Professor Orest Subtelny's colleagues and staff at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta are saddened by the news of his passing. In Orest we have lost not only a friend, but also a talented historian who made a significant contribution to the reconceptualization of Ukraine's history and became the most effective intermediary between Western and Ukrainian historiography in the late twentieth century.
Subtelny was a prominent expert of Ukraine's early modern history. His knowledge of its "Mazepan" age was unexcelled, but the subjects he pursued in his writings were much broader. His research included Ukrainian historiography, national identity, diaspora, and political history to name but a few. Professor Subtelny's interests were also not limited to Ukrainian subjects. He approached the latter as part of the general context of East European history, applying a comparative approach to both the Romanov and Habsburg Empires and their social elites. Subtelny's crowning achievement is considered to be his Ukraine: A History, first published in 1988 by the University of Toronto Press in association with the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. Several more editions appeared in both English and in Ukrainian translations.
Professor Subtelny's History was already a notable event in Western historiography before its triumphant arrival in Ukraine. Several generations of Ukrainian émigrés had dreamt of writing a new synthesis of Ukrainian history. However neither works written by Ukrainian authors, whose patriotic zeal sometime prevailed over their academic impartiality, nor Western attempts at compiling a history of Ukraine could not compete or compare with Mykhailo Hrushevsky's or Dmytro Doroshenko's classical works of the early twentieth century.
Professor Subtelny's History does, inasmuch as it is the product of the new Western historiography of Eastern Europe of the second half of the twentieth century. His new synthesis of Ukrainian history conformed to contemporary academic criteria and, at the same time, was enthusiastically received by the Ukrainian educated community.
In contemporary scholarship it is customary to underline the intellectual link between Professor Subtelny's History and his precursors. Indeed this notion is reasonable, because he was writing primarily about the history of the Ukrainians (both on their ethnic territory and beyond its borders) at a time when a Ukrainian national state did not exist. But Professor Subtelny the historian was never a traditionalist. He was not afraid of addressing those issues that were most sensitive or painful for nationally conscious Ukrainians, including the fundamental and still unresolved problem of the relationship between national statehood and modernization, or, to put it another way, the problem of their chronic incongruity. The issues of mutual relations between the Ukrainians and their closest neighbours-the Russians, the Poles, the Jews, and the Crimean Tatars-still remain the subjects not only of academic debates but also of (geo)politics writ large. In his History Professor Subtelny addresses them explicitly.
The freshness of Professor Subtelny's ideas, his intellectual boldness, and his ability to speak plainly about serious matters created the phenomenon of the "Subtelnization" (a term coined by the Kyiv historian Heorhii Kasianov) of Ukrainian Soviet historiography. Consequently the frozen blocks of canonical texts output during the Brezhnevite "epoch of stagnation" were rapidly melting and provoked Ukrainian scholars to voice their own opinions and individual assessments. There is no doubt that the new generation of Ukrainian historians and their readers of the 1990s were inspired by the intellectual freedom of Subtelny's Istoria Ukrainy. It was even read by those to whom the Ukrainian language seemed a synonym for folkloric provincialism.
Professor Subtelny and the CIUS had a collegial and mutually beneficial relationship from the institute's earliest years. When he was still teaching at Hamilton College in New York State, he collaborated with the late Professor Ivan L. Rudnytsky, an associate director of the CIUS, on a CIUS-based project of reinterpretation of Ukrainian history from antiquity to the post-WWII era.
Professor Subtelny also delivered papers at three international CIUS conferences and was a coauthor of five important articles in the first two volumes (1984-88) of the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, prepared by staff at the CIUS Toronto office and at the Shevchenko Scientific Society in Sarcelles, France. There is no doubt that these projects facilitated and influenced Professor Subtelny to write his benchmark History.
In 1982 the CIUS partnered with York University's Department of History and the Ukrainian Canadian Committee (now Congress, UCC) to fund a three-year professorship at York University to teach courses in Ukrainian history and about Soviet nationalities. Professor Subtelny was appointed to that post, and in 1984, when he was granted tenure, the CIUS again partnered with the UCC and the Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies to secure his position. Later on Subtelny was instrumental in establishing the Dr. Ivan Iwanciw and Dr. Myroslawa Mysko-Iwanciw Endowment Fund at CIUS to promote scholarly exchange between Canada and Ukraine.
Professor Subtelny's scholarship and legacy will endure. We extend our sincere condolences to Orest's wife Maria, his son Oleksa (Alex), his sister Oksana, his mother-in-law Volodymyra and brother-in-law George, and all of their relatives. Вiчна йoму пам'ять!
Volodymyr Kravchenko, director, on behalf of colleagues and staff at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta