The absence of historiography on Kiev is striking and is not matched by any other large city in the Russian Empire. Michael Hamm's Kiev: A Portrait and a small number of scholarly articles are the only satisfactory works available in any language.17 The Soviet Istoriia Kieva, published in two editions in the 1960s, is so sparsely referenced as to be almost useless to the scholar.18 Moreover, the Marxist-Leninist framework within which its authors interpret all events and trends ensures that the issue of ethnicity is almost completely neglected, which is akin to trying to ignore the elephant in the middle of the room. Several recent collections of historical sketches (most notably those by vitalii Kovalyns’kyi), as well as a series of guidebooks by Mikhail Kal’nitskii and a number of Soviet-style reference works (spravochniki) provide some solid information on various aspects of life in tsarist Kiev, but these are obviously no substitute for a comprehensive and overarching analysis of the themes that these works raise.19
Why the paucity of works on Kiev, and especially imperial Kiev? Ukrainian intellectuals were often more interested in the periods that predated tsarist control of the city and of historic Ukraine, and thus produced a number of works on medieval Kiev, capital of Kievan Rus’, as well as on the Hetman period.20 Under the tsars, Kiev enjoyed only a brief period as a flourishing center of Ukrainian nationalism after the 1905 Revolution, and this, along with the fact that until well into the 1920s the city was (officially, at least) minority Ukrainian, meant that it did not garner the attention of a truly "Ukrainian" city such as L’viv. In the early Soviet period, Kiev had its capital status stripped from it in favor of Kharkiv, and even after it regained that title in 1934, it continued to be seen as "a provincial backwater of Soviet Russian culture," with scholarship on Ukrainian history relegated to the second-class standing reserved for all "national minority" histories.21 And perhaps most of all, the decimation of the Ukrainian intelligentsia by Stalin ensured the end of a vibrant academic culture devoted to the study of Ukrainian history and culture, which would of course include the history of Kiev.
Nor have Jews embraced Kiev as their own, remembering it most often as a place of persecution and medieval-style ghettos and preferring to write about cities that they considered to be, in the words of the Hebrew phrase, "mother cities in Israel," such as Vilna, Odessa, and Warsaw. Vilna and Warsaw, both included within the borders of interwar Poland, also survived for much longer as world centers of Jewish culture, while Kiev—despite its large Jewish population and Bureau of Jewish Proletarian Culture, liquidated by Stalin in the late 1930s—quickly lost whatever Jewish cachet it had once had. It did not even benefit from the mass emigration of Russian Jews to outposts of the Russian diaspora that made their metropoles of origin famous once again for their Jewishness (take the example of Odessa and Brighton Beach).
World History
