Person:

Plokhii, Serge

More than twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, the region is still grappling with the problem of its new identity and the choice of an appropriate name to reflect it. There has been considerable talk about a “return to Europe,” as well as the emergence of a “new Europe” and, as a consequence of the latter, the birth of a “new Eastern Europe.” Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova are often viewed as the core of the “New Eastern Europe.” These countries have recently found themselves in a unique geopolitical position, sandwiched between the extended European Union in the west and Russia in the east. They had never been thought to constitute a distinct region and thus had no established group identity. This article explores the question of whether looking at the history of Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova as that of one region can help us better understand its past and explain its current situation.

"Getting history wrong is an essential factor in the formation of a nation,” wrote Ernest Renan, basing this observation on his analysis of the nation-building experience in nineteenth-century Europe (qtd. in Eric Hobsbawm, On History. New York: New York Press, 1997: 270; for a different translation of the same sentiment, see Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation,” in Nationalism in Europe from 1815 to the Present: A Reader. Ed. Stuart Woolf. London: Routledge, 1996: 50). Many historians today tend to agree with Renan’s statement and are doing their best to “get history right” as they search for alternatives to national history. More often than not they face an uphill battle in that regard, both within and outside their profession.