Omeljan Pritsak and the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University – a Conversation with Andrii Portnov
Andrii Portnov is an historian and Professor at the Pilecki-Institute in Warsaw. In 2015, he initiated and co-founded a Berlin-Brandenburg Ukraine Initiative (BBUI), which in 2016 became the PRISMA UKRAЇNA Research Network Eastern Europe at the Forum Transregionale Studien Berlin. In 2023, he was elected full professor at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Ukrainian Free University. From 2018 to 2025, Andrii Portnov was Professor of Entangled History of Ukraine at the European University Viadrina (Frankfurt/Oder). For his Ukrainian-language book “Histories for Home Use”, he was awarded the Yuri Shevelov Prize in 2013, and for “Dnipro. An Entangled History of a European City” he received an Ab Imperio Book Prize in 2023. Last year he published the German-language introduction to Ukrainian Studies: Ukraine-Studien. Einführung (Nomos Verlag). His most recent book publication is: “Omeljan Pritsak and the Intellectual Origins of the Ukrainian ‘Harvard Miracle’” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2026).

Judith Sieber (JS): Dear Andrii, your book is the first English-language biography of Omeljan Pritsak, who co-founded the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. Can you describe what interested you to write a book about Pritsak? What was the starting point of then project and for how long did you work on the book?
Andrii Portnov (AP): I am very interested in the history of historiography as a form of our discipline’s reflection on its own methods, sources and the experience of our predecessors, particularly in relation to shifting intellectual fashions or political agendas. The figure of Omeljan Pritsak caught my attention back when I was a student in Ukraine. I was struck by the breadth of his scholarly interests and the boldness of his conclusions. I even dared to write to him, and we corresponded for years. My decision to write the book about him was significantly influenced by sources I discovered in Germany relating to Pritsak’s academic activities in the 1940s and 1950s, from his studies at the University of Berlin to his dissertation defence in Göttingen and his professorship in Turkology at the University of Hamburg. Also influential was the declassification of the Pritsak’s files from the archives of the former KGB — these documents became available in Kyiv during the full-scale war.
JS: For people who don’t know who Pritsak is: Can you please explain who he was and why it is important to look at his life and work today?
AP: Omeljan Pritsak, one of the greatest Ukrainian historians and academic administrators of the 20th century, was the first director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. He was also a renowned Turkologist and an expert in Eastern languages, as well as a scholar of the origins of Old Rus’. As an historian, Pritsak was open to new ideas and often challenged his colleagues with his conclusions and proposals. During the Cold War, he was among the scholars who advocated for a transnational perspective on Ukrainian history, doing much to foster Ukrainian-Polish, Ukrainian-Jewish and Ukrainian-Russian dialogue.
JS: From your book launch I learned that Pritsak can be described as a cosmopolitan, for example that he worked as a Turkologist, who initially studied Middle Eastern languages, before he became the co-founder of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute in the 1970s and the first Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard – something that is hard to image today, academics changing disciplines over the course of their lives. It seems important that there was more toPritsak than his academic work: he was a red army soldier and lived and worked in Germany for a long time. What does this say about Harvard at the time and what does it maybe say about the limitations of institutions today?
AP: I’m not sure if Pritsak would have agreed to being described as a “cosmopolitan”. He considered himself Ukrainian and emphasised this on more than one occasion. He was simply someone who was open to other languages, cultures, religious beliefs and political views. I see no contradiction in having a sense of Ukrainian (or any other) national identity and being respectful towards others. I would also argue that there are good reasons to consider Pritsak a German scholar. Remember that he defended two dissertations and published a monograph in German, as well as edited a scholarly journal on Altaic studies. He eventually became a full professor at the University of Hamburg. However, we must not forget that Pritsak grew up in interwar Poland, where he enrolled at Lviv University. He graduated after Lviv had already been annexed by the Soviet Union. He had intended to continue his education in Kyiv, but he was drafted into the Red Army and taken prisoner by the Germans in the very first battle of 1941. The biographical paradox is that it was the Second World War that paved the way for the young Pritsak to study in Berlin, where he enrolled at university in the summer of 1943.
When it comes to the historian’s career at Harvard and how his complex life story influenced it, I don’t think the issue is so much Harvard itself as the era in which it took place. The post-war 1950s and early 1960s were a time of great opportunities. Since then, universities and academia in the West have changed significantly. Over the past few decades, there has been a rapidly growing trend towards turning universities into commercial corporations, standardising requirements for scholarly work (including stylistic formatting) and allowing bureaucracy and quantitative metrics to dominate. In my view, modern academia is in the midst of a profound crisis, with the concept of scholarly work as a creative endeavour gradually disappearing. One can say that, in such an academic world, there is less and less room for people like Omeljan Pritsak.
JS: It’s impressive how you describe the transformation of academic institutions over the past few decades through the lens of a figure like Pritsak, who would hardly fit in today but would be extremely inspiring to students (not only at Harvard). From today’s perspective, it’s also particularly interesting to understand how it was possible to establish an institute at Harvard University. Is that what you refer to as the “Harvard Miracle” in the title of your book? And can you say to what extent the institute was and is independent of or dependent on the university as a whole?
AP: In the 1960s and 1970s, the establishment of the Ukrainian Studies chairs and the Research Institute using donations collected by the Ukrainian community in America led people to speak of the “Harvard Miracle”. These funds came from thousands of individuals. It was truly a grassroots initiative. However, Pritsak first had to convince the Ukrainian diaspora that the Institute and its faculty should be established at Harvard, the oldest and one of the most prestigious American universities. He then convinced Harvard to accept these funds and open the Ukrainian Institute. It is important to note that at that time, there was no Ukrainian state, and many in the West equated the Soviet Union with Russia. When the “Harvard Miracle” became a reality, it sparked admiration and envy, particularly among Polish émigrés who had been unable to establish a similar institute at a major American university. So, it was truly an exceptional event.
JS: You mentioned that you visited various archives for the research for your book—different cities in Germany, the KGB archive in Kyiv—and I assume there is also material on Pritsak at Harvard? Is your book a first step toward linking these archives together and/or transferring documents to another location? And can you also say something about the photos you discovered and what the copyright situation is here?
AP: When researching any academic topic, it is standard practice for a historian to examine various archives in different countries. Of course, documents related to Pritsak have been preserved not only in Ukraine and Germany, but also in the United States, Turkey and Poland. I do not think it is feasible or desirable to consolidate these archives. However, we can now consider digitising the most interesting materials and making them available on a single online portal. Despite the exceptional importance of digitisation, I would also add that a researcher’s direct contact with original documents is a special and crucial part of the research process. Sometimes, simply holding original letters or manuscripts in one’s hands can help us to better grasp certain aspects of the life of the figure being studied. The illustrations for the book, many of which are being published for the first time, mostly come from the archival collection of Omeljan Pritsak at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. There are many photographs there; for example, I am including two with this interview that did not make it into the Harvard edition. Some of the book’s illustrations also come from my own collection, specifically copies of his letters and postcards to me. The originals were sent to the Forschungsstelle Osteuropa archive in Bremen.
JS: My last and very brief question: Was there anything completely unexpected that you discovered about Pritsak?
AP: That’s a very good question. Perhaps what came as a “complete surprise” to me was a report on Pritsak written by a very well-known Lviv historian, which has been preserved in declassified KGB documents. The author of the report had himself spent 10 years in Soviet concentration camps; he was an exceptionally talented and charismatic scholar. And this report explained to me how it was possible for a neutral descriptive note about Pritsak’s scholarly works to appear in Soviet Ukraine in the 1960s. It was part of the so-called “operational game” of the Soviet secret services.
JS: Thanks a lot, dear Andrii!
Citation: Judith Sieber / Andrii Portnov, Omeljan Pritsak and the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University – a Conversation with Andrii Portnov, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 05.05.2026, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/65416
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (May 5, 2026). Omeljan Pritsak and the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University – a Conversation with Andrii Portnov. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved May 11, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/166b4



