The Unpredictable Past?

The launch of an unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation in February 2022 was a jolting turn of events for the majority of Western scholars studying Eastern Europe. Moreover, the dramatic unfolding of the subsequent all-out Russo-Ukrainian war helped unmask an array of fundamental deficiencies—and even outright flaws—in the dominant Western perceptions of Russia and Ukraine and of their respective places in, and relation to, Europe’s past and present. The fast-moving geopolitical situation that erupted, in all of its dimensions, rocked the stability of an array of related scholarly disciplines—from the fields of history and cultural history to the study of current political events. As a result, many scholars have voiced the need for a reconceptualization and “decolonization” of the entire cluster of Russian, Slavic, post-Soviet, East European, and Ukrainian interrelated disciplines in Western scholarship. The Unpredictable Past? Reshaping Russian, Ukrainian, and East European Studies, edited by Volodymyr Kravchenko and Marko Robert Stech, offers readers an extensive collection of insightful essays on the topic by thirty prominent international scholars. These invited academics discuss the state of the art in their respective disciplines and suggest feasible solutions for re-evaluating them in the context of recent events.