# Jaroslaw Pelenski

Jaroslaw Pelenski (Warsaw, 12 April 1929 – New York City, 20 February 2022) was a Polish-born Ukrainian historian, political scientist and professor emeritus. He obtained his higher education in West Germany in the late 1940s and 1950s, and his doctorate in the United States in the 1960s, where he made an academic career. Returning to Ukraine in the 1990s, he was a full member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society, and a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, where he served as the Director of the Institute of European Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

## Biography
### Education in West Germany

Pelenski was born to Ukrainian parents in Warsaw in 1929. He grew up in Warsaw and Lublin. When he was 15, his family fled Poland in the summer of 1944, one week before the Warsaw Uprising. After the Second World War, he found himself in the western occupation zones of Germany (which would become West Germany in 1949), attending the Oberrealschule in Würzburg. In 1948, he began studying history at the Julius-Maximilian University in Würzburg, and in 1950–55 he continued his studies at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich. He specialised in the modern history of Europe, and at the same time in the medieval history of Europe, philosophy, and German literature. In 1957, he defended his PhD thesis with distinction on Ukrainian national thought in the light of the works of Mykhailo Hrushevsky and Vyacheslav Lypynsky.

### Academic education and career in the United States

After receiving his master's degree, he moved to the United States in 1957, where he was a lecturer in German language and literature at King's College in Wilkes-Barre in Pennsylvania from 1958 until 1961. From 1961–64, he was affiliated with Columbia University in New York, where in 1964, he defended his thesis at the Russian Institute (since 1997 Harriman Institute) titled Soviet Ukrainian Historiography after World War II. From 1964 to 1967 he was an assistant professor in the history department of American University in Washington, D.C. In the spring of 1968 he was a temporary assistant professor in the history department of Columbia University.
In 1968 he defended his dissertation on Muscovite Imperial Claims to the Kazan Khanate: A Case Study in the Emergence of Imperial Ideology and received a second PhD in historical studies with a specialisation in early and modern history of Russia and Eastern Europe. From 1967 to 1971 he was a lecturer at the University of Iowa, from 1971 an associate professor at the university until his retirement in 1998. In 1975 he was a lecturer at the Harvard University summer school. He was the recipient of more than 25 grants and research fellowships (Academic Awards and Post-Doctoral Fellowships), including the Kosciuszko Foundation.

### Academic career in Ukraine and Poland

Pelenski was a member of the editorial board of the journal Kontinent , founded in 1974 and published by the Soviet dissident community in Paris (editor-in-chief Vladimir Maksimov).
In 1984–1987 Pelenski edited, together with Bohdan Osadchuk, the scholarly magazine-almanac Vidnova [uk] (Віднова, "Renewal", published in Munich) on current affairs in politics and culture of Ukrainian society; another member of the editorial board was Jerzy Giedroyc. Of the magazine's seven issues, two were devoted to Polish affairs and Ukrainian-Polish relations, while others dealt with: Ukrainian-Russian relations, the centenary of the Ukrainian women's movement, the Chernobyl disaster, and glasnost and perestroika). Thanks to the Vidnova community, a Ukrainian translation of the book Bohdan Skaradziński was published: Byalorusians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians – our enemies or brothers?, devoted to the issue of national minorities and the relationship of Poles with their eastern neighbours. In the summer of 1991, he became a member of the editorial board of the Przegląd Wschodni ("Eastern Review") in Warsaw, and in 1993 a member of the editorial board of the Kyiv-published Ucraina mediaevalis ("Medieval Ukraine").
As early as May 1990, as visiting professor, Pelenski lectured for a month at the Institute of Social Sciences of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Lviv. After the Declaration of Independence of Ukraine (24 August 1991), his cooperation with the Ukrainian academic community in the country began. In November 1992, he was elected as a foreign full member (academician) of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NASU). From 1993 onwards, he was director of the NASU Institute of European Studies. In August 1993, he became a member of the Polish–Ukrainian Historical Commission established by the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NASU) and the Polish Academy of Sciences. Since March 1994, he was a member of the NASU's Office of the History, Philosophy and Law Faculty.
His research interests covered various issues and historical periods: Kievan Rus', Ruthenia and Muscovy, the Russian Tsardom and Empire, Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union since 1917, 20th-century history of Ukraine, and more broadly the modern history of (Eastern) Europe since 1500. He gave lectures, seminars and colloquia on themes such as Leninism, Stalinism, the dissident movement, the Soviet political system, political theory, historiography, problems of nationality, imperialism, communism, nobility, and conservatism.