The collapse of the Soviet Union and the 50th anniversary of the end of the World War II have brought attention to the displaced cultural and archival heritage of many nations. The situation of Ukraine provides a striking example of the many international problems involved in questions of restitution. Patricia Kennedy Grimsted considers (among many topics) the problems of defining the archival heritage of Ukraine vis-?-vis Russia; international precedents for post-imperial archival devolution's and post-war restitution; intentional Soviet archival destruction in 1941; the Ukrainian component...

Yuri Shcherbak - currently Ukrainian Ambassador to the US - is a writer and physician who came to international prominence with his expose on Chornobyl, as a founder of the Ukrainian Green Party, as Ukrain's first minister of environmental protection, and as its first ambassador to Israel. This work accesses the period during which Ukraine rose to become an important part of the European geo-strategic posture. The collection treats Ukraine's relations with the United States, other nations in the region, and Israel; the Chornobyl aftermath; the status of Sevastapol; NATO enlargement; and the...

Ukrainian Cossacks used icon painting to investigate their relationship not only with God but also their relationship with the Russian tsar. Could Emperor Peter I and his adversary in the Battle of Poltava (1709) - the Cossack Hetman Ivan Mazepa - be depicted in the same icon? Why did the Cossack colonials commission icons with the portraits of their tsars, but not of their own Cossack leaders, the hetmans? Could a Catholic king be portrayed in an Orthodox icon? Why are the Russian tsars and Orthodox hierarchs missing on some of the Zaporozhian Cossack icons? In this groundbreaking study,...