John-Paul Himka is Professor of East European History at the University of Alberta. He received his PhD in History from the University of Michigan in 1977. He is the author of Socialism in Galicia: The Emergence of Polish Social Democracy and Ukrainian Radicalism (1860-1890) (1983), and Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine: The Greek Catholic Church and the Ruthenian National Movement in Galicia, 1867-1900 (1999), as well as articles on many aspects of nineteenth and twentieth-century Ukrainian history. He served as co-editor for history for volumes 3-5 of the Encyclopedia of Ukraine. His current research focuses on two projects: a monograph on the Last Judgement in Ukrainian texts and images prior to 1800 and a study of politics and violence in Ukraine from 1937 to 1942.

Hans-Joachim Torke (d. 2000) was professor of Russian and East European history at the Free University of Berlin. His publications include Von Moskau nach St. Petersburg. Das russische Reich im 17. Jahrhundert, books on the Russian bureaucracy in the first half of the nineteenth century and on state and society in the seventeenth-century Muscovy, as well as articles on Russian absolutism and on Russian and Soviet historiography.