Lecturer:  Korine Amacher (University of Geneva)

Chair:      Andrii Portnov (BBUI)

In 1935 a book entitled About Ukraine was published in Ukraine. It contains various texts by the Soviet Marxist historian Mikhail Pokrovski (1868-1932) who was the author of numerous works on the history of Russia and a key actor in the development of Soviet historical science during the 1920s before being subject to increasing criticism from the early 1930s onwards. In the preface we can read that Pokrovski’s texts are “useful material for understanding the main issues in the history of Ukraine”. However, Ukraine appears in Pokrovski’s works only within the framework of his works dedicated to a Russian history which he criticizes virulently. To understand the publication of what was one of the latest post-mortem editions of Pokrovski’s texts before the public denunciation of his “school”, we will recount some polemics that occurred between Russian and Ukrainian historians in the late 1920s, as well as Pokrovski’s role and viewpoint in this context. The publication of the book About Ukraine in 1935 represents the last echo of these polemics, in a decade which now sought to affirm a dogmatic truth. A year later, the Russian national narrative that Pokrovski disparaged but paradoxically promoted in his works would impose itself.

Korine Amacher is Associate Professor of History of Russia and the USSR at the University of Geneva (Faculty of Arts and Global Studies Institute). She is the director of the Master program “Russia – Central Europe” at the University of Geneva. She is currently conducting research on “Divided Memories, Shared Memories. Ukraine / Russia / Poland (XX‐XXI centuries): An Entangled History” with funding from the Swiss National Fund for Scientific Research (2016-2019). Her main publications focus on revolutionary movements in the Russian Empire, some Russian revolutionaries of the nineteenth century, biographical itineraries, the historical memory about revolutionaries and Russian revolutions, Soviet and Russian historiography as well as the political uses of the past and the (re)writing of history in contemporary Russia.

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Time & Place

Thursday, 13.04.2017  |  18:00 - 19:30 Uhr 

Centre Marc Bloch
R. Germaine Tillion
Friedrichstr. 191,  10117 Berlin

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