lite”) published an e-book on the Euromaidan Ukraine-Russia crisis, and it has had 30,000 downloads. That is influence: 500 to 1,000 have been sold in hard copy, but 30,000 have been downloaded free of charge as e-books. We are not anywhere near that in Ukrainian studies, but that is the way we should go. I think if those conferences that Bohdan Klid talked about had been published as a special issue of the CIUS journal, I would have some sympathy, but they were not. You continue to focus exclusively on the Holodomor.
Serhii Plokhii:
Thank you. I am really tempted to ask for one more positive comment now [laughter], but we really do not have any time. So again, let me thank the participants in the panel. And thank you, all of you, for your questions and comments.
[1] Canadian International Development Agency (1968–2013).