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Susan Heuman. Kistiakovsky: The Struggle for National and Constitutional Rights in the Last Years of Tsarism. Cambridge: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1998. xiv, 218 pp. u.s. $18.00 paper, u.s. $32.95 cloth. Distributed by Harvard University Press.
Compared with many of his contemporaries-Petr Struve, Pavel Miliukov, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Nikolai Berdiaev, and others in that remarkable generation from the twilight of imperial Russia-Bogdan (Bohdan) Kistiakovsky has suffered undue neglect in the historical literature. Such scholarly oversight is surprising in view of his intellectual breadth. A seminal legal philosopher, he contributed to two of the most important collections in the history of late imperial Russian thought-Problemy idealizma (1902) and the better-known Vekhi of 1909. One can gauge the respect he enjoyed abroad from Max Weber's reliance on him to help interpret the "bourgeois" revolution and "Scheinkonstitutionalismus" in the Russian Empire after 1905.
In addition to these achievements, Kistiakovsky also spoke out for Ukrainian distinctness to an imperial(ist) intelligentsia little inclined to take such claims seriously. Born in Kyiv in 1868, he grew up in a milieu that contemporaries would have termed Ukrainophile. His father, a law professor, had written on the Hetmanate's legal history; his uncle was the distinguished historian Volodymyr Antonovych; and Mykhailo Drahomanov was a friend of the family. Kistiakovsky himself took part...