Monday, June 22, 2026

The Other Side of Michael Karpovich?

As a scholar whose work has been critiqued in a recent cluster on colonialism in Slavic Review, I would like to thank the editors for the chance to write a substantive letter in response. Here, I will carry out a close reading of the cluster, which presents the articles of four scholars who work on the theory or practice of colonialism in the Russian Empire. After an introduction by Paolo Sartori, a scholar of Central Asia, an article by Sean Pollock follows on the development of the field of Russian history in the United States, roughly from 1945 to the imperial turn. Another article, by Ulrich Hofmeister, provides an analysis of how “colonization” and “colonialism” were used from the nineteenth century onward, while two articles, one by Sartori and another by Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, focus on the history of colonialism in Central Asia. I will not comment on the last two.

In Hofmeister’s analysis, colonialism happened in Central Asia, not Ukraine. He argues that due to Russia and Ukraine’s cultural closeness (disputed at this moment), the actions of Russia in Ukraine are an example of “nationalist usurpation” instead. While the definition of colonialism Hofmeister uses may well be widely shared, it is not, and cannot be, the ultimate definition. However, within the logic of the cluster, it seems to be taken as final, since no scholars of Ukraine are given the opportunity to argue the question. At the center of the cluster is a silence where Ukrainian voices should have been.

Sean Pollock’s overview of the development of the field of Russian history in the United States covers the founding of the discipline to the 1990s. Although he sets out to disprove several of my arguments, I find a difference of emphasis rather than a refutation. Pollock argues that my characterization of the influence of V.O. Kliuchevskii on the founder of the field in the US, Michael Karpovich, is overstated. While I argued that Karpovich expanded Kliuchevkii’s focus on colonization to include Russia as an empire, Pollock argues that this meant a rejection of Kliuchevskii’s Moscow-centered approach. As cited in my article, Karpovich noted that “What is sadly missing in the Course of Russian History [written by Kliuchevkii] is the history of the Russian Empire.” Karpovich also said that Kliuchevkii’s scheme of Russian history needed “a thorough renovation, if not total replacement.” I argue that Karpovich’s frequent invocations of Kliuchevskii suggest that he intended a renovation, while Pollock is arguing that he meant replacement.

In terms of Karpovich’s contributions to Russian imperialism, Pollock mentions, as I did in my article, that Karpovich saw the peoples of Russia’s empire on a civilizational hierarchy, with the Russians in the middle, between the more “backward” Central Asians but not as high as those in the western territories. In addition, Pollock notes that Karpovich felt that Ukrainians and Russians were fundamentally the same people, even as he spoke about the Ukrainian national movement. This was my main point in arguing that Karpovich took part in the traditions of Russian imperialism. My intervention was to focus on how Karpovich’s views of Ukraine echoed those of Kliuchevkii and others. Much of the rest of Pollock’s article is spent arguing that Russia is a multinational empire and that the historiography reflected this from the 1940s, but since my article in no way denied this, I will gladly concede that point.

The most important contribution of Pollock’s article is to provide a detailed overview of the development of Russian history in the United States. He argues that Karpovich’s influence on his students did not constrain the field. However, a close reading of his own evidence suggests an alternative narrative is possible. According to Pollock’s narrative, only one of Karpovich’s students, John S. Reshetar, Jr., wrote a history dedicated to Ukraine. Judging by the article, Pollock seems to imply that the study of Ukraine was not central to the concerns of the field, although Marc Raeff reviewed the works of Ukrainian scholars. It is telling that the Hoover Institution Press’ Studies of Nationalities in the USSR, which Pollock rightly highlights, did not publish a book on the Ukrainians.

A new overview of Ukrainian studies in North America by Frank Sysyn provides a useful parallel. Reshetar is the only name that overlaps with Pollock’s narrative, highlighting the separateness of the disciplines. Sysyn concludes by noting that “scholarly production alone will not have resonance if academia chooses to marginalize it.”

Pollock notes that from the 1950s, Ukrainians in the US and, later, Canada, created a parallel series of academic institutions to study Ukrainian history. Would these have been necessary if Ukrainian scholars were not marginalized? He argues that Nicolas Riasanovsky’s textbook is an outlier, not representative of the views of the field. Is it likely that a textbook, which has been the standard in the field for sixty years, could be used so widely without at least some agreement with its contents? Yes, it changed over time, but the question of whether it should still include Kyivan Rus as an origin was very recently discussed at ASEEES (Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies).

I look forward to a time when scholars of Ukraine, as well as of Russia and Central Asia, join together to discuss these important questions in Slavic Review. Our parallel disciplines have much that needs to be said to each other.

Susan Smith-Peter is Professor of History at the College of Staten Island / City University of New York. She is the author of Imagining Russian Regions: Civil Society and Subnational Identity, and the editor of The Great Republic Tested by the Touch of Truth by Aleksei Evstafʹev. She has published widely on regions and regionalism in Russia and questions related to empire and imperialism. She is currently writing about Siberian regionalism and ideas of statism.

Citations

1. Ulrich Hofmeister, “Colonialism or kolonizatsiia? Why the Difference between Ukraine and Central Asia Matters,” Slavic Review 84 (2025): 746.
2. Susan Smith-Peter, with contribution by Sean Pollock, “How the Field was Colonized: Russian History’s Ukrainian Blind Spot,” in “Reinterpreting Russian History after February 24, 2022,” a special issue of Russian History 50 (2023): 148.
3. Sean Pollock, “Anglophone Historiography of Russian Empire before the Imperial Turn,” in “Cluster: Towards a History of Russian Colonialism,” special issue of Slavic Review 84, no. 4 (Winter 2025): 727.
4. Ibid., 726.
5. Ibid.
6. John S. Reshetar, Jr., The Ukrainian Revolution, 1917–20: A Study in Nationalism (Princeton, 1952).
7. Frank Sysyn, “The Evolution of Ukrainian Historical Studies: The North American Case,” East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies 11, no. 1 (2024): 123.
8. Nicholas Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, first edition (Oxford, 1963).