The Battle for History. How the Ukrainian Past Became the Present. Serhii Yekelchyk

Why can the right to tell one’s own history become a struggle for a country’s very right to exist?

History is not just a story about the past. It determines who we consider ourselves to be today, where our state comes from, and who has the right to decide its future. That is why Russia has tried for centuries to present Ukraine as part of its own history, and Ukrainian statehood as an accident, a mistake, or the result of foreign intervention. During the current war, this struggle for the past has become literal: Ukrainian books and textbooks are being destroyed in the occupied territories, and the denial of Ukrainian historical subjectivity is being used to justify aggression.

In “The Battle for History,” Serhii Yekelchyk traces how Ukraine fought for the right to look at its own past with its own eyes. He shows the role of Ukrainian historians and the diaspora, analyzes the legacy of Mykhailo Hrushevskyi, Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytskyi, Orest Subtelnyi, and other researchers, as well as how, after the collapse of the USSR, Ukrainian historical science tried to free itself from Soviet and imperial schemes.

But for the author, decolonization is not a simple replacement of the Russian narrative with its mirror Ukrainian version. Ukraine needs a history in which it appears not as an appendage to a foreign empire, but as an independent subject — a complex, multi-voiced, and multi-ethnic society. Yekelchyk calls this the restoration of epistemic sovereignty: the ability to determine for ourselves the frameworks, concepts, and questions through which we make sense of our own past.