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WORK TITLE: Painting Imperialism and Nationalism Red
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Toronto
STATE: ON
COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY:
http://old.eu.spb.ru/en/reset/11.htm
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:University of London, Ph.D., 1981; University of Toronto, M.A., 1987.
ADDRESS
CAREER
York University, Toronto, ON, Canada, member of faculty, 1983-86; University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada, research fellow,chair of Ukrainian Studies, 1984—, lecturer, 1988-97, 2002, Center for Russian and East European Studies, resident fellow, 1989—; University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada, member of faculty, 1993; Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada, member of faculty, 1993, 1995; Trent University, Peterborough, ON, Canada, member of faculty, 1995-96; State University of New York, Buffalo, visiting assistant professor, 1998-99.
MEMBER:Canadian Association of Slavists, American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, American Historical Association, Canadian Historical Association.
AWARDS:Doctoral Fellowship, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1978-79; Postdoctoral Fellowship, Harvard University, 1983; Edward Schreyer Fellowship, University of Toronto, 1983-84; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Research Grant, 1986-90; Publication Grant, Canadian Federation for the Humanities, 1987; Exchange Scholar, Canada-USSR Academic Exchange Program, 1988; University of Toronto Humanities and Social Sciences Conferences Grant, 1990, 1999; University of London Central Research Fund Grant.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including National Issues in Russian and East European History, and journals, including Canadian Journal of Political Science, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, and Comparative Studies in Society and History.
SIDELIGHTS
Stephen Velychenko, chair of Ukrainian studies at the University of Toronto, is a scholar of Ukraine and its relations with the countries that border it, one of which, Russia, ruled it during the era of the Soviet Union. His work has explored such topics as Ukrainian identity and historiography.
National History as Cultural Process
Velychenko’s first book, National History as Cultural Process: A Survey of Ukraine’s Past in Polish, Russian and Ukrainian Historical Writing from the Earliest Times to 1914, looks at how Ukraine viewed itself and how the Poles and Russians saw it. He consults articles, history texts, and other documents, and finds little agreement among the three nations on any aspect of Ukrainian history. The divergence, he writes, arises not only from the political and economic differences of the nations, but also from individual historians’ beliefs and biases.
The book is “a highly stimulating exploration of the nature of historical knowledge” and the importance of history to national identity, commented Mark Sandle in History Today. Velychenko’s “eye for detail is impressive,” Sandle related, noting that at the same time, the author never loses track of how the details fit into the larger picture. He pronounced the work “a remarkably balanced and erudite piece of scholarship.”
State Building in Revolutionary Ukraine
State Building in Revolutionary Ukraine: A Comparative Study of Governments and Bureaucrats, 1917–1922 examines the various regimes that ruled Ukraine during this turbulent period. There were five different governments between 1917 and 1920, with a variety of political philosophies. The Bolsheviks, having occupied the Crimea region of Ukraine, took power in 1920, and two years later formed the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, one of the founding republics of the Soviet Union. Over the years, some scholars have asserted that Ukraine did not succeed as an independent nation because of the incompetence of the governments that preceded the Bolsheviks. Using documents from the period under study as well as historical accounts, Velychenko compares all five of these and finds that no one of them stands out as more ineffective than the others. All were corrupt to some extent, and all made mistakes, he writes. All, however, employed some competent administrators who managed to provide services to Ukrainians, but in the end the nation proved too unstable for them to govern. He also compares the various Ukrainian regimes to the governments of Ireland, Czechoslovakia, and Poland in the same period.
“Velychenko has written a pioneering book on an important and unstudied subject,” observed Ernest Gyidel in the journal Canadian Slavonic Papers. Some of Velychenko’s conclusions are questionable, though, according to Gyidel. These include the assertion that “a lack of peace and stability” was the key to the collapse of the pre-Bolshevik governments, as the the nation lacked those traits under Bolshevik rule, too. The Bolsheviks may have succeeded where others failed because they were simply more ruthless and repressive, Gyidel remarked. Still, he found State Building in Revolutionary Ukraine a worthwhile study, and he noted that Velychenko readily acknowledges when his data is incomplete or inconclusive. The book “will likely leave the reader with more questions than answers,” Gyidel related. “But perhaps that is the nature of history, for historians ultimately always have questions, but not always answers.”
Painting Imperialism and Nationalism Red
In Painting Imperialism and Nationalism Red: The Ukrainian Marxist Critique of Russian Communist Rule in Ukraine, 1918-1925, Velychenko asserts that opposition to Russian domination came not only from conservative Ukrainians but from leftists, even Marxists. The Russian regime, according to Velychenko, was just as repressive as the czars who preceded it, so leftists had ample reason to oppose it. The Russian attitude toward Ukraine, he writes, was similar to the condescension of Western socialists toward nations that were part of the British Empire, such as Ireland and India. He draws on a variety of documents and provides historical background on the situation.
“In 1919, pro-Bolshevik Ukrainians wanted national independence and social justice — in other words, national and social liberation within a socialist Ukraine ruled by its own party and ministries, within a supra-national socialist confederation,” he notes in the book. “Bolshevik leaders for their part regarded their ‘Ukrainian Republic’ as little more than a Russian province; they did not dismantle their pre-1917 centralized party structure or the single imperial economic system inherited from the tsars.” Once Russia completely dominated Ukraine, Velychenko writes, it made some concessions in allowing use of the Ukrainian language and cultural practices, but on the whole, it sought to “Russify” the nation, drawing the ire of Ukrainian liberals and conservatives alike.
Painting Imperialism and Nationalism Red offers much of interest to scholars, according to some critics. “This book addresses an important topic,” reported P.E. Heineman in Choice. Heineman praised the volume as “richly documented,” but took issue with its “censorious” tone and questioned how much the Bolsheviks were truly imperialistic. Nonetheless, the reviewer rated the book “recommended.” The blogger behind Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist praised it highly, saying Velychenko “demonstrates in copious detail how the Bolsheviks treated the Ukrainians just like the British treated the Irish.” The reviewer summed up the work as “essential.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Canadian Slavonic Papers, March-June 2012, Ernest Gyidel, review of State Building in Revolutionary Ukraine: A Comparative Study of Governments and Bureaucrats, 1917-1922.
Choice, April, 2016, P. E. Heineman, review of Painting Imperialism and Nationalism Red: The Ukrainian Marxist Critique of Russian Communist Rule in Ukraine, 1918-1925, p. 1218.
History Today, July, 1995, Mark Sandle, review of National History as Cultural Process: A Survey of Ukraine’s Past in Polish, Russian and Ukrainian Historical Writing from the Earliest Times to 1914, p. 53.
Reference & Research Book News, December, 2011, review of State Building in Revolutionary Ukraine.
ONLINE
European University at St. Petersburg Web site, http://old.eu.spb.ru/ (March 30, 2017), brief biography.
Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist, https://louisproyect.org/ (February 7, 2016), review of Painting Imperialism and Nationalism Red.*
HESP Regional Seminar for Excellence in Teaching
From History to Histories: Teaching the Past from a Local Perspective
Stephen Velychenko
Current Position:
Chair of Ukrainian Studies, University of Toronto
Education:
York University (Pol.Sci., History) 1972
Academic degrees:
PhD (in History ) - 1981, University of London
MA (in Political Science) - 1987, University of Toronto
Teaching Experience:
Teaching Positions:
Visiting Assistant Professor, SUNY (Buffalo), 1998-99
Lecturer, University of Toronto, 1988-97, 2002
Brock University, 1993, 1995
Trent University, 1995-96
University of Guelph, 1993
York University, 1983-86
Courses taught:
World Civilizations since 1500
History of Russia
Eighteenth-Century Europe
Russia to Peter the Great
Europe in the Age of Revolution 1789-1848
Russia in the Twentieth Century
Europe 1815-1914
Soviet Foreign Policy
The European World
State and Society in Russia
State and Society in Early Modern Eastern Europe
Ukraine: History, Society , Politics
Kievan-Rus
Scholarly Achievements:
1999, 1990 - University of Toronto Humanities and Social Sciences Conferences Grant
1989 - present - Resident Fellow, Center for Russian and East European Studies , University of Toronto
1986 - 1990 - Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Research Grant
1988 - Exchange Scholar, Canada-USSR Academic Exchange Program
1987 - Publication Grant, Canadian Federation for the Humanities
1984 - present - Research Fellow, Chair of Ukrainian Studies, University of Toronto
1983-1984 - Edward Schreyer Fellowship, University of Toronto
1983 - Member, Institute of Historical Research, University of London
1983 - Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University
1978 - 1979 - Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Doctoral Fellowship
1978 - Research Student in History , Jagiellonian University
1975 - Research Assistant, London School of Economics
University of London Central Research Fund Grant
Membership in Professional Organisations:
Canadian Association of Slavists
American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies
American Historical Association
Canadian Historical Association
Publications:
Monographs:
Building in Modern Ukraine (1917-1922) - in progress
Officials in Russian Ruled Eurasia and the Newly Independent States 1802-2002 (co-editor with D.K. Rowney) (in progress)
Rossia et Britannia. Imperii ta natsii na okraiinakh Evropy / Empire and Nations on Europe's peripheries. Special edition of Skhid--Zakhid 4 (2001) (co-editor)
Shaping Identity in Eastern Europe and Russia. Soviet-Russian and Polish Accounts of Ukrainian History. 1914-1991. New York, London: St. Martin’s Press, 1993
National History as Cultural Process. The Interpretation of Ukraine’s Past in Polish Russian and Ukrainian Historical Writing. From Earliest Times to 1914. Edmonton: CIUS, 1992
Articles (On line)
Old-Regime Bureaucrats and New Governments: A European Historical Continuity, in: European History Quarterly - submitted
Gosudarstvennye sluzashchie bolsheviki I Maks Veber 1917-1921, in: Obshchestvenno-politicheskaia zhizn rossiisskoi provintsii (XIX -XX vv.). Tambov, 2005
Ukrainians Re-think their Revolutions, in: Ab Imperio. 2004 No. 4
Bureaucrats and Revolutionary State-Building in Ireland and Russia. Was Weber Right? in: Canadian Journal of Political Science (forthcoming)
Vid Rady to Ruslany. 1654 rik u 2004 rotsi, in: Skhid-Zakhid 8 (2004)
From Cossack Rada to Pop-Star Ruslana, in: Journal of Ukrainian Studies. 2004. No. 1
Postcolonialism and Ukraine in: Ab Imperio. 2004. No. 1.
Poskolonializm, Evropa ta Ukrainska istoriia, in: Ucraina Moderna. 2003. No. 9
Bolsheviks; Lenin; Luxemburg Rosa; Ukraine; in: Encyclopedia of Colonialism. 2 vols. New York: ABC-CLIO, 2003.
Chislennost biurokratii i armii v Rossiiskoi imperii v sravnitlenoi perspektive, in: Rossiiskaia imperiia v sovremennoi zarubezhnoi literature. Moscow, 2003
The Issue of Russian Colonialism in Ukrainian Thought, in: Ab Imperio. 2002. No. 1
Accroitre ou Reduire? L’administration des etats successeurs de l’URSS: Un point de vue historique comparatiste sur le niveau des effectifs, in: Revue d’etudes comparatives. Est - Ouest. 2002. No. 1
The Size of the Imperial Russian Bureaucracy and Army in Comparative Perspective, in: Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas. 2001. No. 3
Rival Grand Narratives of National History. Russian, Polish and Ukrainian Interpretations of Ukraine’s Past, in: Oesterreichische Osthefte. 2000. No. 3-4
Local Officialdom and National Movements in Imperial Russia in light of Administrative Shortcomings and Under-government, in: National Issues in Russian and East European History. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000
The Bureaucracy Police and Army in Twentieth-Century Ukraine. A Comparative Quantitative Study, in: Harvard Ukrainian Studies. 1999. No. 3-4
Tsarskyi uriad v Ukraiinskykh guberniiakh 1800-1914
C vsemohutnist chy slabist? in: Ucraina Moderna. 1999. No. 2-3
Empire Loyalism and Minority Nationalism in Great Britain and Imperial Russia 1707-1914, in: Comparative Studies in Society and History. 1997. No. 3
Reviews:
A. Kappeler, Z.E. Kohut, F.E. Sysyn, M. Von Hagen, eds., Culture, Nation, and Identity, The Ukrainian Russian Encounter, 1600-1945. Russian Review (April 2004)
P. Holquist , Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia's Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921. Ab Imperio (no. 3 2003)
S. Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine. Canadian Journal of History (no.2 2003) 315-17
A.I. Miller, `Ukrainskii vopros v politike vlastei i russkom obshchestvennom mnenii. Slavic Review (Fall, 2001)
T. Sanders ed., Historiography of Imperial Russia. Slavic Review (Spring 2000)
T. R. Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia. Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier 1863-1914. Russian History (Summer 1999)
K. Dawisha and B. Parrot eds., The End of Empire? The Transformation of the USSR Comparative Perspective. Journal of Ukrainian Studies (Summer, 1998) 120-22
A. Wilson, Ukrainian Nationalism in the 1990s: A Minority Faith. Slavic Review (Fall, 1998)
T. Prymak, Mykola Kostomarov. A Biography. American Historical Review (December, 1997)
Velychenko, Stephen. Painting imperialism and
nationalism red: the Ukrainian Marxist critique of
Russian communist rule in Ukraine, 19181925
P.E. Heineman
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1218.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Velychenko, Stephen. Painting imperialism and nationalism red: the Ukrainian Marxist critique of Russian communist
rule in Ukraine, 19181925. Toronto, 2015. 277p Index afp ISBN 9781442648517 cloth, $60.00; ISBN
9781442617148 ebook, $60.00
533633
DK508
Can. CIP
This book addresses an important topic. Typically, one associates Ukrainian nationalism with the political Right.
Velychenko (Ukrainian studies, Univ. of Toronto) shows how, during the era of the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian
civil war, the political Left in Ukraine was forced to defend itself on national principles against the centralizing,
Moscowbased Bolsheviks. Unfortunately, the volume is flawed. Though the book is richly documented, Velychenko's
tone is censorious rather than scholarly. This results in a reductive presentation of the Bolsheviks as Russian
imperialists in the same vein as their tsarist predecessors, as if their Marxist, modernizing worldview was mere window
dressing. Is it not possible that practicality influenced their administrative policies? Velychenko draws apt comparisons
between Bolshevik policy toward Ukraine and that of Western socialist parties toward Ireland, India, and other colonial
possessions but returns to these references constantly, to the exhaustion of readers. In contrast with his open criticism
of the Bolsheviks, Velychenko indulges Ukrainian complaints about the number of Jews among Bolsheviks tasked with
administering Ukraine. An appendix of 14 translated documents from sources little known to nonspecialists is most
welcome. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Upperdivision undergraduates and above.P. E. Heineman, University of
Maryland University College
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Heineman, P.E. "Velychenko, Stephen. Painting imperialism and nationalism red: the Ukrainian Marxist critique of
Russian communist rule in Ukraine, 19181925." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016,
p. 1218. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661764&it=r&asid=0571971e24abe046e98a4ae0c67225a8.
Accessed 5 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449661764
3/5/2017 General OneFile Saved Articles
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State building in revolutionary Ukraine; a
comparative study of governments and
bureaucrats, 19171922
Reference & Research Book News.
26.6 (Dec. 2011):
COPYRIGHT 2011 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
Full Text:
9781442641327
State building in revolutionary Ukraine; a comparative study of governments and bureaucrats, 19171922.
Velychenko, Stephen.
U. of Toronto Press
2011
434 pages
$75.00
Hardcover
DK508
During the four years following the October 1917 collapse of the Russian Provisional Government, seven major
political groups and/or governments claimed political authority in the Ukrainian provinces of the Russian Empire and
this political fluidity has been blamed for producing a lack of able administrators, without which Ukraine was unable to
achieve independence during those years. Velychenko (U. of Toronto) investigates this argument through a topdown
examination of the forming and functioning of central government bureaucracy. Focused on the central ministries of
the various governments and their local agencies at the district levels, the study seeks to identify administrators and
their interests, job histories, and loyalties, as well as determine the degree to which local officials could implement
central policies in the face of inertia, inefficiency, bad organization, wartime conditions, staff shortages and
overstaffing, and sabotage.
([c]2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"State building in revolutionary Ukraine; a comparative study of governments and bureaucrats, 19171922." Reference
& Research Book News, Dec. 2011. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA274119179&it=r&asid=3aaeefc51a1333b6e39d5d290d2e77be.
Accessed 5 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A274119179
3/5/2017 General OneFile Saved Articles
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National History as Cultural Process: A Survey
of Ukraine's Past in Polish, Russian and
Ukrainian Historical Writing from the Earliest
Times to 1914
Mark Sandle
History Today.
45.7 (July 1995): p53.
COPYRIGHT 1995 History Today Ltd.
http://www.historytoday.com/aboutus
Full Text:
One of the first signs of the challenge to the hegemony of the CPSU under perestroika was in the field of history.
Glasnost issued forth a series of articles and discussions which constituted a considerable threat to the previously
publicly unquestioned StalinoBrezhnevite orthodoxy. The reawakening of national consciousness witnessed a strong
impulse from the republics to write their own histories. One of the issues facing historians, both East and West, is the
possibility that the demise of the suffocating Stalinist orthodox interpretation will be replaced by another 'orthodoxy':
an ethnonational approach. Recent writings on Ukrainian history, especially in the Soviet period, are beset by political
considerations in the context of the postindependence struggle for autonomy and identity.
Into this transitional phase come two new works which focus on the historical roots and perspectives on the
relationship between Russia and Ukraine. Although the approaches of the two volumes are very different one
examining a variety of the aspects of the RussoUkrainian relationship, the other being a 'history of national
historiographies' they share a common concern with the evolving relationships and perceptions that each nation has
of the other.
Given the current disputes in this region (the issue of Crimean autonomy, the struggle for control of the Black Sea
Fleet, the protests of Russian workers in the eastern provinces of Ukraine) and the general geopolitical uncertainty
since the colapse of Communism, these volumes must be broadly welcomed as a valuable and timely contribution to
this debate.
The edited volume 'Ukraine and Russia In Their Historical Encounter' is derived from papers from the first Conference
on UkrainianRussian Relations held on October 8th9th, 1981, in Hamilton, Ontario. It is divided into five main
sections: medieval/Early Modern history; modern history; politics; culture and religion; economy and demography, and
concludes with a dialogue between Solzhenitsyn and Jaroslaw Pelenski on RussianUkrainian relations.
The only regrettable feature of an otherwise impressive volume is the failure to update the papers (except in a couple of
cases, and then only cursorily) in the light of the momentous changes in historical interpretation which have occurred
since 1985. This is especially pertinent in the light of recent attempts to fill in the blank spots in the Ukrainian Soviet
experience: the Ukrainian Revolution, the Civil War, the famine of 193233, the Stalinist purges and the antiSoviet
movement in Germanoccupied Ukraine during the Second World War. The new interpretations of the Ukrainian
experience are a critical juncture in the evolution of Ukrainian/Russian relations. Their absence from this volume,
given the long historical perspective of this text, is a significant omission in the light of current tensions.
The limitations on space unfortunately necessitate selectivity. The book hoped to begin to unravel the complex
relationship between Ukraine and Russia in order to create a situation whereby 'the two rejuvenated peoples will find a
true partnership and enter a new period of their relationship, that of two equals' (p.xiv). There contributions stand out.
Pelenski, in the opening chapter, explores the contest for the 'Kievan inheritance': are the Ukrainians or the Russians
more justified in claiming to be the legitimate heirs of Kievan Rus? This debate is handled with great skill by Pelenski.
It is a subject of no little controversy, and he constructs an analysis which demonstrates the inadequacies of those
historiographical schools (both Ukrainian and Russian) which claim exclusive rights to Kievan Rus.
3/5/2017 General OneFile Saved Articles
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Raeff's contribution on intellectual and political encounters is a masterly piece of scholarship. He emphasises how
concepts and ideas have had very different meanings according to their particular context. This is especially the case
with notions of national and regional identity. Raeff argues that it is 'uncritical and anachronistic to project the concerns
and basic assumptions of the new nationalism onto the earlier firms of regional and social autonomy'. (p.81). This is an
important point in understanding the evolution of UkrainianRussian relations. A simplistic, reductionist view of
'Ukraine' or 'the Ukrainian people' or 'the nation' has played a significant role in the creation of biased and distorted
accounts of UkrainianRussian relations. The volume concludes with an excellent piece by Woroby on socioeconomic
changes. This highlights several important features of Soviet rule, which are the cause of many of the current tensions
and problems: economic subordination of Ukrainian industry to the needs of the USSR, and sustained immigration of
Russians (in the East and South) which is bringing about a shrinkage of Ukrainian ethnic territory.
The work by Stephen Velychenko is an extremely interesting addition to this field. Velychenko forms a composite
'history of historiography' of Ukraine from three perspectives: Polish, Russian and Ukrainian up to 1914. He consults
chronicles, articles, surveys and general histories, and traces how the historical interpretations of Ukraine evolved over
time. Underpinning this whole work is a highly stimulating exploration of the nature of historical knowledge (scientific
history versus 'myth' and legend), and the way in which history is constructed as a constituent ingredient of the
ideological cement which unites peoples within a given territory.
The eye for detail is impressive, and yet Velychenko never loses sight of the underlying themes. The result is a
remarkably balanced and erudite piece of scholarship. He demonstrates how different historical interpretations derived
just as much from the philosophical differences between various historians and chroniclers, as from the political and
economic conflicts between the three nations. Consequently, there was little or no agreement on the central issues in
Ukrainian history.
What unites these two volumes is a common concern with mutual understanding and dialogue, and the way in which
historical writing can both facilitate and hinder this process. If the present stage in the historical encounter of these two
nations is to be a peaceful one, then it is imperative that historians avoid the creation of an exclusivist, ethnicallyinspired
orthodoxy. These two volumes compel historians to face Riasanovsky's judgement that '... scholarly opinions
and objective determinations of one age become deeply ingrained prejudices for the next' (p.330 in Ukraine and
Russia).
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Sandle, Mark. "National History as Cultural Process: A Survey of Ukraine's Past in Polish, Russian and Ukrainian
Historical Writing from the Earliest Times to 1914." History Today, vol. 45, no. 7, 1995, p. 53. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA17219576&it=r&asid=98540463b04108f9fa922a39f66db8c3.
Accessed 5 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A17219576
Quoted in Sidelights--from book, not review: In 1919, pro-Bolshevik Ukrainians wanted national independence and social justice — in other words, national and social liberation within a socialist Ukraine ruled by its own party and ministries, within a supra-national socialist confederation. Bolshevik leaders for their part regarded their “Ukrainian Republic” as little more than a Russian province; they did not dismantle their pre-1917 centralized party structure or the single imperial economic system inherited from the tsars.
Quoted from review: demonstrates in copious detail how the Bolsheviks treated the Ukrainians just like the British treated the Irish.
For people committed to understanding the roots of Ukrainian resistance to Russia domination, even when expressed in a distorted form, Velychenko’s book is essential.
February 7, 2016
Painting Imperialism and Nationalism Red: The Ukrainian Marxist Critique of Russian Communist Rule in Ukraine, 1918-1925
Filed under: Ukraine — louisproyect @ 9:27 pm
The last thing I would expect from a knucklehead Putinite like Mike Whitney or Pepe Escobar is any kind of engagement with the history of Ukrainian national oppression but it never fails to amaze me how little interest there is for the Marxist traveling circus consisting of people like Roger Annis, the ex-Trotskyist in Canada, Renfrey Clarke, the Socialist Alliance member in Australia, sect leaders Alan Woods and Jeff Mackler et al. Most of these people probably were exposed to what the Fourth International said about Ukraine in the 1960s and have either forgotten it in their dotage or more likely sweep it under the rug. If there’s anybody who can be called the leader of this new breed of Great Russian Chauvinism, it is Boris Kagarlitsky who has a material incentive to be Putin’s spin doctor. His think-tank is funded by the Kremlin.
Stephen Velychenko
There’s one man who has their number. He is Stephen Velychenko, the chair of the Ukrainan studies at the University of Toronto who wrote a two-part series on the traveling circus. This is from part one:.
Kargalitsky’s pro Kremlin audience finds his worker revolution scenario appealing. But given their preconceptions, ignorance of Russian and Ukrainian, and minimal knowledge about either country, they either cannot, or choose not to, know what he omits from his articles. For example, he makes no mention of Russian imperialism, great power chauvinism, non Russian national movements, linguistic and cultural russification of non Russians, or the link between the national and the social questions. He does not dwell on how his imagined “working class” movement was aided and funded in its origins by Ukraine’s pro Russian capitalists (oligarchs); in particular, Rinat Akhmetov, nor that the local Russian extremist leaders are not interested in nationalization – least of all Akhmetov’s holdings. He does not mention either the small size of the neo-Nazi section of the Ukrainian right nor how few Ukrainian citizens support the Russian neo nazi right. [9] For all their Marxist rhetoric neither Kargalitsky or his likeminded reflect on why the Russian neo-Nazi leaders of Ukraine’s imagined proletarian revolution do not associate themselves with Marxism of any kind, why they sport double headed eagles and tsarist colours, rather than hammers and sickles and red banners, why they use Orthodox symbolism, or, why they wax nostalgic over the tsarist empire rather than the short-lived Russian Bolshevik Krivoi-Rog Republic of 1918.
In order to correct the “preconceptions” and “ignorance” that plagues so much of the left, Velychenko has just written a book titled “Painting Imperialism and Nationalism Red: The Ukrainian Marxist Critique of Russian Communist Rule in Ukraine, 1918-1925” that demonstrates in copious detail how the Bolsheviks treated the Ukrainians just like the British treated the Irish. Lenin was probably the most committed to breaking with Great Russian Chauvinism and probably would have been a force for combatting Stalin’s open embrace of it but even he was not immune.
What you can read below is the first nineteen pages of chapter one, a section titled historical background. For people committed to understanding the roots of Ukrainian resistance to Russia domination, even when expressed in a distorted form, Velychenko’s book is essential.
* * * * *
We propose Union and they want to dominate.
Letter to the editor, Chervonyi prapor, 25 February 1919
In the early twentieth century, the people we now call Ukrainians were much like other peoples in the world. Most were rural, did not live in independent national states, and had little influence on politics. Ukraine, like Poland, was not on any political map of Europe. There were eight Ukrainian provinces in the Russian empire, all centrally administered units with common characteristics that distinguished them from Russian territories. Like Ireland in the United Kingdom between 1801 and 1918, they retained regional particularities that allow them to be classified as a “mixed settler” colony. Ukrainian peasants spoke Ukrainian and did not practice land repartition. In 1900 the numerically small but economically powerful Polish nobility still dominated the three western provinces of Kyiv, Volyn, and Podillia.
The first significant Russian settlement into Ukrainian territories, comprising merchants, administrators, and soldiers, dated from the eighteenth century. Massive settlement of Russian migrant workers, began in the late nineteenth century. By 1900 approximately 2 million Russian speakers, most of whom were Russian, were concentrated in Kharkiv and Katerynoslav provinces. This averaged 10 per cent of the total population of the Ukrainian provinces. Declared Russians constituted 33 per cent of Ukraine’s total urban population, 43 per cent of the population in its eight largest cities, and 52 per cent in its four largest cities. Between 40 and 50 per cent of government administrators were Russian speakers. There was no controlled border between the Ukrainian and Russian provinces to hinder Russian inmigration as there was between the Duchy of Finland and Russian provinces. No border and a century of direct rule by Saint Petersburg, during which time education, administration, the print media, and high culture were all in Russian, meant that Russian settlers had no sense of themselves as immigrants or colonists. They did not become an immigrant minority whose social mobility depended on learning a foreign language and assimilating into the host community. Nonetheless, the Ministry of the Interior in the 1897 census clearly identified Ukrainians (Malorossy) as the “native [korennoe]” population in Kharkiv province and Russians (Velikorussov) as the “immigrant population [prishlym naseleniem].”1
The Ukrainian provinces had fewer industrial workers than Russian provinces because state policy developed Ukraine’s extractive industries and agriculture while neglecting its manufacturing sector. Also factory owners tended to hire incoming poor but semi or highly skilled Russian peasants, whom they preferred to local poor but unskilled Ukrainian peasants. Many of the latter, in turn, preferred to take government subsidies and migrate to Siberia rather than risk going to a nearby factory. Of all workers, 17 per cent came from non-Ukrainian provinces, and of these, 70 per cent were Russian in 1897. Ukrainian speakers were on average 73 per cent of all workers and between 30 and 50 per cent of all urban industrial workers. Twenty per cent of all Ukrainian-speaking workers were urban industrial workers, and Ukrainians were 70 per cent of all workers in settlements not classified as “cities” in the census. In terms of linguistic and socio-economic structure, “the Ukrainian proletariat was totally unlike the Russian proletariat.”2
Although at the turn of the century, Russians who had no sense of themselves as immigrants in the Ukrainian provinces did not have to learn or use the local language, and few assimilated into the host com-munity, the question of whether Ukraine’s urban population would Ukrainianize or Russify was still open. Bilingualism, diglossia, and intermarriage kept boundaries porous and identities ambiguous, and almost half of all incoming workers were from Ukrainian provinces.3 Nor was there yet direct correspondence between language use and political allegiance. Much would depend on future governmental policies. The Polish landowning nobles and urban Russians were a dominant settler-colonist minority on Ukrainian territory. Although Polish nobles initially supported Ukrainian autonomy, it should be noted that that support had faded by the end of 1917 as rural social radicalism brought latent mutual hatreds to the boil.4 Rural Polish and Russian peasants tended to assimilate into the Ukrainian majority; urban Russian dwellers did not. Living in cities with no Ukrainian-language schools, churches, businesses, mass-circulation newspapers, or government offices, they had no need to learn Ukrainian or to culturally assimilate in order to obtain services, an education, a good job, and status. Most Russians, Poles, and assimilated Ukrainians, like settler-colonists and assimilated natives in any colony, looked down on unassimilated Ukrainians. Few among the Russian intelligentsia applied their humanist standards and sensitivities to Ukrainian national issues or supported Ukrainian political demands. It was the dominated indigenous majority-Ukrainian nationality for whom social mobility was contingent on learning a foreign language and adopting foreign cultural norms. All had to learn some Russian, many changed their surnames, many internalized “the colonizer’s image of the colonized” by perceiving themselves as “Little Russians.” Many eventually assimilated and considered themselves Russian. Many of the socially mobile ethnic Ukrainians who admired European modernity and equated it with Russian national identity, linked their own identity with the rural backwardness and poverty they were seeking to escape. Divisions ran within families: one brother might become a Ukrainian nationalist, another a Russian imperialist. Jewish political elites, for their part, by 1917 supported Ukrainian autonomy but, that support did not extend far among their compatriots, who were mostly sceptical or indifferent. “That attitude was reflected not only in comic dismissal of Ukrainian and Ukrainian-language signs; they also passively opposed Ukrainization.” Jewish workers in 191718 volunteered for the Red Guard. None volunteered for Ukrainian units.5
Some bilingual Ukrainians became administrators, traders, manufacturers, patrons of the national movement, and millionaires, but they did not constitute a national capitalist class. Most of Ukraine’s overwhelmingly non-Ukrainian industrialists and bankers identified with the empire. In 1920, the émigré left-SR Mykyta Shapoval noted that Russian, Polish, Jewish, Hungarian, Czech, Rumanian, Belgian, French, and English capital ruled: “In its organization form [sic] this is not Ukrainian but colonial [sic] capital. It is also colonialist [sic] in terms of its economic aim [sic]. It reflects the interests of the metropole and treats Ukraine only as the object of terrible exploitation.” “Colonialist capital has never, in any place, built an independent state from a colony.” He observed that in Ireland, “a colony of intelligent and humane English capital,” the Irish had no option after more than one hundred years of struggle but to engage in “terrorist partisan war.”6
In general, people most of the time do not think about their nationality, and before the war, linguistic-cultural borders were fluid. Educated urban elites had only begun to politicize national identities and draw boundaries between loyal “Russians” or “Little Russians” and disloyal “Ukrainians.” Not every non-Ukrainian shared the anti-Ukrainian Russian-slavophile-based attitudes of the extremist imperial loyalist parties known as the “Black Hundreds.” Ethnic Ukrainians and Russians who supported a loyalist “Little Russian” cultural autonomy could simultaneously condemn Ukrainian political autonomy. Difference did not disrupt everyday life. In 1917 in the town council of Vinnytsia, a typical provincial capital of around 60,000 people, of whom almost 40 per cent were Jewish, “[deputies] spoke in all languages: Polish, Ukrai-nian, Hebrew, various jargons, sometimes Russian, and the spokesman [of the Jewish faction] Spivak spoke in a mix of all of them.”7
Rival elites successfully politicized identities during the revolution as attitudes hardened. Weak Ukrainian governments were too short-lived to appreciably change the views of urban dwellers with Russo-centric preconceptions of eastern Slavic and imperial political unity, who viewed Ukrainians as second-rate, inherently rural, backward, and seditious. As far as is known, most such persons after 1918 still considered Russian a higher culture, which they identified with loyalty to the Bolshevik regime, or the White one. When Anna Dobrovolska in July 1919 faced having to attend church services in Ukrainian in the reestablished Ukrainian Orthodox church subject to Constantinople rather than Moscow, for example, she refused. Her imperial identity trumped her religious convictions, and she denounced the new Ukrainian church to the atheist Bolshevik government as a treasonous organization because it was linked to the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR).8 The Ukrainian-born Russian monarchist Vasili Shulgin was extremely pleased when on his visit to Kyiv in 1925 he heard no Ukrainian in the streets. On visiting Odessa in 1921, a Ukrainian communist reported that “the Ukrainian population is small and totally terrorized … The fear is so great that they are afraid to speak Ukrainian and ask about what is happening in Ukraine in corners.” When he began giving public lectures in Ukrainian, he was considered heroic “because everything Ukrainian is slandered as “Petliurism.” In Mylokaiiv, another Ukrainian communist observed that for local Bolsheviks, “there is no such thing as a Ukrainian revolution [and] the Ukrainian Communist Party is a petite-bourgeois chauvinist national organization.”9
The leaders of the national movement were bilingual political moderates, and after 1905 they could legally form political parties. At the turn of the century, they began to disseminate the idea that the ethnically Ukrainian provinces of the tsarist empire (Rossiia) constituted a political, cultural, and economic entity called “Ukraine,” which was distinct from Russia (Velikorossiia). The leaders began to build a middle-class infrastructure of literate peasants, retailers, and white-collar workers. These people began to wonder why business, education, government, and high culture in “Ukraine” had to be in Russian and not in Ukrainian.10
While the moderate majority of Ukrainian national activists regarded linguistic and cultural assimilation as more significant indices of Russian imperialism than economic exploitation, radicals drew attention to the latter and to the impact of industrialization and commercialization. The Jewish-Ukrainian activist Maksym Hekhter labelled Ukrainian agricultural workers “white niggers.”11 While most national leaders, like their Irish counterparts, considered capitalist urban industrial modernity a threat to Ukrainian nationality, a Marxist minority argued that Ukrainian nationality could only develop alongside capitalist modernity.12 Before the war, self-awareness and self-assertion on the whole remained muted, although antagonisms occasionally surfaced. Ukrainian nationalists focused on cultural-linguistic rather than economic issues and were not extremists; most literate educated Russian speakers, urban white-collar professionals, and industrial workers tolerated “Little Russians” and their folk songs. Some regarded them with condescending contempt, but only the extremist imperial loyalist minority was openly hostile towards the national movement. Russian urban settlers and Polish landowners in the Ukrainian provinces, for their part, did not develop a “creole/mestizo” separatist nationalism as did European colonists in Latin and North America. Urban Russians overwhelmingly identified with the imperial metropole politically and culturally, much as Anglo-Scot loyalists in Ireland, Germans in Bohemia, and French settlers in Algeria did, rather than with their place of residence. Polish nobles, profoundly alienated by peasant land seizures in 1917, opposed Ukrainian independence (unlike their Swedish counterparts in Finland, who backed Finnish independence).
National leaders in Kyiv formed the Central Rada in March 1917 13 That November, its moderate socialist majority proclaimed the UNR an autonomous part of Russia. Instead of declaring independence after the Bolsheviks took power, the Rada sought a federation with the Provisional government then represented by General Kaledin in southern Russia.14 This prompted the Russian Bolsheviks to invade UNR territory in January 1918 in support of their comrades in Kharkiv, who had already on their own initiative occupied UNR cities. The Rada initially enjoyed the support of the 85 to 90 percent of peasants who were poor or struggling and who hoped it would enact land reform. The Rada’s hesitation on this issue led to civil war by early 1918, which Russian Bolsheviks turned into a national war when they invaded on the side of Ukraine’s Bolsheviks. The invasion prompted the Rada to proclaim independence and sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers (see figure 4, illustration section). In April 1918, with German support, landowners and industrialists overthrew the UNR and installed Pavlo Skoropadsky as Hetman of the Ukrainian State. His regime fell in November with the collapse of Germany and was succeeded by a renewed UNR under the temporary rule of a Directory led by the centrist Simon Petliura and the leftist Volodymyr Vynnychenko. The UNR and its army collapsed in December 1919 after a second Bolshevik invasion that established the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic, but, a vicious partisan war that had begun in 1919 raged on until 1922. The major Ukrainian partisan groups were affiliated with either the SRs, the SDs, the UNR, or Makhno, although they did change sides. The UNR attempted to coordinate and control as many partisan groups as possible, without much success.15
Russians and Russified non-Russians dominated the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic and Labor Party (RSDLP) in the Ukrainian provinces as a “centralist” majority. The many culturally Russified ethnic Jews in that party were secular apostates who were not representative of the religious Jewish majority. As a culturally and politically Russian party in Ukraine, the RSDLP was not a party of an oppressed nation. The provincial party organizations had no ties with one another. The most important branch was in Kyiv province, but almost 65 per cent of party members were in Kharkiv and Kateryno-slav provinces. By December 1917, the Bolsheviks did not yet dominate Ukraine’s approximately three hundred soviets. In 1917 they controlled the soviets only in the large cities – they were 88 per cent of members in Luhansk, 60 per cent in Kyiv, 48 per cent in Kharkiv, 47 per cent in Katerynoslav, 40 per cent in Odessa. Only forty of Ukraine’s soviets present at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets approved the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd. Only ninety of Ukraine’s soviets ratified their seizure of power in Kharkiv.16
Among the Kyivan bolsheviks were some later termed “federalists” who differed with the “centralist” majority regarding the degree to which Ukraine was to be subordinated to Russia. Both groups cooperated conditionally with the Rada, much like communists were later to cooperate with “revolutionary anti-imperialist nationalists,” until 26 October, when they declared the Rada a “counterrevolutionary bourgeois” organ. This was in reaction to the Rada’s refusal to recognize the authority of Lenin’s Soviet government because it represented only a minority among the country’s left-wing revolutionary democrats.17 Thereafter, Ukraine’s Bolsheviks called for single-party rule in Ukraine, which they claimed was necessary to fight “Ukrainian nationalism.”
Ukraine’s Bolsheviks took power in Kharkiv in December 1917 with approximately 4,500 troops and Red Guards, of whom roughly 2,100 had arrived from Moscow the previous week.18 This group, which garnered only 10 per cent of the vote in the elections to the Constituent Assembly, and which represented less than 30 per cent of Ukraine’s soviets, claimed to be the government of the five Ukrainian provinces that the Provisional Government had formally subordinated to the Central Rada. Bolsheviks in Katerynoslav, Kherson, and Taurida provinces remained formally under Petrograd, not Kharkiv. The Kharkiv government arrived in Kyiv on 30 January (12 February) 1918 in the wake of the Russian Red Army (see figures 7 and 8, illustration section).The allied Ukrainian and German armies expelled it from the city in March. Ukraine’s first Bolshevik government included Ukrainian-born Russians, Germans, secular Jews, some Ukrainians, a few Russians from Russia and was subordinated to Lenin’s plenipotentiary in Ukraine, Sergo Ordzhonikidze.19 This government sought more power than its central leaders were prepared to allow it, and some of Ukraine’s pro-Bolshevik workers supported it as a Ukrainian and not as a Russian soviet government (see figure 5, illustration section). On 1 January 1918, the Kharkiv Bolsheviks declared: “The centre of Soviet power in Ukraine is the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets of Ukraine and its People’s Secretariat … All military units arrived in Ukraine from the north must put themselves under the authority of CEC [Central Executive Committee] of Ukraine and the activities of their commander in Ukraine can be carried out only in the name of Ukraine’s CEC and the People’s Secretariat. “20 Pro-Bolshevik ethnic Ukrainians in partisan units, meanwhile, may not all have been nationally conscious Ukrainians, but they did know their villages were not in Russia and, they refused to fight in Russia. They had been prepared to fight for soviet rule and land but, they mutinied or deserted when they learned that party committees had displaced the soviets, had collectivized land and, (after May 1919), had begun folding their regiments into the Red Army. “We will not fight for Russia,” they told Bolshevik commissars. “But we will fight for [soviet] Ukraine.”21
Most of Ukraine’s soviets had Russian SR, Ukrainian SR, or Ukrainian SD majorities. This diversity was reflected for the last time in Ukraine’s Second Congress of Soviets, held in March 1918. The Bolsheviks had not had time to stack the local assemblies that sent delegates; consequently, that Congress passed pro-Bolshevik resolutions primarily thanks to the presence of armed Russian Red sailors, who denied non-Bolsheviks the floor and threatened to shoot them. From the podium, Bolshevik delegates threatened to shoot the ninety quarrelsome Ukrainian SD representatives, which prompted fifty-five of them to leave. The Congress opened and closed with the singing of the Internationale, but delegates also sang the Ukrainian patriotic song “Zapovit” and the Ukrainian National Anthem.22 In 1919, on arriving in Kyiv, the new government imposed on Ukraine the Russian Soviet constitution, which heavily weighted representation in favour of urban workers and soldiers. Given that the overwhelming majority of these groups in Ukraine were Russian or Russified, Bolshevik rulers thereby effectively disenfranchised the Ukrainian majority. That year, the Bolsheviks also had enough time to ensure that the people voted for them in elections. They could subsequently dominate the Ukrainian-majority villages and small towns and minimize the non-Bolshevik presence in soviets. Moreover, even though the Russian constitution stipulated proportional elections, which in November 1917 Bolshevik leaders had declared “more democratic” than majoritarian ones, in Ukraine they imposed majority voting to eliminate large non-Bolshevik minorities from the soviets.
Local agents did not refrain from force. For instance, in the village of Merefa in Kharkiv province in February 1919, the local Cheka agent referred to “my use of repression” in ensuring that a fourth round of voting established a pro-Bolshevik soviet. In the central provincial town of Horodyshche that spring, a 150-strong Cheka detachment with six machine guns arrived in the wake of the Red Army. Its commander presented the locals with lists of candidates they had to vote for.
Only one list included town residents – local Bolsheviks, who were overwhelmingly Jewish. Instead of electing outsiders, the inhabitants elected the Jewish Bolsheviks.23 As a consequence of such measures, Ukraine’s Third Congress of Soviets in March 1919 was stacked with a 78 per cent Bolshevik majority, who dutifully booed one of the two Ukrainian left-SD delegates who tried to make a speech condemning centralization, Russification, and economic exploitation, forcing him to step down. Only after they had signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of March 1918 did Lenin’s Bolsheviks recognize that the eight provinces claimed by the UNR constituted “Ukraine.” They then ordered their Kharkiv, Katerynoslav, and Taurida (the Crimea) provincial branches to submit to Ukraine’s secretariat rather than to Russia’s. That same month, the Bolsheviks renamed themselves the Russian Communist Party (RCP) and permitted their branches in Ukraine to form a single territorial subunit dominated by its Russian centralist majority. The “Kyivan” minority, led by Mykola Skrypnyk, decided that April to establish instead a Ukrainian Communist Party independent of the Russian party. However, Skrypnyk backed down in May after a meeting with Lenin for which there are no minutes. Afterwards, Pravda (9 May 1918) proclaimed that “the Russian Communist Party Central Committee … has no objection to the formation of a Ukrainian Communist Party in as much as Ukraine is an independent state.” That statement was issued only to prevent a German invasion, however. In reality, Ukraine’s party remained subordinated to Moscow. This was confirmed in July, when representatives of the “provincial committees of the territories in South Russia occupied today by Germans,” at a meeting attended by Lenin’s deputy Iakov Sverdlov, passed a resolution specifying that Ukraine’s Communist Party was to be subordinated to the Russian party. A few days later, Ukraine’s Bolsheviks adopted the name Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine at a secret session of their First Congress. Senior leaders there explained that now that “the proletariat,” meaning the Bolsheviks, had taken power, “the right of self-determination” and national independence were counter-revolutionary and a threat to the working class. Skrypnyk claimed that with the Bolshevik seizure of power, the period of national states had passed and nationalism had become “reactionary.” He stated that the Russian party remained Ukraine’s mentor: “That is why in practice the situation [of dependency] remains as it was.” He added that his earlier proposal for a separate UCP belonging to the Communist International would now involve merely “formal” status. In practice, there was now an informal “unwritten constitution” that dictated that “we belong to a communist party that is one for all countries” — the Russian party. Of the CPU’s 4,314 members at the time, 7 per cent were Ukrainian speakers.24 In January 1919 the CPU proclaimed the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic.
Bolshevik leaders, like Russian liberals and monarchists, sought to preserve the territorial integrity of the tsarist empire. Lenin, however, was flexible. Faced with the military power of the revolutionary Ukrainian national movement, Lenin, in his celebrated “On Soviet Power in Ukraine” and “Letter to Ukrainian workers” of December 1919, offered what he regarded as cultural-linguistic “concessions” along with governmental positions to leaders of the left-wing factions of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and SDs. This did much to end resistance, for opposition leaders no longer saw the need for it.25 The armed resistance that did continue, until 1922, was uncoordinated.
In early 1919 the left-wing faction of the Ukrainian SRs renamed themselves the Ukrainian Communist Party (Borotbists) and allied themselves with the Russian Bolsheviks, claiming that the excesses of the latter were but “isolated incidents” that would not have serious consequences.26 The Borotbists had hoped to establish a Ukrainian Army, but the centralization of the Red Army limited their access to Ukrainian soldiers. On 4 May, Trotsky had ordered all Red military formations subordinated to Moscow; three days later, he ordered Red Ukrainian partisans to be either disbanded or reorganized as subunits of the Red Army. By September he had probably ordered the death of at least three Bolshevik Ukrainian commanders, who died under mysterious circumstances within weeks of one another.27 In March 1920 the Borotbists dissolved their organization and approximately 5,000 of their 15,000 I members joined the CPU. Some were given ministerial positions in May 1920.28 Lenin admitted them into his party, but only as individuals, and he secretly instructed his people to harass Borotbists and remove them from their positions on minor or spurious legal charges. To ensure that the few who did join the CPU would have little influence, the Kremlin ordered its local leaders to form a special “temporary Central Committee” to register and exclude undesirables. By 1922 only 188 former Borotbists remained in the CPU. Similar tactics were later applied to the UCP, which also dissolved itself. As of 1924, only 23 per cent of the CPU and 18 per cent of its central committee were Ukrainians.29
Ukrainian communists emerged from the left wing of the Ukrainian SDs and the “Kyivans” within the CPU. The first theoretical exposition of Ukrainian communism, Do Khvyli, was written in December 1918 by the Ukrainian Bolsheviks Shakhrai and Mazlakh. In January 1919, left-Ukrainian SDs separated from their parent party and renamed themselves “Independentists.” In January 1920 they adopted the name Ukrainian Communist Party. The head of the UNR’s counter-intelligence considered Mykhailo Tkachenko, a co-founder of the UCP who died in December 1919, “the Ukrainian Lenin.”30 The UCP stood for a sovereign Ukrainian communist state with its own party independent of the Russian communist state and party. It demanded independence on the basis of categorical right, not Bolshevik imperial pragmatism. This distinguished them from the Borotbists, who, like moderate Irish nationalists, hoped only for autonomy in return for loyalty.
In 1919, pro-Bolshevik Ukrainians wanted national independence and social justice — in other words, national and social liberation within a socialist Ukraine ruled by its own party and ministries, within a supra-national socialist confederation. Bolshevik leaders for their part regarded their “Ukrainian Republic” as little more than a Russian province; they did not dismantle their pre-1917 centralized party structure or the single imperial economic system inherited from the tsars. In 1923 they offered Ukraine only cultural autonomy within a nominal federation administered from Moscow as a single centralized economic and political unit through ministries controlled by a single Russian-speaking party. This was less than Ukrainians had anticipated but more than the Entente had offered the UNR — that no Entente member-state recognized. Under immense pressure, Bolshevik leaders agreed to linguistic and cultural concessions. In early 1921 they faced the Kronstadt and Tambov revolts, conflicts in Transcaucasia, and opposition from the left and urban workers. Beginning in 1921 they had to keep almost 20 per cent of the Red Army, a million soldiers, in Ukraine; only in 1922 did the army destroy the last bastion of partisan resistance in southern Kyiv province. According to Emma Goldman, who was in Kyiv that year: “Here the very atmosphere was charged with distrust and hatred of everything Muscovite … In Kiev there was no attempt to mask the opposition to Moscow. One was made to feel it everywhere.”
The incomplete statistics available at the time suggested that war and revolution had not markedly changed the national character of the cities, but that the pre-war mass migration of Russians into those cities would likely end while that of Ukrainians would continue.31
Perhaps such figures played a role in Stalin’s decision to extend the concessions first announced in 1919, when in the Tenth Party Congress Resolutions of March 1921, he stated that Ukrainian cities would “inevitably” become Ukrainian. The village as the “guardian of Ukrainian” would enter all Ukrainian towns “as the dominant element — just as Latvian and Hungarian in the end dominated Latvian and Hungarian cities.” There was nothing artificial in supporting this process, he stressed. Rakovskii and Skrypnyk, meanwhile, were complaining about centralization and seeking maximum autonomy for their republic. In the summer of 1922 they blocked an attempt to divide Ukraine into separate economic zones. In October of that year, a CPU plenum called for the broad use of Ukrainian in schools and government: “The Ukrainian proletarian state faces a difficult and complex task: the creation of Ukrainian soviet statehood, Ukrainian schools, the equalization of the rights of Ukrainian with Russian and of the language of the Ukrainian peasant with that of the Ukrainian proletariat, hindering the Ukrainian counter-revolution, and using the Ukrainian national school for its class purposes.”32
Against this background, the Twelfth Russian Party Congress in 1923 sanctioned extensive cultural concessions to all non-Russians under a policy labelled “indigenization.” During the 1920s many viewed this as a long-term strategy to transform the Ukrainian Republic into a national republic free at last of the cultural legacies of Russian domination. Russians would thereby be transformed from settler-colonists into an acculturated immigrant minority.
Stalin hoped to destabilize Poland and Romania, both allied with France, and to that end he supported the creation of a culturally thriving Ukraine to attract the disgruntled Ukrainian minorities in those countries. Stalin, however, in the Enlightenment tradition that separated culture from market, did not match cultural and linguistic concessions with economic decentralization. Moreover, the New Economic Policy (NEP) proclaimed in March 1923 was not implemented in Ukraine until the following year.33 CPU leader Volodymyr Zatonsky, who also saw Russification as a cultural matter unrelated to economics, avoided the colony analogy in his speeches and did not criticize economic centralism. Supposedly, Russification required only an ideological solution: make comrades stop associating the Soviet federation with Russia!34 Some of those who opposed indigenization considered it absurd precisely because it divorced language use and culture from economics and administration. In their view, Lenin’s notion of national self-determination was nonsense as well, because it contradicted his plan for a centralized economic and ministerial system. Among those who backed national rights but realized that indigenization as implemented would never work was the Georgian Marxist Mdivani, who dismissed the official discourse about cultural and linguistic rights as meaningless. Without a national economy there could be no national culture or language, nor any need within the non-Russian republics to learn languages other than the one used in economic relations – which in the USSR was Russian because all the ministries were centralized. Khristian Rakovskii, a Bulgarian who in 1919 ruthlessly imposed Soviet Russian rule in Ukraine as CPU chairman, had become by 1921 an advocate of Ukrainian rights. He noted that Russian imperial tendencies could be combated only if 90 per cent of Moscow’s commissariats were dissolved and their functions placed under the control of the republics. Rakovskii did not doubt the existence of Russian chauvinism, but he now considered it more than an expression of pre-revolutionary attitudes. For him, it was also the product of economic and administrative centralization, and its agents were ministry personnel: “Russian[s] and Russified Jews who [in your Ukrainian ministries] are the most consistent champions of Russian national oppression.” These people’s opposition to “the simple matter” of learning and using another language in addition to Russian was intense.35 UCP spokesmen complained that indigenization was superficial. They explained in 1924 that while linguistic and cultural concessions satisfied the intellectuals, for peasants and workers the real issues were economic, political, and party organizational. It was on these that cultural and linguistic matters were based, yet the indigenization policy ignored all three.36
What Ukrainian communists had called Bolshevik Russian colonialism during the revolution, official representatives discussed and categorized during the 1920s as “errors” or “Luxemburgism” that “the party” and “Leninist policy” had “corrected.” Even Trotsky admitted that extreme conditions had obliged him to commit excesses in Ukraine. After 1923 he opposed the imposition of Russian in Ukraine on the grounds that it would impede Ukrainians’ access to world culture and the ability to learn in their own language. He favoured locating manufacturing industries near resources. At the 1923 CPU conference he said that unless people who understood Ukrainian were placed everywhere, the soviet regime faced collapse.37 In 1924, party leaders explained that it was the pressure of war, not ideology or imperial preconceptions, that had prevented them from eliminating national oppression as soon as they came to power.38 In June 1926 a Ukrainian party plenum resolution included even the proletariat among the guilty and Russian nationalism as a culprit. Some comrades had incorrect views on national issues, and the party underestimated their significance, that resolution stated. It named the majority of the urban population and the considerable number of Russian proletariat and party members as the source of Russian chauvinism.39 Stalin’s deputy, Lazar Kaganovich, strongly condemned Russian nationalism in a CPU Central Committee Resolution of 1928, which listed seven manifestations of Russian and Ukrainian nationalism. Russian party members and bourgeoisie were explicitly identified as the ones who wished to retain Russian domination in Ukraine, who refused to learn Ukrainian, who wanted to restrict Ukrainian identity to villages, and who exploited mistakes to condemn indigenization as a policy that “oppressed” Russians.
But neither set of “errors” was condemned as “counter-revolutionary.” The critique did not label Russian Bolshevism as a form of colonial rule, and sanctions or punishments were never meted out to Russians. Key Ukrainian critics who thought the concessions did not go far enough were not arrested, though they were transferred out of Ukraine.40 Significantly, except for some among the latter group, those involved had treated national-cultural issues as intellectual-political matters associated with “class enemies.” None linked them to economic structures or centralization, except UCP critics, who applied Lenin’s Imperialism to Soviet Russia and analysed the Russian-Ukrainian relationship in terms of empire-colony discourse. Many cultural /linguistic proposals made their way into indigenization policies, but few of the political and economic demands contained in the UCP critiques did so. Economic centralization was not among the officially admitted “errors.”41 Ministries remained centralized, planning regions ignored national borders, and central officials refused to function in any language other than Russian. The 1929 Ukrainian constitution did not give Ukrainian official status; that same year, the All-Union Central Committee directed that all government correspondence, even at the level of the republic, be in Russian. In 1923, Rakovskii noted that anyone waiting for the comrades in Ukraine’s party school to voluntarily learn Ukrainian would wait a long time. Those who worked for central ministries in Ukraine considered learning Ukrainian a waste of time. By the end of the 1920s, 43 per cent of the staff of eighteen ministry branches in Ukraine and 49 per cent of the staff of republic ministries were still totally ignorant of Ukrainian. In 1929, 85 per cent of government bureaucrats still could not function in Ukrainian.42 Much like other colonies, Ukraine was a place where officials were ignorant of their subordinates’ languages, because they expected the ruled to learn the ruler’s language.
Rakovskii and Skrypnyk in 1922 well knew that a hard core of Ukraine’s urban Russians were ignoring or resisting party measures intended to limit if not curtail Russian cultural domination. By that year, hundreds of requests had come in from party members ignorant of Ukrainian requesting to leave the country. Mikhail Frunze, at a 1922 CPU plenum, realized the threat this posed: “In the end everybody would leave.”43 Skrypnyk, like Galiev, asked why those “Russian chauvinists” did not argue their case publicly. In Ukraine, after voting in favour of Ukrainian-language resolutions at the 1923 Party Congress, delegates in the corridors would reply, when addressed in Ukrainian: “Talk to me in a language I can understand.” Senior leaders knew that Ukraine’s Russian and Russified Jewish bureaucrats were strongly opposed to learning and using Ukrainian on the job, that most delegates in Moscow for the Twelfth Congress had no conception of the national issues involved, and that Congress corridor talk was dismissing the debates as theatre. The overwhelmingly Russian or Russified delegates simply voted during the Congress as their patron Stalin had instructed them. Two years earlier, Mikhail Tomsky, at the Eighth Congress, had identified their true opinions: “I think that we will not find in this hall anyone who would claim that national self-determination and national movements are normal and desirable. We regard these as a necessary evil.” At the 1923 CPU conference, Zatonsky observed that “If all comrades spoke their minds there would be a Russian stink impossible to imagine [Russkim dukhom zapakhlo chto i govorit nichogo].”44 A few weeks later, the resolutions of the secret Fourth Conference of senior party activists in Moscow specified that Russian nationalists were to be dismissed from party and government posts, but made no mention of the danger of imperial Russian “great power chauvinism” that Grigorii Zinoviev had castigated during the sessions. In 1925 the purging of “great power chauvinists” from the Red Army, initiated by Trotsky two years earlier, was halted.45 One of Stalin’s assistants at the Nationalities Commissariat wrote in 1930 that in its earlier work, the commissariat “systematically violated the Leninist line [Twelfth Congress resolutions] on the national question.”46
Indigenization was only beginning to overcome Ukraine’s colonial legacy when it was halted. In 1927, Russian in Ukraine’s public communications sphere had only begun to recede from its pre-1914 dominance. Only 8.5 per cent of all published titles in the USSR were in Ukrainian – well below that language’s share of the USSR’s total population. In terms of titles per capita, Russians in Russia had 2.4 books in Russian, while Ukrainians had 1.6 in Russian and Ukrainian. Throughout the 1920s, declared Russians averaged 10 per cent of Ukraine’s population yet more than 40 per cent of published books in Ukraine were in Russian. In 1927, 4,687 titles were published in Ukraine, of which 2,135 were in Russian. Russia that same year published 21,772 titles, of which only 13 were in Ukrainian. Printed Russian books in Ukraine comprised more than 50 per cent of total copies. When broken down by subject and audience, the disproportions are stark and reflect the pre-1917 colonial reality in which Russian was the language of urban modernity. Of 1,174 titles published during the first half of 1927, 43 per cent were in Russian. However, while the number of academic titles in each language was almost equal, of the 508 Russian books, 58 per cent were for children, 37 per cent for workers, and 1 per cent for peasants. The numbers for the 603 Ukrainian books were 36 per cent, 7 per cent, and 44 per cent respectively.47
In 1922, 54 per cent of CPU members were Russian speakers and 11 per cent were Ukrainian speakers. At the 1923 Congress, 47 per cent of the delegates were declared Russians and 20 per cent were Ukrainians As of 1926, 44 per cent of the members were declared Ukrainians, 30 per cent were Ukrainian speakers, and 21 per cent used Ukrainian at work.48 An early 1926 report to Ukraine’s Central Committee reported that of all Ukraine’s industrial and white-collar workers, 59 per cent and 56 per cent respectively did not speak Ukrainian. In addition, 78 per cent of the former and 33 per cent of the latter were literate only in Russian. Also, 35 to 40 per cent of Ukraine’s 49,689 government bureaucrats and 25 per cent of its seventy-one top ministerial personnel were totally ignorant of Ukrainian.49 Urban Russian and Russified white-collar professionals, whose attitudes towards the majority Ukrainians were not unlike those of European settlers in Africa towards Africans and Arabs, voiced their opposition to learning and using Ukrainian throughout the 1920s in Enlightenment/imperialist Russian slavophile terms: “Ukrainian is only a language for songs”; “[the language] is vulgar and unsuited for a subject like physics … Ukraine now is nothing but a part of Russia”; “I won’t Ukrainianize – the Revolution was in Russian”; “Ukrainian is a dog’s language, I won’t study it.” Some employees who knew Ukrainian refused to use it, while a considerable number did not know it at all. While employees could be fired for ignorance of Ukrainian, apparently few were. In a letter from a Luhansk miner, we learn that in fifty-six mines in the region, where Ukrainians averaged 57 per cent of the workforce, Ukrainian was forgotten after speeches were made. Privately, officials said there was no one to Ukrainize because “all our workers are Russians.” Mine committees functioned in Russian, and when Ukrainian workers complained, they were told: “Go to your honkie land [khokhlandiia] and talk your dog-language there.” Cultural clubs functioned in Russian, and there were no Ukrainian-language manuals. Ukrainian posters and announcements were systematically torn down.50
In general, more Ukrainian-language materials were published after 1922 than before 1914, and the government did establish Ukrainian schools and universities. The lower the level within the government and the party, the higher the percentage of declared Ukrainians or Ukrainian speakers, and with each passing year an increasing percentage of these two groups rose through the hierarchy. Perhaps this trend would have dominated in the long term. But there would be no long term. Indigenization was never formally condemned, but it stopped being enforced after 1933. After that year, as before 1917, Russians in Ukraine would no longer face the fate of immigrants everywhere – learning foreign languages and acculturization. They remained settler-colonists. The change was reflected in two speeches by Zatonsky that gave different characterizations of Russian settler-colonists in Ukraine. In 1926 he had considered Ukraine to be undoubtedly a colony of the Russian tsars and bourgeoisie. Both tsarism and capitalism had Russified Ukraine, and the latter had also brought skilled Russian workers into Ukraine. “The Russian proletariat went to factories built in Ukraine.” In 1933 he stated that “the theory that the proletariat in Ukraine, or its majority, came from Russia is totally false.”51 Condemnation of Russian chauvinism ceased that year. Support from Russians and Russified non-Russians opposed to learning and using Ukrainian compensated Stalin for the loss of support from Ukrainian party leaders – although his elimination of the “left opposition” meant in any case that he no longer needed national republic leaders as allies. In 1923, Sultan-Galiev strongly condemned Stalin’s public rationalization of indigenization. It was absurd, he pointed out, to label opposition to Russian great-power chauvinism as “local nationalism” and then claim that the latter was the opposite of the former. Opposition to great-power chauvinism was not “nationalism” – it was simply opposition to great-power chauvinism. It was absurd, he continued, to expect the “young Russian party comrades” who staffed local administrations to fight “local nationalism” if they were “infected” with great-power chauvinism. They would only fan the flames of chauvinism while “beating” local non-Russian communists on the spurious grounds that they were “nationalists.” 52 These remarks infuriated Stalin, but he did not dispense with his false syllogism. In January 1934 he declared that the “greatest enemy” in the non-Russian republics was no longer Russian chauvinism but “local nationalism,” and in 1938 he ordered that Russian be made compulsory in all Ukrainian schools.53 Policy reversals were presented as “correcting errors” – but those reversals reflected Stalin’s thinking as expressed in a September 1922 letter to Lenin.
By 1939, Russian dominated in urban schools, the media, and administration. Massive inmigration of Russians had begun anew. Russians and Russian speakers did not have to learn Ukrainian to receive a job, a promotion, or government services, or to be educated, informed, or entertained. Russian language use still gave status and prestige. Ukrainian language use was relegated “things spiritual” – to ethnography, rural media, scholarship on Ukrainian subjects, and private use. Moscow ministries controlled an economy they administered in Russian. The Ukrainian communist criticism of Russian Bolshevism became relevant again.
Quoted in Sidelights: Velychenko has written a pioneering book on an important and unstudied subject.
will likely leave the reader with more questions than answers. But perhaps that is the nature of history, for historians ultimately always have questions, but not always answers.
Stephen Velychenko.
State Building in Revolutionary Ukraine: A Comparative Study of Governments and Bureaucrats, 1917–1922
.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. xiv, 434 pp. Map. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index. $75.00, cloth. After defeat of the Ukrainian revolution in 1920, some of its national leaders lamented that a lack of qualified and reliable personnel had been fatal for the newborn Ukrainian state. For example, Volodymyr Vynnychenko complained that all previous tsarist organs of state administration had to be dismantled and all personnel fired. At the same time, according to him, there were too few educated declared Ukrainians to staff and properly run the new administration. Thus it was a systemic failure, yet another outcome of Ukrainians being “underdeveloped” as a nation. Others, like Western Ukrainian journalist and bureaucrat Osyp Nazaruk, disregarded this interpretation as foolish. Newly independent Poland and especially Bolshevik Russia had similar problems. It was not a shortage of educated people or of administration skills that doomed the Ukrainian state, but the actions of its incompetent and narrow-minded leaders. When Nazaruk worked for the Ukrainian state in its Directory period, the minister of external affairs, he wrote, “did not even know one foreign language, let alone anything about foreign affairs” (p.140). Stephen Velychenko, in his study of governments and bureaucrats in revolutionary Ukraine, is inclined to agree more with Nazaruk than Vynnychenko. The book is based on extensive Ukrainian archival material and the contemporary press. It covers six political regimes—Central Rada, Hetmanate, Directory, White, Bolshevik, and ZUNR—plus a chapter that compares bureaucracies in Ukraine with those of post-WWI Czechoslovakia, Ireland, and Poland (adding Finland to this list could be productive too). The object of study is the formation and functioning of central government bureaucracy. In terms of genre, the book is a mixture of political and social history. Five regimes claimed power over Russian Ukraine in 1917–1920 with the Bolsheviks emerging as victors in November 1920 after the occupation of the Crimea. The conservative Hetmanate and White administrations have been traditionally ranked as more effective than any other regimes due to the sheer numbers of former tsarist bureaucrats whom they managed to attract. The Leftist Ukrainian Central Rada and Directory have often been described as borderline helpless and incompetent. Velychenko claims that his findings challenge and, in some cases, significantly revise these and other pre-conceptions.
His main conclusion is that no administration was more ineffective than any other. All were plagued by chaos and corruption, and all worked through trial and error. The Central Rada, the author argues, did not start organizing its own administration until July 1917 not because it could not, but because it chose not to. Its leaders focused on forming a coalition with non-Ukrainian parties, which was, as Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi later admitted, a mistake. The Hetmanate administration was not as heavily staffed by Russians (who either did not know Ukrainian and / or were hostile to it) as most Ukrainian leftists claimed. In fact, the lower level of the hierarchy was staffed almost entirely by Ukrainians, most of whom were hired while the Central Rada was in control. The Directory administration was again helpless in many situations, although not due to a lack of skill or competence, but because its political leaders (especially Petliura) refused to use repressive measures against the Ukrainian population. Instead, it tried to make people comply through propaganda and appeals to national consciousness. The majority of the bureaucrats in Russian Ukraine were ready to serve under any Ukrainian regime and willing to learn Ukrainian. As one clerk in 1918 put it: “We don’t care whether Lenin, or Petliura, or Trotsky, or Vynnychenko is in power […] this doesn’t concern us. We will follow whoever suits us best because we must eat” (p. 92). Velychenko uses this example and similar ones to stress the validity of Max Weber’s theory that professional interest and prerogatives tend to trump identities and loyalties amongst bureaucrats. In general, Velychenko argues, the development of various Ukrainian administrations suffered owing to a lack of stability and peace, not staff or skill. The comparative chapter on post-WWI bureaucracies supports this thesis. In terms of personnel, Ukraine was in a much better position after the war than Slovakia, which had only 75 Slovak-speaking men with government experience in 1919 (p. 247). Some scholars, however, may find Velychenko’s conclusions disputable simply because of the lack of supportive data in the book. Velychenko is honest about the limitations of his findings; phrases such as “not studied,” “little known,” “unclear,” and “unknown” appear frequently throughout the book. As Velychenko admits, he succeeded only in proving that some Ukrainian bureaucrats managed to provide some basic services in some territories (p.149). The data in the book also allow for challenges to the author’s conclusion that a lack of peace and stability was the most detrimental factor for any Ukrainian administration. The Bolsheviks did not enjoy much peace and stability either; their authority, unlike that of the Ukrainian regimes, was also challenged much more aggressively and seriously. However, they survived. Unfortunately, Velychenko’s book does not cover the Ukrainian repressive apparatus and its staff. Was it a coincidence that the Russian Civil War was won by the regime that happened to have a more centralized, brutal, and effective repressive machine than any of its competitors? In short, Velychenko has written a pioneering book on an important and unstudied subject. However, it is also a book that will likely leave the reader with more questions than answers. But perhaps that is the nature of history, for historians ultimately always have questions, but not always answers.
Ernest Gyidel,
University of Toronto
Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. LIV, Nos. 1–2, March-June 2012 / mars-juin 2012