Much has been written on the 1917-20 revolution in Ukrainian, on the national movement, the Makhnovists and the struggle of the Bolsheviks. Yet there were others with a mass following whose role has faded from history. One such party was the Borotbisty, an inde-pendent party of Ukrainian revolutionary socialists seeking to achieve national liberation and social emancipation. Though widely known in revolutionary Europe in their day, the Borotbisty were decimated during the Stalinist holocaust in Ukraine. Out of print for over half a century this lost text by Ivan Maistrenko, the last survivor of this party provides a unique account. Part memoir and part history this is a thought provoking study which chal-lenges previous approaches to the revolution and shows how events in Ukraine decided the fate not only of the Russian Revolution but the upheavals in Europe at the time. Ivan Maistrenko’s Borotbism is more than just a historical document. The debates during and after the ‘Ukrainian revolution’ of 1917 still have a contemporary relevance - and Ukrainian debate was especially rich because if extended beyond the ranks of the Bolsheviks to the ‘national communist’ parties, the Borotbisty and Ukapisty. Ukrainian ‘national communism’ proved ephemeral when reborn in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but ar-guably because it failed to reconnect with earlier polemics, being, as Maistrenko predicted in the 1950s, little more than a cover story for the nomenklatura to pursue its self-enrichment.The debate about the relative importance of national and/or social liberation is still of great importance, however, especially as Ukrainians arguably now have the former without the latter. In Putin’s Russia, market capitalism has to struggle with the state, and the left has often been prisoner to imperial nostalgia. The popular hatred of ‘oligarchs’ is as visceral in Ukraine as it is in Russia, but these sentiments are currently better tapped by opposition politicians like Yuliia Tymoshenko and Yurii Lutsenko. Both are often dismissed as ‘populists’, but building a non-communist Ukrainian left remains as important a task today as it was in 1917 or 1954.Andrew Wilson, Senior Lecturer in Ukrainian Studies at the School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University College London

Much has been written on the 1917–1920 revolution in Ukraine, on the national movement, the Makhnovists and the Bolsheviks. Yet there were others with a mass following whose role has faded from history books. One such party was the Borotbisty, the heirs of the mass Ukrainian Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries, an independent party seeking to achieve national liberation and social emancipation. Though widely known in revolutionary Europe in their day, the Borotbisty were decimated during the Stalinist holocaust in Ukraine. Out of print for over half a century, this lost text by Ivan Maistrenko, the last survivor of the Borotbisty, provides a unique account on this party and its historical role. Part memoir and part history, this is a thought-provoking book which challenges previous approaches to the revolution and shows how events in Ukraine decided the fate not only of the Russian Revolution but the upheavals in Europe at the time.

Between 1914 and 1954, the Ukrainian-speaking territories in East Central Europe suffered almost 15 million "excess deaths" as well as numerous large-scale evacuations and forced population transfers. These losses were the devastating consequences of the two world wars, revolutions, famines, genocidal campaigns, and purges that wracked Europe in the first half of the twentieth century and spread new ideas, created new political and economic systems, and crafted new identities. In Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914-1954, George O. Liber argues that the continuous violence of the world wars and interwar years transformed the Ukrainian-speaking population of East Central Europe into self-conscious Ukrainians. Wars, mass killings, and forced modernization drives made and re-made Ukraine's boundaries, institutionalized its national identities, and pruned its population according to various state-sponsored political, racial, and social ideologies. In short, the two world wars, the Holodomor, and the Holocaust played critical roles in forming today's Ukraine. A landmark study of the terrifying scope and paradoxical consequences of mass violence in Europe's bloodlands, Liber's book will transform our understanding of the entangled histories of Ukraine, the USSR, Germany, and East Central Europe in the twentieth century.

Literary Politics in the Soviet Ukraine, 1917-1934 illuminates the flowering of Ukrainian literature in the 1920s and the subsequent purge of Soviet Ukrainian writers during the following Stalinist decade. Upon its original publication in 1956, George S. N. Luckyj's book won the praise of American and English critics, but was violently attacked by Soviet critics who labeled it a "slander on the Soviet Union." In the current political environment of glasnost, the book's findings have been acknowledged and supported by Soviet scholars. Moreover, this new critical corroboration has enabled the author to discover that the 1930s purge was more brutal than was previously estimated. The new edition reissues Luckyj's critical work in light of current political developments and reflects the revision of previous findings. Luckyj originally drew on published Soviet sources and the important unpublished papers of a Soviet Ukrainian writer who defected to the West to describe how the brief literary revival in the Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s was abruptly halted by Communist Party controls. The present volume features a new preface, an additional chapter covering recent Soviet attitudes toward the literature of the 1920s and 1930s, and an updated bibliography.

Revolutionary upheavals engulfed Ukraine, Poland, and Russia after the First World War.

The Soviet Union was the first of Europe's multiethnic states to confront the rising tide of nationalism by systematically promoting the national consciousness of its ethnic minorities and establishing for them many of the institutional forms characteristic of the modern nation-state. In the 1920s, the Bolshevik government, seeking to defuse nationalist sentiment, created tens of thousands of national territories. It trained new national leaders, established national languages, and financed the production of national-language cultural products.This was a massive and fascinating historical experiment in governing a multiethnic state. Terry Martin provides a comprehensive survey and interpretation, based on newly available archival sources, of the Soviet management of the nationalities question. He traces the conflicts and tensions created by the geographic definition of national territories, the establishment of dozens of official national languages, and the world's first mass "affirmative action" programs. Martin examines the contradictions inherent in the Soviet nationality policy, which sought simultaneously to foster the growth of national consciousness among its minority populations while dictating the exact content of their cultures; to sponsor national liberation movements in neighboring countries, while eliminating all foreign influence on the Soviet Union's many diaspora nationalities. Martin explores the political logic of Stalin's policies as he responded to a perceived threat to Soviet unity in the 1930s by re-establishing the Russians as the state's leading nationality and deporting numerous "enemy nations."