Ukraine and Russia in their Historical Encounter

Encounter (cf. Canadian Slavonic Papers, Vol. XXXV, Nos. 1-2, March-June, 1993, pp. 131-147) can be considered response to Omeljan Pritsak's invitation in the foreword to begin between Ukrainian and Russian historians. Dmitriev accepts this invitation and rightly states that, Only now, following the colossal changes in the republics of the former USSR, are conditions developing for truly free and productive between historians of Ukraine and (p. 147). It should be admitted here that a truly free dialogue is now only in its initial stage, and that the current state of relations between the two historiographies can be defined more in terms of confrontation than of dialogue. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the historical profession in Russia was left with only few experts in Ukrainian history; those who study it are primarily specialists in the related fields of Russian and Soviet history. This situation is due in part to the way in which Soviet historiography was planned and managed by Soviet ideologists: national histories were studied at the Institutes of of the republican Academies of Sciences, while all-Russian and all-Union topics were reserved for the Institute of of the in Moscow and Leningrad. This party policy eventually created an atmosphere in which those Russian historians who studied Ukrainian topics did so in an allRussian or all-Union context. They now face serious difficulties in treating the histories of Russia and Ukraine as histories of separate nations. Party policy and the availability of archival materials encouraged scholars in Ukraine to pursue their research predominantly in the field of Ukrainian history or, more precisely, the history of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The huge complement of historians of the CPSU in Ukraine was oriented toward the study of topics in local party history. Even though Ukrainian scholars in Ukraine were, generally speaking, as remote from the study of Russian topics as their colleagues in Russia were from Ukrainian subjects, the former appear by and large better prepared to initiate dialogue, owing to the simple fact that they studied the history of Russia labeled History of the USSR or History of the