Oleksander Ohloblyn - Publications

Publications

During his early Soviet period, Ohloblyn authored several monographs on Ukrainian economic history (reprinted in the west in 1971 as A History of Ukrainian Industry) and began publishing on the Mazepa era of the early eighteenth century. After the war, he continued his studies of seventeenth and eighteenth century Ukraine, publishing books on the Treaty of Pereiaslav of 1654 between the Ukrainian Cossacks and the Muscovite Tsar (1954), the political elite of Left-bank Ukraine in the eighteenth century (1959), and Hetman Mazepa and his era (1960). He also published an important update to Dmytro Doroshenko's pioneering "Ukrainian Historiography" (1957).

In his various publications which appeared in the west, Ohloblyn followed his distinguished emigre predecessor, Dmytro Doroshenko, in stressing the strivings for national unity, autonomy, and independence of the Ukrainian Cossack elite and their successors, the Ukrainian gentry of Left-bank Ukraine. He greatly admired Hetman Ivan Mazepa whom, he thought well represented this trend, and who actually openly defied Moscow during the reign of Tsar Peter the Great.

In his writings on Ukrainian historiography, Ohloblyn took a moderate position, positively evaluating the work of his former opponent Mykhailo Hrushevsky, who had been severely criticisized by the generations of the 1930s and 1940s, including Doroshenko, for his ostensible undervaluing of the strivings of the Ukrainian Cossack elite for statehood and independence. Ohloblyn tried to evaluate populist Ukrainian historians like Mykola Kostomarov, Volodymyr Antonovych, and Hrushevsky within the context of their own times rather than that of the next generations which had learned new lessons about the importance of statehood from their experiences during the revolution.