The Section for the History of Western European Culture at the Kharkiv Institute of Public Education

Abstract

In the early twentieth century, Ukrainian historical scholarship underwent a profound transformation driven by the entrenchment of a novel Marxist methodology and sweeping changes in the structure and organization of higher education. Universities as centers of academic life were abolished and replaced by institutes of public education, whose primary mission was teaching rather than research. To preserve the scholarly potential of university-level instructors, special research departments were established. The largest center for the study of world history in Kharkiv was the Department of the History of European Culture at the Kharkiv Institute of Public Education (KhINO), which included a Section for the History of Western European Culture specializing in the history of Europe from the Middle Ages to the modern era. The department recruited such prominent Kharkiv historians as V. Buzeskul and M. Holdin, whose research focused on modern history. It also hosted a graduate program; one of its first graduates, M. Pakul, subsequently joined the department’s faculty. By the mid-1920s, the department boasted a substantial cohort of graduate students, most of them working in modern and, to a lesser extent, medieval history. The Section for the History of Western European Culture at the KhINO pursued wide-ranging research in modern history, with special attention to social movements, the history of the peasantry, and the development of European thought. Holdin worked on topics from agrarian policy and the labor movement to French socialism, while Buzeskul studied Western European historiography. The section’s graduate students (Kyktiev, Chukmarov, Oleksandrov, and others) tackled problems of the Peasants’ War in Germany, pre-scientific socialism, and materialist philosophy, producing some of the earliest Marxist interpretations of these subjects in the USSR. Their work contributed to the shaping of new approaches to the study of European history and bore fruit in important publications and document collections.