Notes from the Field: Entangled History-Writing in Wartime Ukraine
Historians, at least the ones I like to talk to and to read, think a lot about subjectivity, which is to say one’s positionality vis-à-vis everyone and everything else. Where one is located in the larger social tapestry invariably structures narrative choices – as that vantage point will determine what a person sees. When writing history, positionality structures our understanding of human choices, especially in times of duress. For the reader, subjectivity is important for understanding authorial voice, the perspective of the person putting pen to paper. Who that person is – how they lived, were raised, the trials and tribulations they have faced until that point – will determine what they see, what they focus on, what they write about, how they view the world and their objects/subjects of study.
In the fourth year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it seems to me that many scholars of our region have forgotten this lesson – a crucial one in which you come to understand that subjectivity applies not just to your research – the people and places you write about – but also to yourself. This is a process through which you become aware of your own narrative presence and ideally take that into account as you work – acknowledging limitations, correcting where necessary. Anthropologists do this as a matter of course, knowing that social dynamics change with the introduction of a stranger with an accent and a notebook. Historians are a methodologically promiscuous bunch (it’s why I chose this discipline!). But this means that historians deal with subjectivity unevenly. At times, it really shows.
Though many of us understand this intuitively, I learned this formally in my first year of doctoral study in our methods course with Keith Baker at Stanford University. It was called “Approaches to History.” It was my favorite class in graduate school; in it we learned about historians and historiography or…narratives about the past and the people who write them. We started with Fernand Braudel’s longue durée, an approach to history-writing that came out of the Second World War. Braudel, as a POW in a Nazi camp, worked on his dissertation about the Mediterranean in the time of Philip II in his mind – rewriting, revising, rethinking – as his world collapsed around him. What is striking to me is that in response to the daily realities of war, Braudel receded deep in time – so far back, in fact, that the painful vicissitudes of the present became barely perceptible fluctuations in the history of the world. This was his intellectual response to war. We, historians of Ukraine, have to figure out what ours will be.
In Baker’s class we covered a lot of terrain. We talked of microhistories – stories that focus on a single event, a village community, or individual life. This does not mean that microhistory is “the history of the excluded, the powerless and the far away.” These are also not biographies. This approach asks important historical and historiographical questions with non-biographical goals in mind; it is “keen to evoke a period, mentalité, a problem.” This historian’s tool was thought up by early modern historians who deal with not having enough material, but historians of the modern period also use it to break through immovable metanarratives with greater precision. We also talked of fractured histories – responses to radical breaks or discontinuities that change how knowledge, power and discourse function. Michel Foucault coined a term for this – rupture – but how do we piece together what comes after? Sexualities (in the plural), the other, race, gender, class, and other subjectivities followed. I distinctly remember Keith Baker talking about making space for Ms. (that woman that exists between Mrs. and Miss), as a means of demonstrating how language structures the world around us – narrowing and sometimes opening possibilities.
These lessons from “approaches to history” came full circle in March – just two months after I quit my academic job. I was on a walk in Lviv with Natalie Nougayrède, a former journalist and a fellow at INDEX – a new center of documentation and exchange – where I was a scholar in residence for the month. Natalie is working on a project about storytelling in wartime, currently in Ukraine, but drawing on vast experience in other theaters – namely Chechnya, the Balkans, Syria. She reiterated on several occasions that she was not a war correspondent. As an historian, who has recently left the academy and my profession, I could relate to this delimitation of boundaries. Natalie is not only interested in storytelling but also in storytellers themselves – what they think about, how they understand their craft (and their purpose), what stories they try to tell (and why), and how they go about it.
On this walk, Natalie asked if she could pick my brain about storytelling. I was surprised by the question as historians are not typically asked these kinds of things. I thought about it for a second and then told Natalie all about the evolution of the historical profession after the Second World War (which we learned about in Keith Baker’s class). I also described how hard it is for us – as historians of Ukraine and the region – to operate under these current circumstances. Not only are we observing as the past gets abused and distorted across so many fronts, but the war itself is challenging what we thought we understood about our own profession. Historians think so much about silences and absences, because we know from our own research experiences how much is left out of the story. Yet, in Ukraine, what we have seen in response to Russia’s invasion is not silence, but an explosion of defiant expression – on the page, in theaters, in music, photography, art – deliberate acts that resist a war that Ukrainians know is meant to wipe them off the map and their memory from history. In this way, Russia’s war on Ukraine should encourage us to look differently at wars past.
As historians of the region, we know that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – and the response of Ukrainians (and the lack of response from so many others) – demands an intervention, but we are in the middle of it, and it can be hard to see the forest for the trees. The solutions we came up with prior to February 24, 2022 were undermined by our intellectual collective and its failure to foresee and explain Russia’s motivations, by continuously changing circumstances on the ground, and by the fact that time has collapsed – we are adjudicating contested pasts all along the very long timeline of Russia’s encounter with Ukraine (from prehistory onward) and all at once.
As historians of Ukraine, we also face seemingly insurmountable resistance from what is referred to as “the field” – the collective academic enterprise that studies Russia, Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and Eurasia. These are big structural considerations, but, if you remember how this talk began, the issue of subjectivity plays a significant role here, with historians of and from Ukraine being radicalised by the invasion. Not radicalised in the sense of becoming extreme, but radicalised in the sense that our understanding of the academy, our place in it and in the world around us, has been upended. Our colleagues can go about business as usual, many of us simply cannot.
Were it not for the full-scale invasion, I would probably still be working at the University of Manitoba, vaguely unhappy about being so far away from family (and about the weather), but trundling along with my teaching and service responsibilities, so that I could spend the summer traveling and working on my research projects. Russia’s full-scale invasion was a moment of rupture full of realizations – about the academy and its limitations, about the futility of decolonization in its present form, about my own impossibly difficult positionality, and the “pekel’na sumish” – a hellish mix as my friend in Bucha described it – that was my teaching load. My courses included Russian and comparative politics, the politics of memory, and courses about Ukrainian culture, where we inevitably went over centuries of repression, but also resistance.
Syllabus writing is narrative construction. The work is important, perhaps the most important thing we do as academics for the future, but it is the part of the job that is respected the least and takes the most serious toll on faculty. Faculty teaching about Ukraine tell stories that reside in an awkward liminal space between Eastern Europe (an entity that is rejected by its inhabitants and scholars, but its separation into smaller constituent parts, quite simply, further alienates Ukraine) and the Soviet Union/Russia. To make space for those stories in the academic world means to be in continuous conflict with colleagues who don’t understand what I am trying to do and who create knowledge believing that Ukraine is a fiction.
I found on this trip to Ukraine in March and April that it is actually much easier to work in Ukraine. As counterintuitive as it sounds, you may be less physically safe, but there are daily reminders about why the work matters, you see others tackling similar topics in different ways, and it encourages you to push forward. Being at INDEX, in the company of other writers who think about how to write about this war, made me think more about how we historians should go about ethically conveying the stakes of wars past. When you are not continuously on the defensive about Ukraine’s importance to the history of the region, you actually have space to think about how to more effectively relay that to others.
Some stories that academics want to tell, but don’t feel like they can, reside in the uncomfortable space between the personal and professional. To be of Ukrainian origin outside of Ukraine means dealing with difficult, painful histories early and often. Because of my name, this began the minute I left to go to college at 17 years old. I was confronted with the role of Ukrainians in the Holocaust (and questions of collaboration) well before I was ready for it: in my first year at the university a boy in our dorm told me that his grandmother told him Ukrainians were worse than the Germans. It was a steep learning curve for me from that point onward. Ukrainians were ambushed by the Kremlin’s insane rhetoric about Nazis, but we in the US have been dealing with this for generations. I grew up a stone’s throw away from the house where John Demjaniuk lived, my music lessons held in the back hall of the church where he attended mass. I remember, as a child, walking past the exterior walls of that building, which had been smeared the night before with red paint – a condemnation of us all for the crimes he was on trial for in Israel. This is what it meant to grow up as Ukrainian in America, perpetually called on by our neighbors – many of whom fled the same lands our grandparents did – to answer for the past.
February 24, 2022 brought all these early difficulties as a student in the academy rushing to the surface. And also, in the year prior to the full-scale invasion, I was spending extended periods of time with my maternal grandmother, who was descending further and further into vascular dementia. The hard days involved reliving Operation Barbarossa over and over again until she went to bed. Bombers thundering overhead, the family fleeing for cover in the ravines hugging the Dniester, their exodus on foot to become forced laborers in Germany, a childhood disrupted thoroughly by war. We spent many days together in this ravine, in filtration camps for forced laborers, as Baba shared vivid memories of unexpected human kindness, then on the boat to America, and what it felt like when the Statue of Liberty came into view. On February 24, 2022, Baba Maria saw the news and then got fully dressed, shoes and all, closed the curtains in her room, tucked herself into bed without dinner. Her memories of WWII had come crashing into the present.
Seamstresses, DP Camp Muenster-Lager, 194? (Baba Maria is in this photo)
She had talked a lot about privation, about a Galicia neglected by the Poles and the Habsburgs before them: stories of men and boys lost to imperial armies, stories of families with not enough food to put on the table. It was from this side of the family that I learned about the Mykhal’da – a book of Arabic Sibylline prophecies (sybils are oracles) that had been translated into old orthography Ukrainian at the beginning of the 20th century. It was wildly popular in Galicia, some historians referring to it as a turn-of-the-century “bestseller” – people would gather in homes and read the text, which foretold of a great war that would destroy everything. In 1942, our family’s fields near the Dniester flooded, one sign of many that the apocalypse was nigh. They decided to pack up and go to Germany where they worked as forced laborers; In some versions of the story, they thought the war would end in a few months and then they would be back. The Mykhal’da told a different story. Ukrainians have apparently sought out this old book to process their current reality and the possibilities of a third world war.
For me as a third-generation Ukrainian-American, a trained professional historian who has spent decades in the academy, first as a student and then as a teacher, what happened as a result of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine felt like intellectual whiplash. To operate within the academy, I had had to reject to a not insignificant extent the teachings of my community. To learn to think critically about the perils of nationalism (drilled into us in our doctoral training), I had to reject in no small part my family’s own stories. I kept them largely to myself. These acts of dissimulation – which we read about in Aleksei Yurchak’s Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More and so many other texts about the Soviet period and lives of the subaltern in the context of empire – bifurcate the self. Humans are great at compartmentalizing, but one cannot sit indefinitely with this dissonance. Truth will out, as they say, whether you like it or not. It’s clear now that Russia’s full-scale invasion was the catalyst for this reckoning – it was impossible to keep the personal and professional separate.
There was a group of us that tried to deal with this thoughtfully a number of years ago by bringing third-generation historians from across the region into dialogue with those working in other disciplines, mainly literary scholars and documentary filmmakers testing the limits of genre. I even organized a workshop at the University of Toronto called Mavkas in the Room: Silences, Denials, Discomforts in East European History to have us – Ukrainians, Poles, Serbs, Bulgarians, and also colleagues with no personal roots in the region – think together about how to navigate this complex multigenerational terrain. We also invited respected senior scholars to share their perceptions of what we were trying to do.
Golden Rose Synagogue, Lviv, March/April 2025
It was an interdisciplinary gathering in two parts (one closed to the public and one open) during which we discussed a range of silences that affect scholarship on the region, including personal and familial accounts of the past. We talked about how violence and trauma has shaped what is said and what remains unsaid. We talked about conceptual, practical and methodological hurdles facing scholars trying to address these silences and restore agency to voices that remain unheard. We also talked about silences facing the researcher, or personal and professional reasons for pursuing one research agenda over another (or reasons why you might avoid certain topics), seeking to understand what makes us uncomfortable, both individually and collectively.
We learned through discussion that it took a distance of three generations – a considerable remove from events as they transpired – for historians with a personal stake in the historiography to feel it was safe enough for us to deal with these stories and integrate them into the work of “the field”. We knew – watching the field fracture after the Euromaidan rebellion of 2014 (and Russia’s annexation of Crimea and fomentation of war in eastern Ukraine) – that these stories urgently needed to be told and integrated into the scholarship. Distortions (and a lack of accountability) surrounding the Second World War were having very real geopolitical consequences. But we – the grandchildren of people who lived through WWII – were only just starting to feel each other out, to test the pliability of the field’s defenses, to think through new methodologies, to float arguments amongst ourselves that could shift the narrative (less heroes and villains, more accounts of the confusing complexity of choices made in wartime).
Then, the Russians launched their full-scale invasion of Ukraine, screeching even more incomprehensibly about Nazis. I personally recoiled from this work. It felt unsafe and unethical to bring our family stories out into the open under this new wartime reality and in an era where the truth is harder to protect from the deleterious effects of social media.
Covid and the full-scale invasion meant that I did not travel to Ukraine for five years, my longest absence since I first started traveling to the country as an undergraduate. I spent most of my twenties in Ukraine on the Fulbright program and then working in various positions in Kyiv – first in journalism, and then as an editor for two Russian investment banks. I lived and worked in the city for a number of years and it became home to me – one of several that I return to. When I left to begin a doctoral program at Stanford, I still came back every summer to work in the archives.
The war disrupted these connections to Ukraine and my long-standing relationships with the people who lived there. As the full-scale war entered its second and third year, our realities were pulling further and further apart. I felt increasingly disconnected from the processes that I had relied on to work effectively as a scholar of Ukraine. These processes involved continuous exchange with Ukrainians – family, colleagues, friends and loved ones – who by sharing their perspectives made me better at my job. Professionally, it became hard to orient spatially and in time with the protagonists of my work at war with one another in the present. There was a disconnect, but also the bigger question for me as an historian of the Soviet Union was how to understand the period I research and the stories I tell about that time given where dissolution eventually leads.
In response, I made the decision to go to Ukraine for the inaugural RUTA conference in Zakarpattia, where more than 200 scholars came together to discuss how to decolonize “the field.” The conference was a pretext for my primary aim, which was to see for myself what had happened in Ukraine over the past nearly three years of war. As you know, one can only enter Ukraine via ground transportation – the fastest route into the country is through Poland, which has absorbed so much of the ancillary shock of the invasion. I studied the map and decided to see if my friend Ania, an historian who attended that workshop on Mavkas five years earlier, would be up for resuming our intergenerational explorations of our shared past. Ania’s family was among the Poles deported from Stryi, not far from the village where my grandfather was born, sometime between 1944–1946, when the Soviet and Polish governments decided to carry out population exchanges that they named for some reason “repatriations”. Our family was deported in these same years to Ukraine from a village in the Bieszczady mountains, which, if it existed today, would be right on the Polish–Ukrainian border.
I had heard stories about this place – Dźwiniacz Górny – passed down from those who left it behind. As the story goes, my great grandparents Anna and Yuriy got married on the eve of WWI. They looked around them and decided this was no place to start a family: Poles and Ukrainians were at each other’s throats and the continent was inching toward war. So they left for the United States, following in the footsteps of many economic migrants from this neglected region. Only they never came back. Baba Anna determined that the family would assimilate as soon as possible and forbade Ukrainian being spoken in the home. Still, they maintained contact with the family, who had been sent to Kolomya, and we too managed to meet them many years later.
Bieszczady Mountains, Poland, June 2024. (giant lypa, Dźwiniacz Górny, next to where the church once stood).
I had always been intrigued by the place, my father being the last to visit, visibly disappointed that there was nothing to look at but a cemetery and a few hints of foundations. I knew the territory had been cleared of its inhabitants – Lemkos, Boikos and Hutsuls – and most of the villages burned down. In the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it became harder and harder to prioritise my projects for “the field” over these untold stories from the previous big war to reach these lands. How the current war is being waged – a vicious campaign of ethnic cleansing in Ukraine’s southeast – made it hard to look away from this unnamed population exchange of 1944–1946 that preceded Aktsija Wisla (1947). The campaigns of ethnic cleansing on both borders mirror one another in certain ways, but bringing them into conversation raises so many difficult and unanswerable questions.
The journey to the place where Dźwiniacz Górny used to stand was beautiful and I am forever grateful to Ania for helping to organize it. It was also disruptive for me. I learned that my name – which has been a problem for my entire life in my own country – was popular in this part of Poland. The man who rented us our car was positively giddy after seeing it on my driver’s license. I also discovered that I looked like the people who were expelled from these territories all those years ago – which at times provoked discomfort for those around me. And I felt a visceral attachment to a place that I had never been to before. It was a lot to process at once.
The last leg of the journey was on foot, walking through a national park that doesn’t seem to have many visitors. Nevertheless, the Poles took care to tell the story of this place with informative signs, strategically placed along the way, creating a physical emplotment of the story of those who once lived here. It is inscribed in the landscape – like the mulberry trees of Anatolia planted by the Armenians, and the apricots of Donbas that push through the rubble and continue to bear fruit. In the Bieszczady mountains, this part of them anyway, we see trees favored by the Boikos – old orchards of apples and plums. The signs discouraged us from getting too close to them, as bears and wolves are often spotted eating the fruit; they rule these mountains now.
What struck me most were the linden trees on the rolling hilltops of the Bieszczady mountains – lypas planted more than a century ago. They have remained undisturbed for the better part of three quarters of a century. Their presence is weighty once you come to understand their history. They are the largest specimens of their kind that I have ever seen, stretching into the stratosphere, towering over everything else, their presence demanding answers to a simple and yet unanswerable question – what happened here?
Humans do not come to these lindens in search of their fragrant flowers for tea. Humans do not trim their branches to adorn their homes in preparation for communion with their ancestors during Zeleni Sviata. These trees have been left alone. I learned while talking to one of the locals, the caretaker of a 17th-century Lemko church, that lindens for the highlanders of Galicia are liminal. These trees are portals to the other side, natural healers, trees that represent the mother of God. They are used by Boikos, Hutsuls, Lemkos to shield their beautiful wooden churches from lightning. They nestle at the edges of cemeteries to help us commune with the dead; icons were traditionally painted on the wood of linden trees. Tea made from linden flowers is thought to be a salve for grief.
Seeing these huge trees rooted in a landscape, which we are tied to but have no right to return to, made me feel rootless. That was summer 2024. By the fall I had uprooted myself even further – from my job in Winnipeg; from the academy itself – an enterprise I devoted much of my life to; from my old patterns, old ways of thinking. Orienteering in my own life had become a challenge, but it was the war and returning to Ukraine while it was ongoing that was the catalyst for these changes – for taking control of my own life.
When I came back from Ukraine, I returned to my grandmother’s house and stared at the four oaks in her front yard for days. They towered over everything else, demonstrating that we have been there a while, but in reality, these trees are younger than my mother – the youngest of her generation. I thought to myself: once my grandmother passes, the house will go and with it these oak trees, the oldest that remain in our family. Once they are gone, we will be rootless once again; I did not know how to process that.
Roots, and the loss of them, were present and on my mind during this recent trip to Ukraine as well. We lost Baba Maria in January; I knew her home with the old oaks would be next. That same month, our country, the place that accepted our stateless, unmoored family after the Second World War and gave us citizenship, began its descent into authoritarian madness. In Ukraine also, there was a lot of discomfort around my shifting personhood and the shifting context in which I had to navigate: clearly foreign, but also fluent; a scholar, but one without an institutional home; a writer, but not entirely clear what kind; an historian, who is no longer sure of what timeline she is living in; an American, but one of Ukrainian descent, whose family, like most of the diaspora of the WWII-era, preserved Ukrainian language, culture and other traditions over three generations. Ukrainians in Ukraine found the latter rather confusing. I was asked so many questions during this trip (by very dear friends) about why the diaspora cares about all of this. The real question, of course, was why America doesn’t. I returned to the United States feeling more rootless than ever before in my life.
I phoned my friend Mayhill, an historian of Ukraine and the region who writes about Soviet theater, while preparing for this talk, because I really was in the weeds. She listened to me process out loud for a while and then proposed a framework in which I talk about historical research methods and this idea of rootlessness. Diaspora understands this concept well, she said, as do Ukrainians in the present moment, with a new wave of IDPs and others who have been forced to leave Ukraine and find roots elsewhere. She suggested I show the DP (Displaced Person) registration cards of my grandfather Wasyl and the one from the concentration camps where he is designated as stateless. I thought about it and then said, “But Mayhill, this is a talk about entanglements.” Then she pulled a brilliant analytical move that can only come from someone who knows your story intimately: “Maybe the issue is not that Dido Wasyl is rootless,” she suggested, “but that he had too many states…” In other words, the problem is not rootlessness, but being tied to too many places and having entangled roots.
This conversation with my friend really changed my perspective on my time in Ukraine, which was very rich, but also challenging and confusing in unexpected ways. INDEX – the Center for Documentation and Exchange where I was the Scholar in Residence in March – brought me there to work on my book, How Ukraine Ruled Russia: Regionalism and Party Politics After Stalin. But I was surrounded by a very different group of writers, whose work is much more immediate. They race to document Ukraine’s cultural heritage, its present boom of creative expression, testimonies of war crimes, visual representations of life during rebellion and wartime and also on the frontline. There were two exhibitions on display at INDEX by young photographers who captured beautiful images of this lived reality before they were killed on the front lines. One cannot help but feel the sense of urgency in how our colleagues in Ukraine race to capture this reality – and relay the pain of it – with whatever creative tools they have.
Given this context, I wondered how historians fit into the story. We work with entirely different temporalities, on topics that are important but at a remove from all of this. I asked the director of INDEX, Dr. Sasha Dovzhyk, why they brought an historian of the Soviet period to Lviv and what role they see for us historians in the institution’s work. Her answer took me by surprise. Ukrainians are aware of their increasing isolation from the rest of us. The longer this war drags on, the longer restrictions on movement in and out of the country remain in place, particularly for men, the longer the airspace above Ukraine is closed, the more isolated – or siloed – Ukrainians become. The simplest task before us, as scholars of Ukraine who care about this place and its future, is to show up and break up the uniformity of the information space: self-regenerating repetitive narratives need to be challenged to maintain healthy discourse. We see in the United States what happens when people stop speaking across siloes; the results can be devastating.
The team at INDEX knows that to have a future, Ukrainians must be clear-sighted about their past. That is true of any society. The only way forward is through truth – to acknowledge your country’s past mistakes, which allows you to hold more of your messy history in conversation with itself. What people admire about Ukraine is not what it was (referring to all that happened there during WWII), but where it is headed. INDEX took a step in this direction by bringing me (a scholar trained outside Ukraine) to give a lecture at Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) in Lviv in a course on modern Ukrainian history. The topic was my book How Ukraine Ruled Russia: Regionalism and Party Politics After Stalin. The logic was that this would expose Ukrainian students to other ways of thinking, of narrating their past, and show them that not everyone paints their past as an endless series of terrors, horrors and repressions. Rather, they can be fully-fledged three-dimensional agents of their own history. And this implies that they have agency in their present too. This is both empowering and also carries with it a different set of responsibilities. I went through this same process as an undergraduate. It requires thinking long and hard about the role of individual choice and responsibility in times that challenge individuals to their very core.
Syllabus writing and teaching is storytelling, but teaching in wartime in Ukraine – in the place where this history unfolded – makes you much more aware of this process of narrative construction. Being physically present in the classroom only heightens that awareness. Sasha asked me if I noticed the composition of the students in the room; so many of them were young men who are unable to leave the country and can be drafted into the army at any time. If we scholars of Ukraine from abroad do not come to them, they will not be exposed to these stories; without these intellectual exchanges, their visions of the past, present and future become much narrower. This alone, being able to tell these students a different kind of story about the past, and then to learn that the more important part of that was showing up in person, was worth the journey to Ukraine for me.
Not everyone in the room was thrilled by my lecture on the rise of the Dnipropetrovsk clan, which is what the book How Ukraine Ruled Russia is about. It tells the story of how Ukraine and the Soviet Union change as both of them rebuild after the Second World War. Where the students saw a breath of fresh air, the professors bristled and took the last word. They saw an opportunity to tear down my scholarship, calling it “hyperbolic” in front of the students, rather than engaging with my careful arguments. I am trained in the Anglophone academy and have been walking carefully through the minefields of its Russophilia for decades. Whatever I say out loud in these talks has been measured many times against potential counterarguments and criticisms, most of which do not surprise me at all.
I wanted to draw your attention to this because scholars of Ukraine have similar experiences presenting their work in front of diaspora audiences. Amongst ourselves, we know we’ve done our jobs as Ukrainianists when everyone is mad at us. I encourage you to reconsider this as a community. But the main reason that INDEX brought me to Ukraine was not for me to do more of what they already do well as a collective – document Russia’s war in Ukraine assiduously and creatively. It was for me to finish my book, How Ukraine Ruled Russia. And the reason for it is that without historical agency, Ukrainians will remain trapped in their martyrdom. These are the dangers of being collectively swept away by bloodlands sagas in which one’s victimhood or heroism is on display. Ukrainians are not superheroes (or supervillains); they are regular humans living through extraordinary trials and tribulations. Our task as historians is to restore those dimensions, that complexity, that agency in the past in narratives where Ukrainians remain flat-two dimensional characters in someone else’s story.
‘Notes from the field: Entangled History-Writing in Wartime Ukraine’ by Dr Orysia Kulick was originally presented as the Mohyla Lecture 2025 on 21 May at the St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan