Omeljan Pritsak and the Soviet Secret Services: An Attempt at a Critical Reading of the Declassified KGB Documents

Talk by Prof. Dr. Andrii Portnov, PRISMA UKRAЇNA Research Network Eastern Europe (Berlin)

Moderator: Prof. Dr. Annette Werberger, Chair of Eastern European Literatures, European University Viadrina (Frankfurt/Oder)

The German-Ukrainian Academic Society and the Embassy of Ukraine in the Federal Republic of Germany invite you to attend the lecture series “Science at First Hand” on “Omeljan Pritsak and the Soviet Secret Services: An Attempt at a Critical Reading of the Declassified KGB Documents“.

The intellectual biography of Omeljan Pritsak (1919–2006), one of the most productive, influential, and controversial Ukrainian historians of the 20th century, has yet to be written. A renowned Turkologist who studied in Lviv, Berlin, and Göttingen, Pritsak became a professor in Hamburg after World War II, the first professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard in the 1960s (1968), and the founding director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (1973). Pritsak’s biography is full of mysteries, starting with a rather complicated World War II experience (when a former Soviet prisoner of war became a student at the University of Berlin) and his 1959 trip to Soviet Ukraine to visit his mother. New evidence on both episodes, as well as other aspects of Pritsak’s biography, is now available thanks to a recently declassified three-volume “Linguist” case from the State Archive of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine. In his talk, Prof. Portnov will analyze these documents and briefly present his forthcoming book “Omeljan Pritsak and the Intellectual Origins of Harvard’s Ukrainian Miracle”.

Registration via berlin@ukrainet.eu