Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies – serie

The warp and weft of political and social relationships among the medieval elite were formed by marriages made between royal families. Ties of Kinship establishes a new standard for tracking the dynastic marriages of the ruling family of Rus´—the descendants of Volodimer (Volodimeroviči). Utilizing a modern scholarly approach and a broad range of primary sources from inside and outside Rus´, Christian Raffensperger has created a fully realized picture of the Volodimeroviči from the tenth through the twelfth centuries and the first comprehensive, scholarly treatment of the subject in English.Alongside more than twenty-two genealogical charts with accompanying bibliographic information, this work presents an analysis of the Volodimeroviči dynastic marriages with modern interpretations and historical contextualization that highlights the importance of Rus´ in a medieval European framework. This study will be used by Slavists, Byzantinists, and West European medievalists as the new baseline for research on the Volodimeroviči and their complex web of relationships with the world beyond.

The biblical image of David and Goliath captures fittingly the nature of the war that Russia, the world’s largest country by surface area, unleashed on neighboring Ukraine, a country that—while still the largest on the European continent—is almost thirty times smaller and has only over a quarter of Russia’s population. Yet Ukraine’s stubborn resistance proves that it is possible to mount a successful defense against an enormously larger, more populous, and better equipped enemy, even despite its threats of nuclear apocalypse should Ukraine refuse to submit and the West dare to interfere. This volume shows that history can help reveal the reasons for Ukraine’s resolve and success on the battlefield and in the public arena.Collected in David and Goliath for the first time are short essays, commentaries, and interviews written and given by Serhii Plokhy, the world’s preeminent scholar of Ukrainian history, on the eve and during the first two years of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Plokhy draws our attention to the unique nature of the truly historic events of the largest war in Europe since the end of World War II.

In December 1994, Ukraine gave up the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world and signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, having received assurances that its sovereignty would be respected and secured by Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Based on original and heretofore unavailable documents, Yuri Kostenko’s account of the negotiations between Ukraine, Russia, and the US reveals for the first time the internal debates of the Ukrainian government as well as the pressure exerted upon it by its international partners.Kostenko presents an insider’s view on the issue of nuclear disarmament and raises the question of whether the complete and immediate dismantlement of the country’s enormous nuclear arsenal was strategically the right decision, especially in view of the 2014 annexation of Crimea by Russia, one of the guarantors of Ukraine’s sovereignty under denuclearization.

Ukrainian nationalism made worldwide news after the Euromaidan revolution and the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian war in 2014. Invoked by regional actors and international commentators, the “integral” Ukrainian nationalism of the 1930s has moved to the center of debates about Eastern Europe, but the history of this divisive ideology remains poorly understood.This timely book by Trevor Erlacher is the first English-language biography of the doctrine’s founder, Dmytro Dontsov (1883–1973), the “spiritual father” of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Organizing his research of the period around Dontsov’s life, Erlacher has written a global intellectual history of Ukrainian integral nationalism from late imperial Russia to postwar North America, with relevance for every student of the history of modern Europe and the diaspora.Thanks to the circumstances of Dontsov’s itinerant, ninety-year life, this microhistorical approach allows for a geographically, chronologically, and thematically broad yet personal view on the topic. Dontsov shaped and embodied Ukrainian politics and culture as a journalist, diplomat, literary critic, publicist, and ideologue, progressing from heterodox Marxism, to avant-garde fascism, to theocratic traditionalism.Drawing upon archival research in Ukraine, Poland, and Canada, this book contextualizes Dontsov’s works, activities, and identity formation diachronically, reconstructing the cultural, political, urban, and intellectual milieus within which he developed and disseminated his worldview.

Of the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian women were sentenced to the Gulag in the 1940s and 1950s, only half survived. In Survival as Victory, Oksana Kis has produced the first anthropological study of daily life in the Soviet forced labor camps as experienced by Ukrainian women prisoners.Based on the written memoirs, autobiographies, and oral histories of over 150 survivors, this book fills a lacuna in the scholarship regarding Ukrainian experience. Kis details the women’s resistance to the brutality of camp conditions not only through the preservation of customs and traditions from everyday home life, but also through the frequent elision of regional and confessional differences. Following the groundbreaking work of Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History (2003), this book is a must-read for anyone interested in gendered strategies of survival, accommodation, and resistance to the dehumanizing effects of the Gulag.

For the first time, this collection makes available a selection of documents on the history of Jews in old Rus’ that provide unique insight into Slavic–Jewish relations, offering both the original texts in Latin, Hebrew, Church Slavonic, and Arabic, and their English translations.Adding nuance to our understanding of the difficult relations Rus’ had with Khazaria, Jews in Old Rus’ also realigns the position of East European Jews within the larger diaspora of European Jews. This collection meticulously presents legal rulings, religious and liturgical customs, practices regarding food and garments, linguistic acculturation, and the political loyalties of Jews in old Rus’.

The Frontline presents a selection of essays drawn together for the first time to form a companion volume to Serhii Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe and Chernobyl. Here he expands upon his analysis in earlier works of key events in Ukrainian history, including Ukraine’s complex relations with Russia and the West, the burden of tragedies such as the Holodomor and World War II, the impact of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and Ukraine’s contribution to the collapse of the Soviet Union.Juxtaposing Ukraine’s history to the contemporary politics of memory, this volume provides a multidimensional image of a country that continues to make headlines around the world. Eloquent in style and comprehensive in approach, the essays collected here reveal the roots of the ongoing political, cultural, and military conflict in Ukraine, the largest country in Europe.

The Frontline presents a selection of essays drawn together for the first time to form a companion volume to Serhii Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe and Chernobyl. Here he expands upon his analysis in earlier works of key events in Ukrainian history, including Ukraine’s complex relations with Russia and the West, the burden of tragedies such as the Holodomor and World War II, the impact of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and Ukraine’s contribution to the collapse of the Soviet Union.Juxtaposing Ukraine’s history to the contemporary politics of memory, this volume provides a multidimensional image of a country that continues to make headlines around the world. Eloquent in style and comprehensive in approach, the essays collected here reveal the roots of the ongoing political, cultural, and military conflict in Ukraine, the largest country in Europe.

In 2014, Russia illegally annexed Crimea, bolstered a separatist conflict in the Donbas region, and attacked Ukraine with its regular army and special forces. In each instance of Russian aggression, the U.S. response has often been criticized as inadequate, insufficient, or hesitant.The Moscow Factor: U.S. Policy toward Sovereign Ukraine and the Kremlin is a unique study that examines four key Ukraine-related policy decisions across two Republican and two Democratic U.S. administrations. Eugene M. Fishel asks whether, how, and under what circumstances Washington has considered Ukraine’s status as a sovereign nation in its decisionmaking regarding relations with Moscow.This study situates the stance of the United States toward Ukraine in the broader context of international relations. It fills an important lacuna in existing scholarship and policy discourse by focusing on the complex trilateral—rather than simply bilateral—dynamics between the United States, Ukraine, and Russia from 1991 to 2016. This book brings together for the first time documentary evidence and declassified materials dealing with policy deliberation, retrospective articles authored by former policymakers, and formal memoirs by erstwhile senior officials. The study is also supplemented by open-ended interviews with former and returning officials.

In 2014, Russia illegally annexed Crimea, bolstered a separatist conflict in the Donbas region, and attacked Ukraine with its regular army and special forces. In each instance of Russian aggression, the U.S. response has often been criticized as inadequate, insufficient, or hesitant.The Moscow Factor: U.S. Policy toward Sovereign Ukraine and the Kremlin is a unique study that examines four key Ukraine-related policy decisions across two Republican and two Democratic U.S. administrations. Eugene M. Fishel asks whether, how, and under what circumstances Washington has considered Ukraine’s status as a sovereign nation in its decision-making regarding relations with Moscow.This study situates the stance of the United States toward Ukraine in the broader context of international relations. It fills an important lacuna in existing scholarship and policy discourse by focusing on the complex trilateral—rather than simply bilateral—dynamics between the United States, Ukraine, and Russia from 1991 to 2016. This book brings together for the first time documentary evidence and declassified materials dealing with policy deliberation, retrospective articles authored by former policymakers, and formal memoirs by erstwhile senior officials. The study is also supplemented by open-ended interviews with former and returning officials.

Using Ukraine as a case-in-point, Svitlana Krasynska engages diverse bodies of literature and rich empirical data to reveal the vital role and unique potential of below-the-radar civic engagement in contexts where informal practices abound—a phenomenon largely neglected by scholars of civil society who traditionally focus on formal civic organizations.Civil society in Eastern Europe has long been labeled weak based on a general lack of citizen participation in formal civil society organizations—a key criterion for assessing civic engagement in comparative studies. However, such assessment of civil society fails to recognize the role and impact of informal civic engagement in contexts where informality permeates economic, political, and social spheres. Ukraine offers a valuable counterargument of the importance of informal civil society in Eastern Europe, especially in the post-Soviet countries.Krasynska convincingly shows that informality constitutes an essential component of civil society, shaping popular approaches to addressing social, economic, and political issues. The trailblazing findings in Self-Organization will be of interest to scholars of democratization, informality, and area studies, and they will aid development practitioners and policy makers in determining a more effective approach to helping fledgling democracies around the world.

Millions of innocent people were arrested in Stalin’s Soviet Union during the 1930s in different waves of mass repression. Under violent interrogation, many were forced to confess to crimes they did not commit. Rather than save their lives, as the interrogators had promised, confession was usually the last step to their execution. Very few of those arrested eventually refused to confess.Oleksandr Shums’kyi, the Ukrainian Marxist revolutionary, was one of the most important but least known of them. He not only refused to confess but sustained for over a decade a massive protest against his repression and the Stalinist attack on his country, Ukraine. Stalin punished him mercilessly in response, paralyzing him in jail and murdering his wife, but refrained from assassinating him for more than ten years.This book unravels the Shums’kyi riddle to explain why. In doing so, it opens a new window into understanding the history of Soviet repression and the Russian pathologies toward Ukrainian independence, which help us understand Russia’s current war against Ukraine.

Millions of innocent people were arrested in Stalin’s Soviet Union during the 1930s in different waves of mass repression. Under violent interrogation, many were forced to confess to crimes they did not commit. Rather than save their lives, as the interrogators had promised, confession was usually the last step to their execution. Very few of those arrested eventually refused to confess.Oleksandr Shums’kyi, the Ukrainian Marxist revolutionary, was one of the most important but least known of them. He not only refused to confess but sustained for over a decade a massive protest against his repression and the Stalinist attack on his country, Ukraine. Stalin punished him mercilessly in response, paralyzing him in jail and murdering his wife, but refrained from assassinating him for more than ten years.This book unravels the Shums’kyi riddle to explain why. In doing so, it opens a new window into understanding the history of Soviet repression and the Russian pathologies toward Ukrainian independence, which help us understand Russia’s current war against Ukraine.

In Breaking the Bonds of Corruption, Elena Denisova-Schmidt takes a broad view of corruption and its prevalence in global societies, using the case of Ukraine to examine practices that are considered corrupt in historical, social, and economic perspectives. She investigates corrupt behavior in higher education, both in Ukraine and internationally, as well as reliance on corruption in Ukrainian business. For both areas, the author relies on studies and polling that she and her colleagues administered at a number of Ukrainian universities and with Ukrainian businesses. This is the first English-language book dedicated to examining corruption as a widespread social phenomenon in post-Soviet Ukraine and makes an important contribution to the maturing study of informal practices in Ukraine and the region.

In Breaking the Bonds of Corruption, Elena Denisova-Schmidt takes a broad view of corruption and its prevalence in global societies, using the case of Ukraine to examine practices that are considered corrupt in historical, social, and economic perspectives. She investigates corrupt behavior in higher education, both in Ukraine and internationally, as well as reliance on corruption in Ukrainian business. For both areas, the author relies on studies and polling that she and her colleagues administered at a number of Ukrainian universities and with Ukrainian businesses. This is the first English-language book dedicated to examining corruption as a widespread social phenomenon in post-Soviet Ukraine and makes an important contribution to the maturing study of informal practices in Ukraine and the region.

In December 1994, Ukraine gave up the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world and signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, having received assurances that its sovereignty would be respected and secured by Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Based on original and heretofore unavailable documents, Yuri Kostenko’s account of the negotiations between Ukraine, Russia, and the US reveals for the first time the internal debates of the Ukrainian government as well as the pressure exerted upon it by its international partners.Kostenko presents an insider’s view on the issue of nuclear disarmament and raises the question of whether the complete and immediate dismantlement of the country’s enormous nuclear arsenal was strategically the right decision, especially in view of the 2014 annexation of Crimea by Russia, one of the guarantors of Ukraine’s sovereignty under denuclearization.

The biblical image of David and Goliath captures fittingly the nature of the war that Russia, the world’s largest country by surface area, unleashed on neighboring Ukraine, a country that—while still the largest on the European continent—is almost thirty times smaller and has only over a quarter of Russia’s population. Yet Ukraine’s stubborn resistance proves that it is possible to mount a successful defense against an enormously larger, more populous, and better equipped enemy, even despite its threats of nuclear apocalypse should Ukraine refuse to submit and the West dare to interfere. This volume shows that history can help reveal the reasons for Ukraine’s resolve and success on the battlefield and in the public arena.Collected in David and Goliath for the first time are short essays, commentaries, and interviews written and given by Serhii Plokhy, the world’s preeminent scholar of Ukrainian history, on the eve and during the first two years of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Plokhy draws our attention to the unique nature of the truly historic events of the largest war in Europe since the end of World War II.

In The Eye of the Mind, Maria Grazia Bartolini investigates how early modern Ukrainian preachers prompted their listeners to see and remember sermons by calling upon vision, memory, and mental imagery. With memorization recognized in Ukraine as a cognitive skill vital to the internalization of texts, these preachers, like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, designed their sermons to enable listeners to see the subject matter as mental images and situate them in imaginary locations for easy recall.Based on analysis of little-known printed and manuscript sources from the second half of the seventeenth century, Bartolini masterfully demonstrates how verbal and visual images within the sermon functioned as mnemonic devices that helped Ukrainian preachers construct and deliver sermons and evoked intellectual and emotional associations in the minds of the audience. The effect of this rhetorical practice, Bartolini argues, was to create a theatrum meditationis—a memory theater—in which the audience was encouraged to take part as spectators. By fully integrating intellectual history, visual studies, and rhetorical analysis, The Eye of the Mind provides a unique perspective on seventeenth-century religious orators and their audiences in Ukraine and beyond.

Collected here for the first time are selected essays, reviews, and remembrances by the award-winning Askold Melnyczuk—novelist, poet, essayist, translator, and editor—who has, for half a century, played an active role in shaping the American literary conversation. Articulating an unwavering faith in the civilizing power of literature, Melnyczuk’s With Madonna in Kyiv brings together meditations on the literary arts alongside recollections of writer-friends Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Oksana Zabuzhko, and others. This ardent, wide-ranging volume also includes pieces on writers such as Samuel Beckett, Grace Paley, Elias Khoury, Julian Barnes, Milan Kundera, Olga Tokarczuk, Delmore Schwartz, Alvaro Mutis, Orhan Pamuk, Chinua Achebe, Lesia Ukrainka, Vasyl Stus, and Volodymyr Dibrova.

Collected here for the first time are selected essays, reviews, and remembrances by the award-winning Askold Melnyczuk—novelist, poet, essayist, translator, and editor—who has, for half a century, played an active role in shaping the American literary conversation. Articulating an unwavering faith in the civilizing power of literature, Melnyczuk’s With Madonna in Kyiv brings together meditations on the literary arts alongside recollections of writer-friends Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Oksana Zabuzhko, and others. This ardent, wide-ranging volume also includes pieces on writers such as Samuel Beckett, Grace Paley, Elias Khoury, Julian Barnes, Milan Kundera, Olga Tokarczuk, Delmore Schwartz, Alvaro Mutis, Orhan Pamuk, Chinua Achebe, Lesia Ukrainka, Vasyl Stus, and Volodymyr Dibrova.

Ritual and the Body explores how people experience life’s most profound transitions: birth, marriage, and death. Drawing on Ukrainian folk traditions, Maria Mayerchyk shows how rituals mark changes in social status by shaping how the body moves, speaks, eats, hears, and even feels itself to exist.From christenings and weddings to funerals, the book follows key figures and moments of ritual life—the newborn child, parents, newlyweds, and the deceased—and reveals how bodily states, clothing, sound, food, light and darkness, joy and grief all carry meaning. With clarity and insight, Mayerchyk invites readers to see the human body as a powerful cultural language, one through which communities make sense of loss, transformation, and belonging.

Ritual and the Body explores how people experience life’s most profound transitions: birth, marriage, and death. Drawing on Ukrainian folk traditions, Maria Mayerchyk shows how rituals mark changes in social status by shaping how the body moves, speaks, eats, hears, and even feels itself to exist.From christenings and weddings to funerals, the book follows key figures and moments of ritual life—the newborn child, parents, newlyweds, and the deceased—and reveals how bodily states, clothing, sound, food, light and darkness, joy and grief all carry meaning. With clarity and insight, Mayerchyk invites readers to see the human body as a powerful cultural language, one through which communities make sense of loss, transformation, and belonging.

The work of Alexander A. Potebnja, a leading Ukrainian linguist of the nineteenth century, has significantly influenced modern literary criticism, particularly Russian formalism and structuralism. Potebnja's theory, known as potebnjanstvo (Potebnjanism), flourished in the Russian Empire and in the Soviet Union during the 1920s. It attracted scores of adherents and gave rise to an influential literary journal and a formal critical school at Kharkiv. Yet despite his remarkable achievements in linguistics and literary theory, Potebnja's work was officially renounced in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and in the West he remains virtually unknown.In his study, John Fizer carefully reconstructs Potebnja's theory of literature from the psycholinguistic formulations found in his works on language, mythology, and folklore. Elaborating Potebnja's concept of internal form, energeia, polysemy, and the semiosis of poetic discourse, Fizer develops the central tenets of Potebnja's theory with regard to their philosophical, psychological, and linguistic bases. Largely influenced by Kant and by Humboldt's philosophy of language, Potebnja conceived of language and the verbal arts as coterminous phenomena. He identified the internal form with the etymon of the word, which he considered the preeminent locus in the structure of poetic art. He insisted on the dynamic role of the Self in poetic creation and perception but, unlike many of his contemporaries, he believed that the diachronic depth of the signifiers was ethnic and had measureable limits. According to Potebnja, this depth (or internal form) reveals itself as a semantically multivalent image that induces self-knowledge and transforms the primary data of consciousness into syntagmatic wholes.A great deal of Potebnja's theory shares similarities with the work of Benedetto Croce, Leo Spitzer, and Charles S. Pierce. It anticipated modern literary criticism, and, as the author convincingly argues, retains existential and epistemological cogency even today. Fizer's volume offers the first thorough study of Potebnja's literary theory, and his insightful analysis restores Potebnja to his rightful place in the history of literary criticism.

The first half of the twentieth century was in many respects crucial for the evolution and character of Modern Standard Ukrainian. Prior to World War I, the Ukraine was divided between the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian Empires. The standard language lacked uniformity even though the primacy of the standard established in Russian-dominated Ukraine was theoretically accepted in Austrian-ruled Galicia and Bukovina. Up to 1905 the tsarist government forbade the public use of Ukrainian beyond belles-lettres, and excluded it from education until 1917. In the interwar period the country was divided among the USSR, Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia, and social and cultural conditions differed drastically.George Shevelov’s book, based on extensive study of factual material, traces the development of Modern Standard Ukrainian in relation to the political, legal, and cultural conditions within each region. It examines the relation of the standard language to the underlying dialects, the ways in which the standard language was enriched, and the complex struggle for the unity of the language and sometimes for its very existence. While shunning excess linguistic terminology, the book presents the essentials of linguistic development in connection with broad political and cultural conditions.

This volume contains the papers presented at the Third Quinquennial Conference on Ukrainian Economics, held at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University, in 1985. The first two conferences and their proceedings were devoted to the Ukraine’s current economic conditions and to selected contributions of its scholars to economics. The present proceedings contain fourteen previously unpublished essays dealing with the one thousand years of Ukrainian economic history prior to the outbreak of the First World War.The contributions are divided chronologically into three parts, covering the periods of Kievan Rus’, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the nineteenth century. They are not intended to give a comprehensive survey of Ukrainian economic history, but primarily to deal with important economic issues of particular periods. The problem of the orientation of the Kievan Principality with regard to the Nomadic East and the Byzantine South is discussed in the first part. The authors of the volume’s second part analyze the economic ties of the Ukrainian economy during the rise and fall of Cossackdom and, subsequently, the Hetman State, with the West and Muscovy. The contributions in the third part deal with the important problems of economic development during the Ukraine’s rebirth as a modern nation in the past century. Issues discussed include: population change, industrialization, relations with the Russian Empire’s metropolis, urbanization, and the development of the southern and western (within the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy) regions. Finally, the introductory essay offers a proposal for a periodization scheme of Ukrainian economic history.

Odessa, one of the world's unique cities, was founded by Empress Catherine II in 1794 on the northern shore of the Black Sea. Settled close to the fertile Ukrainian steppe, Odessa soon became the Russian Empire's chief exporter of cereals to western Europe. Attracted by trade and the liberal policies of its early governors, Greeks, Italians, Jews, French, Armenians, and other nationalities immigrated to the city and the surrounding countryside. By the late nineteenth century Odessa was the most polyglot and cosmopolitan city in the empire. In the first decades of the twentieth century, however, strikes, revolutionary agitation, and pogroms brought about the city's decline.In this book Patricia Herlihy contrasts Odessa's rapid development during the nineteenth century with the growing tension within its society up to the First World War. Besides Ukrainian and Russian sources, she makes use of travel literature and consular reports, which offer an especially lively portrait of this bustling and turbulent port. The book is an important contribution not only to Ukrainian and Russian history, but also to the history of agricultural settlement, international commerce, urban expansion, and social life within a large and variegated nineteenth-century community.

Meletij Smotryc’kyj was one of the outstanding figures in the great flourishing of Orthodox spirituality that occurred in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century in response to the challenge posed first by Polish heterodox religious movements, and later by the Polish Counter-Reformation. His biography reflects the tensions and contradictions that characterized his “nation”—the Ruthenians, the Orthodox Christians of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Ruthenian patriots were torn between various allegiances to nation, church, and traditions. Thus, in Smotryc’kyj’s life we witness one of the later acts in the drama of the European Age of Reform, all the more important because for the first time the Reformation and Counter-Reformation came into direct daily contact with the Byzantine world of Orthodox Slavdom.David Frick’s biography—the first major English-language work on Smotryc’kyj—examines the ways in which established cultures were altered by cross-cultural understandings and misunderstandings, resulting from the confrontation and mutual adaptation of two or more diverse cultures. This study, which has affinities with the “microhistorical approach,” seeks to reconstruct details in the lives of individuals and pays special attention to the ways in which individual world views conflicted with each other and with various higher authorities. Meletij Smotryc’kyj will be of interest to scholars and students of Ukraine, Belarus, Poland-Lithuania, and those researching the history of the Uniate, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic Churches in Eastern Europe.

In 1903 Bogdan Kistiakovsky railed against Lenin's concept of a vanguard party to lead the revolution, remarking that he did not want to see the Romanov autocracy replaced with the despotism of Lenin in the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat. His charge was wholly consistent with a life (1868–1920) devoted to the development of rule of law in the Russian Empire—a new government based on respect for national minorities, human rights, and constitutional federalism. Susan Heuman's study shows the fresh urgency of Kistiakovsky's ideas as Russia, Ukraine, and the other countries of the former Soviet Union seek to establish precisely those values that Kistiakovsky put forth ninety years ago. Heuman's analysis and portrait of Kistiakovsky will provoke scholars of Russian and Ukrainian intellectual history to reassess early twentieth-century politics and society in the Russian Empire.

This volume contains the papers presented at the Third Quinquennial Conference on Ukrainian Economics, held at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University, in 1985. The first two conferences and their proceedings were devoted to the Ukraine’s current economic conditions and to selected contributions of its scholars to economics. The present proceedings contain fourteen previously unpublished essays dealing with the one thousand years of Ukrainian economic history prior to the outbreak of the First World War.The contributions are divided chronologically into three parts, covering the periods of Kievan Rus’, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the nineteenth century. They are not intended to give a comprehensive survey of Ukrainian economic history, but primarily to deal with important economic issues of particular periods. The problem of the orientation of the Kievan Principality with regard to the Nomadic East and the Byzantine South is discussed in the first part. The authors of the volume’s second part analyze the economic ties of the Ukrainian economy during the rise and fall of Cossackdom and, subsequently, the Hetman State, with the West and Muscovy. The contributions in the third part deal with the important problems of economic development during the Ukraine’s rebirth as a modern nation in the past century. Issues discussed include: population change, industrialization, relations with the Russian Empire’s metropolis, urbanization, and the development of the southern and western (within the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy) regions. Finally, the introductory essay offers a proposal for a periodization scheme of Ukrainian economic history.