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https://theconversation.com/ukraine-is-unlikely-ever-to-return-to-the-russian-empire-in-a-new-book-mark-edele-unpacks-whats-at-stake-in-a-bloody-war-211497>
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Review: Russia’s War Against Ukraine: The Whole Story – Mark Edele (MUP)
“The whole story” is an unexpected subtitle for a book by a historian. We have
long been alert to the fact that, faced with the boundless chaos of empirical
facts, historians make selections.
In order to make intelligible narratives, they propose causes and effects.
Their accounts imply interpretations and, inevitably, evaluations. The number
of potential “stories” about a given topic is infinite.
Historian Mark Edele, author of
Stalinism at War: The Soviet Union in World
War II,
The Soviet Union: A Short History and several other highly regarded
books, knows this well. His subtitle is a provocation: it accuses his academic
field – call it Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies, or Slavic and East European
Studies, or Eurasian Studies – of telling us what is patently not the whole
story of the Russia-Ukraine relationship.
Edele, along with historian Rebecca Friedman, has begun editing a new series of
short books for Cambridge University Press dedicated to “decolonising Soviet
history”. By decentralising this history away from Moscow, they write,
contributions will both decolonize Soviet history and provincialize the
former metropole: Russia.[…] Why is this worth doing? Russia’s war of
aggression against Ukraine has further amplified voices in our field who
have called for a ‘decolonization’ of our thinking, writing, and teaching
about the former Soviet space. This is an urgent matter.
These words were addressed to scholars. Edele’s new book
Russia’s War Against
Ukraine, by contrast, is chiefly written for non-specialists. The book makes
its argument of decolonisation by implication, treating Ukrainian realia as
things-in-themselves rather than peripheral parts of an essentially Russian
whole.
One aspect of the Russocentrism of Western scholarship about the Soviet and
post-Soviet space is the fact that research into the non-Russian parts has
mostly been left to scholars with a personal background linking them to the
countries about which they write.
Most accounts of Ukrainian history in English – including the notable works of
Serhii Plokhy and Serhy Yekelchyk, both of whom Edele generously cites – are by
historians of Ukrainian origin.
Edele’s book departs from this custom, a fact that the author emphasises. “This
is a book by an outsider written for outsiders."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
