Orest Subtelny

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Orest Subtelny (b. 1943 in Cracow) - is a Ukrainian historian, and a professor at the Department of History and Political Science, York University, Toronto, Canada. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1973. His major work is his general textbook titled Ukraine: A History (1988), a work of "national" historiography, which during the Gorbachev reforms was quickly translated into both Ukrainian and Russian and affected the growth of Ukrainian historical and national consciousness during the intitial years of Ukrainian independence.

Under the influence of his mentors, the orientalist Omeljan Pritsak and the Mazepa specialist Oleksander Ohloblyn, Subtelny's earlier work dealt with the Cossack era, especially the revolt of Hetman Ivan Mazepa against Tsar Peter the Great. In this work, he sought to avoid the extremes of labelling Mazepa either an evil traitor to Russia or a heroic defender of Ukrainian national independence and portrayed him as a typical partisan of aristocratic local autonomy before the encroaching absolute monarchies of his time.

In his general history of Ukraine, Subtelny took a more traditional approach, like his predecessors Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Dmytro Doroshenko, and Ivan Krypiakevych, writing a national history, primarily the history of the Ukrainian people. However, unlike these predecessors who wished to stress aspirations to statehood, Subtelny stressed "statelessness." In his view, modernization of the country was largely sponsored by outside powers and thus not exactly favourable to the rise of a Ukrainian national consciousness.

Subtelny's national history contrasts with that of his principal competitor, Paul Magocsi, who in 1996 published a non-national, territorial History of Ukraine.

[edit] Selected books and publications

The Mazepists: Ukrainian Separatism in the Early Eighteenth Century (1981).
The Domination of Eastern Europe, Foreign Absolutism and Native Nobilities (1986)
Ukraine: A History (1988)
Ukrainians in North America (1991)
"Cossacks", in The World Book Encyclopedia (1997)
"Ukraine", in Encarta Encyclopedia (1997)
"Ukraine: The Imperial Heritage", Briefing Papers of the Canadian Bureau of International Studies (1996)