Mark Louis von Hagen (July 21, 1954 – September 15, 2019) was an American military historian who taught Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian history at Arizona State University. He was formerly at Columbia University. He was commissioned by The New York Times to write an independent assessment of Times correspondent Walter Duranty and his reporting on the Soviet Union after the newspaper received a letter from the Pulitzer Prize Board regarding allegations of Duranty's role in the cover-up of the Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine.
In 2003, The New York Times commissioned Von Hagen to study Duranty's role in covering up genocide in Ukraine. He reported that "after reading through a good portion of Duranty's reporting for 1931, I was disappointed and disturbed by the overall picture he painted of the Soviet Union for that period...but after reading so much of Duranty in 1931 it is far less surprising to me that he would deny in print the famine of 1932-1933." The results of the study led him to call for Duranty's Pulitzer Prize to be revoked, remarking to the press that "for the sake of The New York Times' honor, they should take the prize away."
Asked if his opinion of Duranty's reporting would change if he were to examine only those 13 articles for which Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize, Dr. von Hagen replied with a resolute no. The reporting for which he won the Pulitzer Prize was "quintessential of the problems of Mr. Duranty's analysis," Dr. von Hagen said. The professor said that Duranty's award "diminishes the prize's value."
An excerpt from, "Does Ukraine Have a History?" By Mark von Hagen, Slavic Review, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Autumn, 1995):
One answer to this seemingly simple question was suggested by a Ukrainian scholar when he retorted that if Ukraine has a future, then Ukraine will have a history. He thereby correctly put politics, including international politics, at the center of the discussion. A simple answer to the question is, of course, that the peoples and institutions that occupy the contemporary state of Ukraine have a history, in the sense of lived experience, wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, the way all of us have pasts to which we can appeal.
But if we re-ask the question, "Does Ukraine have a history?" and mean this time a written record of that experienced past that commands some widespread acceptance and authority in the international scholarly and political communities, then the answer is not so simple. The title of this paper echoes an important essay by Ukrainian historian Serhii Bilokin', "Chy maemo my istorychnu nauku?"'---literally "do we have historical science?" perhaps more clearly translated "Do we have a tradition of historical scholarship?" Bilokin', by the way, persuasively argues that it is too early to speak of such traditions.
If we leave Ukraine and look to the political geography of history teaching, we find virtually no recognition that Ukraine has a history. In major Anglo-American, German and Japanese academic centers, Ukrainian history as a field (with a couple of important exceptions) does not exist per se; the exceptions only confirm the general rule. The Canadian government and Canadian Ukrainian emigrants subsidize Ukrainian history and culture in Canada, but here an "abnormal" situation exists in that nearly all the scholars are of Ukrainian descent. This fact has allowed "mainstream" historians to characterize Ukrainian history as "searching for roots," national advocacy or some other partisan pleading, and to deny the field the valorization it seeks as "objective history." The domination by scholars of Ukrainian ancestry is also the case at the one US center of Ukrainian studies, at Harvard University. The point of all this is that, by the indexes of the intellectual organization of professional history writing, Ukraine has not had a history.
Ukraine and the History of East Central and Eastern Europe
Why is this? Above all, Ukraine's history must be seen as part of a greater dilemma of eastern and central Europe. During all their tenuous modern existence, the states of eastern and central Europe have been pawns in the international system. Before 1914 the "non-historical peoples" were long subject to three central European dynastic empires: the Romanovs, the Hohenzollerns and the Habsburgs. After the collapse of the multi-ethnic monarchies in World War I, these nations have been most directly the pawns of either the German Reich or the Soviet Union.
These geopolitical realities were reflected in intellectual structures that have served to organize our thinking about the region. Because none of the states which exist today between Berlin and Moscow existed at the time of the rise of modern historiography in the early and mid-nineteenth century, their histories continue to carry a taint of artificiality, non-genuineness; real states are Britain, France, Spain, Russia and, with qualifications, Germany. But Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and especially Ukraine are suspect candidates in the international order and somehow undeserving of the prerogatives of genuine statehood. As one of the consequences of the failed or circumscribed statehoods of the peoples in eastern and central Europe, the peoples of the region have been denied full historiographical legitimacy.
