At the beginning of the 20th century, Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky referred to Galicia as the Ukrainian Piedmont. He was alluding to the Italian nation building that began in Piedmont and spread throughout Italy by 1870. After the civil war, Bolshevik propaganda turned the tables and claimed that Soviet Ukraine was the Ukrainian Piedmont. It was only after independence that the idea of a Galician Piedmont regained its influence.  Famously, president Leonid Kuchma, who had roots in Dnipro, compared Ukrainian nation building with Italian nation building in his 2003 book “Ukraine is not Russia.” Indeed, following Russia's annexation of Crimea and the destabilization of eastern Ukraine  in 2014, and more pronouncedly after the open invasion in 2022, we can observe the spread of the Ukrainian national project from Galicia to the whole of Ukraine.

Ulrich Schmid is professor of East European Studies at the University of St. Gallen. His research interests include nationalism, literary culture, and media in Eastern Europe. He studied German and Slavic literature at the Universities of Zürich, Heidelberg, and Leningrad. He held academic positions in Basel, Bern, Bochum, and was visiting researcher at Harvard University and at the universities of Warsaw and Oslo. His publications include History of Ukrainian Literature (ed. 2025). Eastern Europe between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and Russia’s War in Ukraine (2022). Ukraine. Contested Nationhood in a European Context (2019). Regionalism without Regions. Reconceptualizing Ukraine’s Heterogeneity (ed. 2019). De profundis. On the failure of the Russian Revolution (ed. 2017). Technologies of the Soul. The Production of Truth in Contemporary Russian Culture (2015), Sword, Eagle and Cross. The Aesthetics of the Nationalist Discourse in Interwar Poland (ed. 2013), Tolstoi as a Theological Thinker and  Critic of the Church (ed. 2013), Lev Tolstoi (2010), Literary Theories of the 20th Century (ed. 2010), Russian Media Theories (ed. 2005), Russian Religious Philosophers of the 20th Century (ed. 2003), The Designed Self. Russian Autobiographies between Avvakum and Herzen (2000).

Moderator: Dr. Darius Staliūnas (Lithuanian Institute of History)

We cordially invite you to the lecture about regionalism and nation-building in Ukraine by Prof. Dr. Ulrich Schmid (St. Gallen).
The lecture is organized by our branch office in Vilnius.The lecture will take place at Vilnius University Faculty of History, auditorium no. 211

18 May, 2026, start: 17:00 / 5pm