Stephen Velychenko, Joseph Ruane, Liudmyla Hrynevych

The contributors to this volume show that the themes of empire, colony, and national liberation movements can be addressed in a European continental as much as in Asian, Latin American, or African contexts. There is a further benefit from a within-Europe comparison: It calls into question the tendency to assume fundamental differences between “western” and “eastern” Europe, including the now largely abandoned distinction between a “western” nationalism, defined as a civil nationalism, and an “eastern” one, defined as ethnic. It also answers the question whether intra-European comparison of this kind is possible, in a context where post-Soviet scholarship is often invisible in Anglo-American scholarship. As Norman Davies reminds us, low public awareness of Europe’s smaller and, in west-European minds, “more distant” nations, underlies the persistence of false generalizations about them, including assumptions like “that the whole of the west was advanced while the whole of the east was backward.”

Liudmyla Hrynevych is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute

of History at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences as well as

Director of the Holodomor Research and Education Committee.

Her previous publications include: Holod 1928–29 rr. u

Radianskyi Ukraini (2013); Khronika kolektyvizatsii ta Holodomoru

v Ukraini, 1927–1933 (2013).

Joseph Ruane is Professor Emeritus in Sociology at University

College Cork. He was Visiting Professor at the Geary

Institute, University College Dublin from 2016-2021. He is

co-author (with Jennifer Todd) of Dynamics of Confl ict in

Northern Ireland (1996); co-editor of Europe’s Old States in the

New World Order (2002), and Ethnicity and Religion (2015).

Stephen Velychenko is Senior Research Fellow, Chair of

Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto. His most recent

publications include: Propaganda in Revolutionary Ukraine.

Leafl ets Pamphlets and Cartoons (1917–1923) (2019); Life and

Death in Revolutionary Ukraine. Violence Living Conditions and

Demographic Catastrophe 1917–1923 (2021).