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Pritsak   Letter 01   18-Aug-1998   Ukrainian Legion of 500,000 dying for Israel
Perhaps the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute is staffed with scholars who have been entrusted by the Ukrainian diaspora with the task of disseminating truths about Ukraine, but who in reality have sold themselves to the anti-Ukrainian coalition.  Such scholars may harm Ukrainian interests not only by adding to anti-Ukrainian calumny, but also by absorbing funds from the Ukrainian diaspora which naively infers from the title "Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute" that their donations will contribute to the shedding of light upon Ukraine to dispel the enshrouding darkness.
The following letter primarily discusses a statement made by professor Omeljan Pritsak of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) during a round-table discussion at a Conference on Jewish-Ukrainian Relations in Historical Perspective which took place at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario in 1983.  The proceedings of this conference were published in Howard Aster and Peter J. Potichnyj (eds), Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective, Second Edition, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, 1990.  Professor Pritsak is described in the list of contributors as follows:

Omeljan Pritsak, professor emeritus of Ukrainian history at Harvard University and former director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, is a specialist in Ukrainian, Turkic and Ural-Altaic studies and the author of The Origin of Rus'" (p. 515).

The links within the letter below were added to this Internet version of the letter, and of course were not present in the original hard copy of the letter.  In some cases, clicking the links will take the user to the very location that is most relevant within some larger document on the UKAR web site.  However, because of the lack of standardization between web browsers, this will only happen for users employing recent versions of the NetScape browser; users employing Microsoft's Internet Explorer will always be taken to the top of the document linked to, which is not as useful.

I assume that the "Seven Day War" that professor Pritsak refers to below is in fact Israel's "Six Day War."
August 18, 1998
Omeljan Pritsak
Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute
Harvard University
1583 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA
USA 02138

Dear Professor Pritsak:

I was reading Potichnyj and Aster (eds) "Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective," and nearing the end which recounts the round-table discussion between conference participants, and was most astonished to read there the following passage attributed to you:

As you all know, the Seven Day War started under very difficult conditions for the Israelis and this disturbed me very much.  And I thought, what could be done?  Following the concept of Professor Szporluk, that if a Ukrainian is going to be political, he must act politically, the idea came to me to organize a Ukrainian Legion and whatever impact the 500,000 or 1,000 people will make, it is not so important; but what I believed was that it was very important to show to the world, and first of all to our Jewish friends, that there are some Ukrainians who believe that they have to pay for their sins with their own blood.  That was the time I started to organize Ukrainian studies at Harvard, and at that time I had connections to the Ukrainian student organization.  Therefore, I immediately had some discussions and I was very pleased to find within a few hours at least thirty young men who were ready, like myself, to die for that cause.  There were, of course, many problems.  First of all, to get more people, to get some money, and also to convince some Ukrainian political groups, that they should take advantage and express their position, during that particularly difficult situation.  But there was still another very difficult problem — the problem whether the Jews would be willing and ready to talk with us.  It was also a time of the birth of Jewish consciousness and my friend, Professor Pipes, belonged to those who regained a consciousness during that period.  I went to him and we discussed the matter of how to convince the Jews at that hour we want to do something which is very serious.  So we started to make preparations, but fortunately for the Israelis and unfortunately for me, the war ended in just a few days, before I was able to do something.  But, of course, others were ready, like myself, to die for that cause.  I forgot about this attempt, but yesterday Professor Pipes resurrected it and I just wanted, as a historian, to remember it, that there was such an attempt and first of all what I must stress again that there were young people who were ready to do something and in a clear consciousness they were planning to do this as a kind of recognition of the guilt.  (pp. 510-511)

Eight things about your statement astonished me:

(1) I was astonished at the totality of your conviction that the Israeli position in the Arab-Israeli conflict was meritorious and the Arab side not.  Your conviction, however, overlooks evidence that the State of Israel was established, and is maintained, through war crimes and crimes against humanity practiced upon the indigenous peoples of the region.  What I would have expected from a Ukrainian scholar is quite the opposite — a sympathy with the Palestinian cause, which sympathy should have been reinforced by a recognition of the parallels between the Jewish oppression of the Palestinians today and the Jewish oppression of Ukrainians, particularly during the time of Bohdan Khmelnytsky 350 years ago.

(2) I was astonished that you assume Ukrainian guilt.  I myself was unaware of any Ukrainian guilt.  I was aware of an uprising led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky against Polish-Jewish oppression in 1648.  I was aware of the criminal collaboration with the Nazis of approximately one Ukrainian out of every 10,000 during the Second World War.  I was aware of similar though less extreme instances of Ukrainian-Jewish clashes.  In these, I see nothing that Ukrainians should feel guilty about.  These were conflicts in which Ukrainians did not strike the first blows and in which Ukrainians played the role of victims pushed beyond endurance rather than of aggressors.  If Ukrainians today are obligated to feel guilt for the criminal collaboration with the Nazis of 1/10,000 of their fathers more than half a century ago, then Jews should also feel guilt for the criminal collaboration of some similar proportion of their fathers with the Nazis, as by membership in the Jewish ghetto police.

(3) I was astonished that you subscribe to the notion of eternal collective guilt.  Ukrainian peasants turned on their oppressors in 1648 and slew them, and for this Ukrainian students at Harvard should offer up their lives in expiation today?  Some Ukrainian prisoners-of-war preferred serving as camp guards to dying in POW camps, and in expiation of this young Ukrainian-Americans today should spill their blood on Middle-Eastern sands?  Well, yes, that does follow logically if there had been any guilt, and if that guilt was indeed collective, and if that guilt was indeed eternal.  But then it would also follow from this same primitive reasoning that you subscribe to that Jews today are Christ-killers, and should pay for the sin committed by a handful of their coreligionists two millennia ago.

(4) I was astonished at your Prime-of-Miss-Jean-Brodie-like grip over your students.  In a few hours you found at least thirty young Ukrainians who, like yourself, were ready to die for Israel, and you found plausible the idea of swelling that 30 to 500,000.  It would seem to me that either you are gifted with unusual charisma and powers of persuasion, or that you mistook as commitment, or at least acquiescence, what in reality was the students' being rendered speechless by your Quixotic plan.

(5) I was astonished at your naive view of modern warfare.  Of what use do you imagine that a retired history professor and a miscellaneous assortment of Harvard students could have been on a contemporary battlefield?  These Harvard students presumably had not gone through military training; were not proficient in the firing of an Uzi submachine gun or a mortar, or the throwing of a hand grenade, or the handling of communications equipment; did not know how to fly jet fighters or aim artillery pieces or drive tanks or construct pontoon bridges; did not even speak Hebrew — and so would have been of no earthly use to the Israeli army.  Given that the stability and loyalty and capacity to endure homesickness and the good physical health of these Harvard students had never been established, they would not even have been of use away from the action, as by washing dishes in a mess or digging latrine ditches in an encampment.  Undoubtedly, if you had had occasion to continue pressing your scheme upon the Israelis, they would ultimately have invited you to just send money — which, however, would have frustrated your dream of dying for Israel and taking the largest possible number of Ukrainian youths along with you.

(6) I was astonished at the incongruity of your lacking the courage to stand up for your country at an academic conference, juxtaposed with your simultaneously presenting yourself as eager to demonstrate heroic courage in a much more demanding arena.  On the one hand, too pusillanimous to violate the political correctness expected of you on the spot, and at the same time finding refuge in images of dying on distant battlefields.  For courage to face immediate dangers — even when these are merely verbal — we must give you an F; for courage to face death on the battlefield — so long as that battlefield remains on the other side of the globe — we must give you an A+.

(7) Of course no one expects Jewish conference participants to have replied to your statement by rising to their feet and documenting any reciprocal case of young Jewish students banding together to offer their lives on behalf of Ukraine.  The imbalance of Ukrainians demonstrating greater sympathy for Jews than Jews demonstrate toward Ukrainians is widely known, and occasions no surprise.  However, I was astonished at the incompleteness of your statement, astonished that is in that neither you nor any other conference participant pointed out that such reciprocity from the Jewish side was absent, and in fact unimaginable.

(8) I was astonished at the possibility suggested to me by your advocacy of a Ukrainian Legion for Israel that within North American institutions of higher learning there might exist a filter through which historians of Ukraine are allowed to pass only if they can demonstrate that they are anti-Ukrainian.  I have already noted that professor Magocsi of the University of Toronto is markedly anti-Ukrainian; and here in yourself I see one of the founding members of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute demonstrating a similar bias.


In recent days, some controversy has erupted concerning the effectiveness of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.  In defense of the HURI has been offered a list of topics that have been treated by HURI scholars.  As for myself, I find this list not only unconvincing, but damning, for what it demonstrates is the slavish adherence of HURI scholars to the dictates of political correctness.  They will not touch the controversial, which renders them next to useless to both the Ukrainian diaspora and to Ukraine itself because it prevents them from dealing with the immediate and the vital.  Here is my list of some vital topics crying out for study, concerning which the HURI presents a deafening silence:

(i) in general the unwarranted and discriminatory pursuit of war criminals among aging Ukrainians, and in particular the show-trial of John Demjanjuk;

(ii) the widespread and frequent calumniation of Ukraine in the mass media, as for example in the 60 Minutes broadcast "The Ugly Face of Freedom" of 23 October 1994;

(iii) the draining of Ukrainian brains to the West, and more especially to Israel, and possible efforts to increase this drain by magnifying and inciting Ukrainian anti-Semitism;

(iv) the white slave trade in Ukrainian women;

(v) the domination of Ukrainian politics and economy by both a domestic and an international mafia, even to the point where the Ukrainian president is implicated in the shooting of his political opponents;

(vi) the role played by Swiss banks in the support of the Ukrainian mafia, and more generally in the plundering of Ukraine;

(vii) the tendency for Western countries, particularly the United States, to exploit and pauperize some of the countries which seek their support and protection;

(viii) the low success rate of the World Bank and the IMF in improving the economies of their client countries;

(ix) the degree to which the disproportionate Western support of Russia compared to Ukraine is attributable to Russia having remained a nuclear power potentially threatening to the West while Ukraine disarmed.

Most, if not all, of the above are topics that have in the past served as subjects of scholarly research, and that today could be the focus of HURI research, and that moreover should be subjects of HURI research because they are of immediate and urgent concern to Ukraine.  That not every HURI scholar should jump to the study of the most immediately pressing topics is understandable.  But what is not understandable is that not a single HURI scholar seems to have ventured to study a single one of these pressing topics.

A possibility that your statement above concerning the Ukrainian Legion for Israel brings to mind, then, is that there may indeed be some reason for discontentment with the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.  Perhaps what is wrong with the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute is that it is staffed with scholars whose thinking is too tightly gripped by political correctness and whose loyalty is less to truth (because the pursuit of truth leads to controversy) than to career advancement (where career advancement is surest for those who devote themselves to the inoffensive study of the obscure, the unimportant, and the politically correct).  Perhaps the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute is staffed with scholars who have been entrusted by the Ukrainian diaspora with the task of disseminating truths about Ukraine, but who in reality have sold themselves to the anti-Ukrainian coalition.  Such scholars may harm Ukrainian interests not only by adding to anti-Ukrainian calumny, but also by absorbing funds from the Ukrainian diaspora which naively infers from the title "Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute" that their donations will contribute to the shedding of light upon Ukraine to dispel the enshrouding darkness.

In fact, I can recall a time when that was my own thinking, and that of my family, one result of which was the donation of $1,000 by the Prytulak family to the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.  I fear now that these funds were misplaced, producing little advancement of truth and little comfort for Ukraine, and perhaps on the whole even aiding Ukraine's enemies, among whom you have revealed yourself to be one.


Yours truly,


Lubomyr Prytulak

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