A changing of the guard: Szporluk replaces Grabowicz as HURI director (07/14/96)

A changing of the guard: Szporluk replaces Grabowicz as HURI director

Prof. Roman Szporluk

by Roman Woronowycz

As of July 1 Professor Roman Szporluk became the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute's third director. He succeeds Prof. George Grabowitz (see accompanying story). Dr. Szporluk is a professor in the department of history at Harvard University, where he holds the M.S. Hrushevsky Chair in Ukrainian History. He teaches courses in the East European and Soviet areas, including the history of socialism and nationalism. From 1986 to 1991 he served as director of the Center of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Michigan. At the U-M he also taught East European history from 1965-1991.

Q: First of all, as of July 1, you took over as director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. What made you want to take the reins?

A: This is not a position that I am taking because I was seeking it, this is a position that I accepted because it is a part of an understanding of being one of the professors in Ukrainian studies. It is, in a sense, a rotation.

George Grabowicz worked hard for seven years and its only fair that some other people, his colleagues, like myself, should take over for a while. Then, presumably, Prof. (Michael) Flier at some point will agree to do so, and I very much hope that Prof. Edward Keenan will be a director at one time, and very reasonably we should expect that Prof. Grabowicz, considering his age, will be a director again.

So, it is not a job I terribly wanted to take. I can live happily ever after without holding it, but I feel that once I accepted it, and I cannot say that I had been forced to do it, I would like to do my best.

Q: Financial constraints seem to be the bane of administrators in organizations everywhere in today's world, how will you deal with those?

A: First of all, we should say that the Ukrainian Institute is not all that poor, we have a substantial endowment. The question is how we manage it, how we use it. There is always a question of priorities, we must decide should we publish a book [or] should we give it to a good student, shall we hire a research assistant and so on and so forth.

So when you have money of a certain amount it does not mean that you cannot make intelligent choices. There may be choices between good things. It is not a choice between a good thing and a bad thing. There are many good choices. And this is what administration means, that you have to make decisions which are not perfect but still make sense. This is what I would like to keep in mind.

Obviously, we want to increase our endowment. I wonder if you ever met someone who told you that they did not need more money, and we certainly do need more money, and I mean that seriously. There are more things we would like to do.

To put it very briefly, on my agenda as I see it, and, of course, on this I have input from my colleagues, it is not just Roman Szporluk thinking it up, it is a collective thought. In a situation of an independent Ukraine we really should use our resources, our connections, our influence to help talented students from Ukraine, and scholars and artists establish connections with their counterparts in the U.S. We see it as a contribution to the United States because we think there are many able, talented, promising and accomplished people in Ukraine whose presence in American life will improve the quality of American life. This, of course, also will help Ukraine to overcome the terrible legacy of provincialism.

The second agenda is to promote much more the study of the 20th century. Prof. (Omeljan) Pritsak is a medievalist, Prof. Grabowicz is a literary scholar, as we know. I am a very modern political historian whom, probably, some historians would prefer to call a political scientist. Therefore, on my intellectual agenda, I think that the 50 years since World War II is a very burning historical topic.

And as I have told you, I pay attention to what my students say, I am aware that while I do remember 1945 and some years earlier, and I certainly remember what I did when Stalin died, or when Khrushchev condemned Stalin, what I do know is that for current college students who take my courses these things are not very much closer than Napoleon, or Bismarck, or Nicholas II. Therefore, it is history for them.

What we need to do is study contemporary history, including very much the origins of 1991 and also Ukraine as an independent state, because in a very few years our time will become a historical time for people who are now graduating from high school.

Q: Most of the endowment of HURI is by Ukrainian Americans and Canadians, etc. Do you see any need to reach beyond this group and, if so, how do you think it could be done?

A: Absolutely, we need to reach out. We need to face another fact, which in some sense this Harvard summer school demonstrates, and so did last year's. Because Ukraine is now an independent country, and it occupies quite a lot of space on a map, because it is a country which is geopolitically, strategically extremely important, many people of non-Ukrainian origin are becoming interested in it.

Many ambitious, intelligent, young men and women, whether they have Korean surnames, or Italian, or Spanish, or whatever, when they are considering what they will do when they grow up, are considering that perhaps there is something interesting to do in connection with Ukraine - whether it is business, whether it is promoting arts or being a musician, being a playwright, whatever, we want to have these people very much. This does not mean that we like people with Ukrainian surnames any less, we continue to like them very much.

What I think we now would hope - I see no reason why a company called Lufthansa one day might not offer us free tickets for, let's say, summer school students coming to Harvard. Lufthansa flies daily to Kyiv, to Odessa, presumably is making some money. I think it would be beautiful publicity for Lufthansa if it announced, and you wrote about it, 10 round-trip tickets, Kyiv-Boston, from Lufthansa.

The same could be said about American companies like Motorola. Why should we not have a Westinghouse fellow at Harvard University, for example?

It requires that someone go to Westinghouse, that someone write a letter, make a presentation, but I feel that this would be good for us. We would be going beyond our traditional givers, but I think that it would also be good for Westinghouse, not only for its image, but perhaps Westinghouse could be a more successful operation if it functions in a country in which some number of young people are world wise.

Q: Two more questions.

A: By all means, I love questions.

Q: You mentioned at the roundtable earlier today that at HURI there should be more emphasis on Polish-Ukrainian relations, and you said you are determined to do this, and you said it emphatically.

A: Yes, you saw that I was being serious about that. For some time we have been talking, "we" means my colleagues and I, with various people in Ukraine, Poland, France, not to mention the United States, about organizing a conference in Kyiv and in Cambridge at different times devoted to honor the 50th anniversary of the Polish literary and political monthly published in Paris called Kultura, of which the editor-in-chief is Jerzy Giedroyc. He is now 91 years old, but in very good mental and physical health.

He became interested in Ukraine and in promoting Polish-Ukrainian understanding in the 1930s, when he edited at first a student journal, around 1929, and then a very influential Polish weekly called Politika. After World War II he established his new journal called Kultura. Now Jerzy Giedroyc's journal has always paid attention to Ukraine, always supported Ukrainian independence.

It terribly upset the Polish diaspora around 1949-1950, when it publicly declared itself in favor of recognizing that Lviv should remain with Ukraine, that Polish-Ukrainian borders should be accepted, and that it is in the interest of Poland to have an independent Ukraine. Kultura had an enormous influence on the formation of new generations of Polish elites. You may say that politically and intellectually the activists of Solidarnosc are alumni of Kultura, which was read by the influential people.

To make a long story short, Kultura helped to raise a new political thinking in Poland of the group that eventually came to power in 1989 and was so supportive of Ukrainian independence.

I feel that Ukrainians owe it to Jerzy Giedroyc and to Kultura to acknowledge that extraordinary contribution. By the way it was Kultura which in 1959 published in Ukrainian the famous volume "Rostriliane Vidrodzhennia." This was a book that caused events in Ukraine which had enormous influence in the West. It was published by Kultura without any Ukrainian money; Kultura gave money to a Ukrainian editor to put it together.

It is only fair that we should somehow acknowledge this. And that is what the conference which various people in Kyiv are organizing with our support is about, and then afterwards in Cambridge. This will be in June 1997.

Q: What type of support?

A: This is intellectual support. We are still looking for money. We have no money, we have ideas but no money.

Q: What type of conference will this be?

A: This will be a conference in Kyiv, lasting three days, on the 50 years from 1945 through today, rethinking the history of that period, in terms of Ukraine's history in connection to Poland, diaspora, the influence of émigrés, because, after all, Kultura is an émigré journal.

We would like to promote an understanding among the Ukrainian intelligentsia of the fact that actually Poland is a major European nation.

What we would like to do at the conference we are planning in Kyiv, we would like to invite to it able, talented, promising young scholars, from Donetske and Kharkiv and Odessa and Luhanske, to come to Kyiv, meet Polish participants and Kyiv scholars so that within the Ukrainian literary, cultural and political elite their will be a better connection to Europe. I always repeat this point and I will say it here. Poland is not a bridge to Europe, Poland is Europe.

Q: Well, then, what is Ukraine - is it Europe or a bridge to Europe?

A: Ukraine is now in the process of defining its geopolitical and geocultural location.

But back to the conferences. We want to publish a book. Or more than one book containing papers on the Kyiv conference, which should come out in Ukrainian. We want to have Polish scholars giving papers in Kyiv because in this way we want to inspire them to pay attention to Ukraine. In this way you promote certain interests. You get invited, you get a grant.

And second, then in November 1997, we would like to have a major international conference devoted to a rethinking of Eastern European history by trying to show that modern history is better understood by watching the Kyiv-Warsaw, Ukraine-Poland connection because, as you know very well, in American academia there is this traditional iron curtain. There is Soviet studies and Eastern Europe. If you studied Eastern Europe you studied Bulgaria, Poland and Czecho-Slovakia, but you never mentioned Ukraine, even though Ukraine has much more in common with Poland than Poland does with Bulgaria or Romania.

And then in Soviet studies you had lectures on Ukraine and Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. What we want to argue in this project is that you can better understand Poland when you study it next to Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania, and you can better understand the rise of modern Ukraine if you see that Poland is a very major factor in Ukrainian history.

Q: Given all that, what do you see as the largest hurdles to what you want to do in the next five years?

A: The hurdles are enormous. But what we need to do is to support scholars working in this framework. What I am proposing is a reconceptualization of East European history. In this way we hope to convince people who are specialists on Central Europe, or on Russia, that, in fact, by rearranging players on the board, seeing Ukraine connected to Poland to Hungary and so on, and refiguring these things, we can better understand what happened.

The big question which we want to understand is how did the Soviet Union collapse, how did an independent Ukraine emerge? These are big questions for historians. We will be asking these questions for years and years to come, and future generations will, too. I feel that the Ukrainian Institute is uniquely located, favorably located, to be a place where people do it.

By the way, we want to do it together with the Russian Center, with the European Center, with the Center for Jewish Studies, various units of the university and other institutions elsewhere. You know, there are Ukrainian studies done on a very high level at Columbia University, in Toronto, Edmonton, Stanford is beginning something.

We are delighted this is happening and we want to work with these people.

Prof. George Grabowicz

by Roman Woronowycz

Professor George Grabowicz left the position of director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute on July 1 after holding the reigns for seven years. He remains the Dmytro Cyzevskyj Professor of Ukrainian Literature in the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He was a Fulbright scholar in Poland and the Soviet Union in 1989. He became an assistant professor at Harvard in 1975 and a full professor in 1983. For five years he served as chairman of the department of Slavic Languages and Literature. He succeeded Prof. Omeljan Pritsak as HURI director in 1989.

Q: You are leaving the directorship of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute after seven years at the helm. Prof. Roman Szporluk, your successor, with whom I spoke earlier, said that, given your age, he would think that you would eventually return to the directorship since it is a position that should rotate among the chairs of the Institute. Would you consider eventually returning?

A: Well, he is right. Harvard has a rotating system and there is a finite universe of professors dealing with Ukrainian studies or holding chairs in Ukrainian studies or associated with the executive committee. So it's not hard to figure out that, depending on how long a given person stays on as director, that he will be replaced and eventually may find it his turn once again.

Q: Would you want to be director again at some point in time?

A: There is an obligation involved in being a professor here, and one of those obligations is performing administrative services. When I received tenure here I immediately was offered the position of chairman of the Slavic Department. I did not refuse that offer. In retrospect I find the administrative part of the job is quite onerous.

I find myself successful and happy about the fact that I managed to produce, write that is to say, while being a director, while being a chairman. But I think that in all due awareness of my obligations, my potential, I look very much forward to writing and being a professor.

Q: What do you consider your biggest accomplishments in your seven years as director of HURI?

A: I think what we accomplished in the Institute in the seven years that I was director was to put it on a sound, fiscal, administrative and governance footing. We filled the chairs. We established a normal operating system of staffing and of publications. We reduced a significant deficit that we had. We established broad contacts with Ukraine. We broadened the fields we are working in from history and philology and distant history to more contemporary events, to political science and economics matters. We simply broadened our scope. We involved a lot of people.

We continued on also with what the preceding generation did. So I think that these achievements, if I can so call them, are that while holding on to what was our basic mandate, not breaking with our best traditions, we also expanded our work and made the Institute into what it was always intended to be, a top notch, scholarly establishment, which one can in honesty say is second to none outside of Ukraine. And in some respects competes well with them, too.

I can say these things with some confidence because they can be verified. If you establish a set of criteria by which you can measure these things, whether it is by books published, not only in terms of quantity, but quality, how they are received, how they are reviewed. If you do it in terms of how many PhDs we have awarded and whether these PhDs have found jobs, subsequently. Whether they in turn have become successful, respected scholars.

Ukrainian studies is accepted now in the United States and Canada due in large measure to what we and, of course, the Canadian Institute have also done. I think by these objective standards we have done an awful lot, and I am very pleased to have been a part of that.

Q: Now that you are free of the administrative responsibilities, what do you see in your immediate future?

A: I certainly will be continually involved in the Institute. I have a great commitment to it. I find it an extremely exciting and a central type of institution. This is, for anyone who is interested in Ukrainian studies, where the action is. So I will be involved with it.

My main hope is to more aggressively, more actively, pursue my writing. As I said before, I am very pleased that I haven't dried up, I'm still doing it. In fact, in the past year, as I was, in a sense, preparing myself for leaving this position, I was writing quite a bit. I have two books that are about to come out, and I am working on two others. And I thank God for that ability and that the fire in the belly is still with me, so I am looking forward to that.

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