Kharkiv regional identity runs deep. In the early 1800s, the city's renowned university was founded as part of empire- and nation-building plans among local Ukrainian, Russian, and Little Russian gentry to defend local privileges and educate the masses. The accomplishments were many: the “true capital” or “first capital” mythology (168–69) for Kharkiv became a part of Ukrainian modernization, the story of a place transformed and destroyed by Soviet violence and now Russian terror. Kharkiv once was an imperial center in its early modern period of “territory and institutions (Sloboda Cossack regiments), security concerns, economic cooperation, and even historical narrative” (119). Fluidity of identities and frontiers now are an academic default for this book, less of an argument and more of a setting, with paths of resistance to national myths and an antidote to Russia's violent wartime neocolonial claims to territory and both Ukrainian and Russian ethnonational histories. The book's six chapters are presented as less of a chronology than a series of essays on a region's central city and its historical geography.
Ukrainians were co-creators of multiple projects. Condensed from the author's studies of entangled Ukrainian-Russian spaces from the 1760s through the modern period, Kharkiv between two poles (plus actual Poles) is a fair and relatable way to work in historiographical interventions. Volodymyr Kravchenko maps out borderland empires and multiple modernizations, showing how Kharkivites strongly prized their local and regional patriotisms often ahead of Russian or Ukrainian staged metanarratives and claims to a nationalized past. He stresses how Kharkiv in the history of its institutions “may be seen as an indicator of the progress of Ukrainian nation-state building, which in turn is based on the three pillars: geopolitics, historical legacy, and modernity” (168–69). The city's dynamic development and frontier location are reflected across its various and diverse cultural landscapes.
There are two essential parts in the book: on Ukraine in the symbolic mental geography of the Russian empire; and on Sloboda Ukraine as fits into Ukrainian, Russia, Little Russian, and borderland histories. Little Russian historiography left its mark, as in the work of Nikolai/Mykola Markevych (1804–1860). Kravchenko describes the Kharkiv educational district “made up of diverse regions of contemporary Russia and Ukraine, differing in traditions and ethnic composition: the Russian military borderland; the Cossack territories of the Sloboda region; Little Russia; the Don Cossack and Black Sea Cossack Hosts; the Crimean Khanate; and even part of the Caucasus” (184). Russian governance strategies imagined a kind of “colony” (188) for academic life and assembled an outpost for a “university project” (181).
Kravchenko returns to identity discourses, even as Soviet nostalgia certainly persists. Little Russian discourse “was reinvented as a Ukrainian national discourse by a new generation of intellectuals under the leadership of Taras Shevchenko” (49). Sloboda Ukraine was a region and a frontier zone “between the forest-steppe and the steppe” (114). In Ch. 5, we see effects of renaming streets and returning them to symbolic spaces of the Ukrainian Cossack and imperial periods, showing the persistence of entangled Ukrainian and Russian narratives. V.N. Karazin was restored to prominence and made to inhabit the role of a “Ukrainian Lomonosov” (158). Such templates show the power of foundational myths: one can also point to unique and subtle shifts between 2014 and 2019 in the Ukrainian electorate, namely southeastern departures from the Party of Regions and toward Volodymyr Zelensky and his Servant of the People as a “third force” prying patriotic populations now further nationalized by war. Kharkiv is still undergoing a toponymic revolution with a reselection of Ukrainian national symbols to replace Soviet ones, and some 268 urban-nyms have changed since 2015 (167).
In a more pointed conclusion, Kravchenko calls for Ukrainian “admission of co-responsibility for crimes committed under the imperial banner” (207). He concludes with a meditation on how “Ukraine remains on the slope of a volcano, in the shaky geopolitical zone” (210). Only Russia, he says, is making claims to Ukraine's territory. (Hungary, anyone?) I wonder how much of the book was written before February 2022. A separately developed chapter for Ukrainian civil society would have been helpful, rather than paragraphs or addenda added. Parallels between Kharkiv and Odesa could be further explored. Kravchenko rightly warns of a “past-oriented” Putinism and “fossilized Sovietism,” how “the bombing of Kharkiv is transforming the former capital of Soviet Ukraine into a Ukrainian national outpost against Russian aggression” (210). This is a rich historiographical book for wartime Kharkiv between history and geography; the portrait of a city that continues to fight for its life.
