The Globally Connected Western Ukrainian Village

European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire ISSN: 1350-7486 (Print) 1469-8293 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cerh20 The globally connected Western Ukrainian village Matthias Kaltenbrunner To cite this article: Matthias Kaltenbrunner (2017): The globally connected Western Ukrainian village, European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire, DOI: 10.1080/13507486.2017.1393653 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2017.1393653 © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 11 Dec 2017. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 167 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cerh20 EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE, 2017 https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2017.1393653 OPEN ACCESS The globally connected Western Ukrainian village Matthias Kaltenbrunner Institute of East European History, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY What analytical framework do we need in order to study villages Received 16 January 2017 shaped by intensive and long-lasting migration processes? The author Accepted 14 October 2017 tackles this question by scrutinizing the history of a Western Ukrainian KEYWORDS village from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century in a case Migration; village; global study. Migrants and non-migrants alike were closely interconnected history; micro history; Soviet to each other by manifold networks. This kind of interconnectedness Union; Ukraine; Canada proved to be amazingly persistent and did not lose its function even decades after the migration processes themselves had come to an end due to economic or political caesurae. In order to fully grasp this phenomenon, it is necessary to synthesize migration and village history, striving towards a ‘micro history of the globally connected village’. Introduction In summer 2007, Yulia Tymoshenko, wearing a completely white suit, stood on a grass-covered hill next to a white stone cross in a Western Ukrainian village and gave a passionate speech. The leader of a party named after herself (Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc) had just dis- covered a new group of previously completely neglected voters who should bring victory in her election campaign: Ukrainian migrants or, more precisely, female migrants working in Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece. One of them was Ol’ha Lypka, a woman in her early 50s who was visiting her family for the very first time after having worked in Naples for five years and was coincidentally at home when Tymoshenko appeared with her entourage. The film team also produced some footage in Lypka’s home, filming her playing with her grandchildren and taking an interview with her elderly mother.1 Tymoshenko’s spin-doctors had chosen the site of her appearance with consideration. The stone cross was situated in Rusiv, a tiny village in Western Ukraine’s Pokuttia region (Sniatyn county, Ivano-Frankivs’k oblast’) and had been erected in 1898 or 1899 by an elderly villager prior to his migration to Canada. The emotional suffering of the old peasant hesitantly leaving the village after being urged by his enthusiastic children infected with ‘migration fever’ inspired the writer Vasyl’ Stefanyk (1871–1936), a native of Rusiv, to his CONTACT Matthias Kaltenbrunner [email protected] © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. M. KALTENBRUNNER 2 famous novel The Stone Cross.2 Stefanyk’s novel, published in 1900, is, to this day, the most renowned piece on migration in Ukrainian literature, creating with the literary figure of Ivan Didukh (who is a mixture of two villagers, Ivan Akhtemiichuk and Stefan Didukh) the idiosyncratic image of the Ukrainian migrant and his reluctance to leave his beloved motherland.3 Tymoshenko tried therefore to draw a straight line from the late nineteenth-century peasants’ exodus from the impoverished Habsburg crown land of Galicia to which Rusiv village had belonged to until 1918, to the recent migration processes that haunted post-So- viet Ukraine in the early twenty-first century. In this period of roughly 110 years, the village had belonged to several different states. After the First World War, Eastern Galicia had become a part of the newly established Second Republic of Poland before it was annexed by the Soviets for the first time in autumn 1939 after the Hitler–Stalin Pact. Living through Nazi occupation from 1941 to 1944, the region became once again part of the Soviet Union before Ukraine gained independence in 1991.4 The symbolic significance of Rusiv as parsa pro toto for the history of Ukrainian migration seemed to me an interesting starting point for a case study investigating the long-term effects of migration processes.5 As Rusiv is the linking element between Vasyl’ Stefanyk’s Ivan Didukh and Yulia Tymoshenko’s Ol’ha Lypka, it is clear that the village itself had to play a pivotal role in such a study. In her movie, Yulia Tymoshenko tried to bridge the gap of roughly 110 years between those two migrants by referring to a narrative of national suffering. The history of Rusiv is, however, much more complex: from the late nineteenth century to date, the villagers were involved continuously in many different migration processes, had to cope with various political and economic transitions and to adjust to changing migration regimes in order to realize their agendas and projects. The main question is therefore on a more general level: what analytical framework is needed in order to study a village like Rusiv, shaped by intensive and long-lasting migration processes? In tackling this question, I was much inspired by a concept of Peggy Levitt, an American sociologist working on villagers from the Dominican Republic, who have been migrating to the Boston area from the 1980s onwards. She argues that migrants and non-migrants left behind are, as a rule, closely interconnected to each other by manifold, tight-knit networks. Thus, not only do the migrants’ lives change profoundly due to their migration experiences, but the lives of those not directly involved in migration processes also change. They, too, are affected by remittances, monetary as well as cultural or political ones, that transform the social relations within the village.6 The village is therefore perceived as relational social space constituted by networks between migrants and non-migrants Levitt calls a ‘trans- national village’.7 Levitt’s study comprises a period of approximately 20 years and does not pay much attention to external political or economic factors. In the case of a Western Ukrainian village in the course of more than 100 years, it is therefore necessary to mod- ify her concept in order to consider numerous political and economic caesurae affecting both the village itself as well as the destinations of the migrants. Such kinds of caesurae determined the functioning of migration processes on different levels, shaped migration regimes and brought, more than once, an end to certain migration patterns (for example, Canadian migration after 1930) while new ones emerged (for example, those due to forced migrations, like the Nazi or Stalinist deportations). So, examining the networks between migrants and non-migrants alike, I pose the question not only of how they emerge and EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 3 function, but also of what happens to them when the migration processes themselves come to an end: do they just cease to exist, as one could suggest, or do they rather transform to adjust to new conditions?8 In order to grasp this phenomenon fully, it is necessary to somehow synthesize migration and village history, to link global factors to local ones, thus striving towards some kind of ‘global micro history’, or, in our case, a ‘micro history of the globally connected village’ as I call this concept. This is a universal approach applicable independently of time and place, for Rusiv as well as for a Scottish or Irish village in the eighteenth century, for instance. The indispensable precondition for realizing every kind of micro historical approach is, of course, the existence of sources. While traditional micro history focuses on lower classes like peasants or artisans, global micro history is, as a rule, applied to higher strata of soci- ety who have left more sources than the mobile ‘underclass’, like Armenian merchants or Hanseatic burgher families.9 To use the concept of the ‘micro history of the globally connected village’ successfully in the case of Western Ukraine poses for this reason a particular challenge. With regard to the availability of a sufficient range of varying sources, Rusiv is a stroke of good luck that highly predestines the village for a case study. The sources were, however, produced unequally by different groups: it was the migrants who produced more sources themselves by writing down their life stories for their offspring, while it was rather the non-migrants about whom sources were produced. As for Rusiv, there is a remarkable abundance of autobiographical accounts10, obituaries in Ukrainian-Canadian newspapers, as well as much published or unpublished material on the village’s history collected by local historians and activists on both sides of the Atlantic.12 A crucial source illuminating the functioning of networks is, of course, letters exchanged between migrants and non-migrants.

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