Per Anders Rudling


Per Anders Rudling is a Swedish-American historian, an associate professor of the Department of History at Lund University, specializing in the areas of nationalism. He has an MA in Russian from Uppsala University, an MA in history from San Diego State University, Ph.D. in history from the University of Alberta , and post-doc at University of Greifswald, Germany. He is the author of The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906-1931, published by University of Pittsburgh, devoted to the subject of present-day Belarusian nationalism from its origins until the 1930s.

Treatment of Ukrainian nationalism

Rudling became the subject of international attention in October 2012 when a group of Ukrainian organizations in Canada delivered a signed protest to his employer, accusing him of betraying his own university's principles. The letter came as a response to Rudling's own public criticism of the promotion and glorification of OUN-B, and the UPA, as well as Stepan Bandera, and Roman Shukhevych by Ruslan Zabily from Ukraine in his intended Canadian and American lecture tour. Rudling delivered a communiqué from Lund to concerned universities pointing out to the role of OUN-B in the Holocaust in Ukraine and the UPA involvement in the massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. He also wrote about Bandera's antisemitism and political violence during World War II leading to ethnic cleansing of not only Poles and Jews but also Ukrainians themselves. In response to the Canadian-Ukrainian complaint about Rudling, an open letter was published in his support, signed by 38 scholars of the Holocaust and professors of leading universities supporting him, including Omer Bartov, Kristian Gerner, John-Paul Himka, Dovid Katz, Alexei I. Miller, Ruth Wodak, and Efraim Zuroff.