Between 1917 and 1923, Ukraine experienced an anti-colonial war for national liberation, foreign invasion, socialist revolution, and civil war simultaneously, resulting in almost unimaginable civilian casualties. In Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine Stephen Velychenko surveys the plight of civilians, details the socio-economic background to the political events that unfolded during this time, and documents the country’s demographic losses. Focusing specifically on two causes of civilian death, deliberate killing and appalling living conditions, Velychenko outlines prewar improvements in living conditions and describes their decline after 1917. He examines governmental culpability in civilian death and notes that while ideologies and the inability of leaders to control subordinates were undeniably causes of violence, there were other factors at play. Velychenko mines previously unused archival sources to create a picture of the social conditions leading up to and during this catastrophic period, combining this data with stories and reports from memoirs of the period. Readers familiar with the explosion of violence against Jews at this time will find here a compelling framework for understanding the context of that violence.

State Building in Revolutionary Ukraine examines six attempts to create governments on Ukrainian territories between 1917 and 1922. Focusing on how political leaders formed and staffed administrations, this study shows that in Ukraine during this time, there was an available pool of able administrators sufficiently competent in Ukrainian to work as bureaucrats in the independent national governments. These people could sometimes implement policies, a significant accomplishment in light of the upheavals of the time. Stephen Velychenko compares Ukrainian efforts to create an independent national government with the analogous successful efforts made in Russia, Poland, Ireland and Czechoslovakia. He questions the notion that Ukrainian attempts at national independence failed because its society was 'incomplete' and its leaders unable to organize an effective administration. Pointing out that Bolshevik administrations at the time were no more effective in implementing policies than their rivals, Velychenko argues that more effective governance was not one of the reasons for the Russian Bolshevik victory in Ukraine.

This study of cultural memory in post-Soviet society shows how the inhabitants in Ukraine?s east negotiate the historical legacy they have inherited. Zaharchenko approaches contemporary Ukrainian literature at the intersection of memory studies and border studies, and her analysis adds a new voice to an ongoing exploration of cultural and historical discourses in Ukraine. The scholarly journey through storylines explores the ways in which younger writers in Kharkiv (Kharkov in Russian), a diverse, dynamic, but under-studied border city in east Ukraine today, come to grips with a traumatized post-Soviet cultural landscape. Zaharchenko?s book examines the works of Serhiy Zhadan, Andre? Krasniashchikh, Yuri Tsaplin, Oleh Kotsarev and others, introducing them as a ?doubletake? generation who came of age during the Soviet Union?s collapse and as adults, revisit this experience in their novels. Filling the space between society and the state, local literary texts have turned into forms of historical memory and agents of political life. ÿ

A vivid and intimate account of the Ukrainian Revolution, the rare moment when the political became the existential What is worth dying for? While the world watched the uprising on the Maidan as an episode in geopolitics, those in Ukraine during the extraordinary winter of 2013–14 lived the revolution as an existential transformation: the blurring of night and day, the loss of a sense of time, the sudden disappearance of fear, the imperative to make choices. In this lyrical and intimate book, Marci Shore evokes the human face of the Ukrainian Revolution. Grounded in the true stories of activists and soldiers, parents and children, Shore’s book blends a narrative of suspenseful choices with a historian’s reflections on what revolution is and what it means. She gently sets her portraits of individual revolutionaries against the past as they understand it—and the future as they hope to make it. In so doing, she provides a lesson about human solidarity in a world, our world, where the boundary between reality and fiction is ever more effaced.

Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein in southern Ukraine, Trotsky was both a world-class intellectual and a man capable of the most narrow-minded ideological dogmatism. He was an effective military strategist and an adept diplomat, who staked the fate of the Bolshevik revolution on the meager foundation of a Europe-wide Communist upheaval. He was a master politician who played his cards badly in the momentous struggle for power against Stalin in the 1920s. And he was an assimilated, indifferent Jew who was among the first to foresee that Hitler's triumph would mean disaster for his fellow European Jews, and that Stalin would attempt to forge an alliance with Hitler if Soviet overtures to the Western democracies failed. Here, Trotsky emerges as a brilliant and brilliantly flawed man. Rubenstein offers us a Trotsky who is mentally acute and impatient with others, one of the finest students of contemporary politics who refused to engage in the nitty-gritty of party organization in the 1920s, when Stalin was maneuvering, inexorably, toward Trotsky's own political oblivion. As Joshua Rubenstein writes in his preface, "Leon Trotsky haunts our historical memory. A preeminent revolutionary figure and a masterful writer, Trotsky led an upheaval that helped to define the contours of twentieth-century politics." In this lucid and judicious evocation of Trotsky's life, Joshua Rubenstein gives us an interpretation for the twenty-first century.

An estimated forty thousand Jews were murdered during the Russian Civil War between 1918 and 1922. As the Dust of the Earth examines the Yiddish and Russian literary response to the violence (pogroms) and the relief effort, exploring both the poetry of catastrophe and the documentation of catastrophe and care. Brilliantly weaving together narrative fiction, poetry, memoirs, newspaper articles, and documentary, Harriet Murav argues that poets and pogrom investigators were doing more than recording the facts of violence and expressing emotions in response to it. They were interrogating what was taking place through a central concept familiar from their everyday lifeworld—hefker, or abandonment. Hefker shaped the documentation of catastrophe by Jewish investigators at pogrom sites impossibly tasked with producing comprehensive reports of chaos. Hefker also became a framework for Yiddish writers to think through such incomprehensible violence by creating new forms of poetry. Focusing less on the perpetrators and more on the responses to the pogroms, As the Dust of the Earth offers a fuller understanding of the seismic effects of such organized violence and a moving testimony to the resilience of survivors to process and cope with catastrophe.

Since 1989, scores of bodies across Eastern Europe have been exhumed and brought to rest in new gravesites. Katherine Verdery investigates why certain corpses—the bodies of revolutionary leaders, heroes, artists, and other luminaries, as well as more humble folk—have taken on a political life in the turbulent times following the end of Communist Party rule, and what roles they play in revising the past and reorienting the present. Enlivening and invigorating the dialogue on postsocialist politics, this imaginative study helps us understand the dynamic and deeply symbolic nature of politics—and how it can breathe new life into old bones.

The spellbinding true story of the infamous Ukrainian anarchist and revolutionary.

Dotyczy m. in. Kresów wschodnich Rzeczypospolitej.

Few political figures of the twentieth century have aroused as much passion, controversy, and curiosity as Leon Trotsky. His role in history—his epic rise and fall, his fiery persona, his violent end in Mexico in August 1940—holds a fascination that transcends the history of the Russian Revolution. Bertrand M. Patenaude masterfully interweaves the story of Trotsky’s final years with flashbacks to pivotal episodes in his career as a young Marxist, revolutionary hero, Red Army chief, Bolshevik leader, outcast from Stalin’s USSR, and ultimately heretic of the Kremlin, targeted for assassination by its secret police. Gripping, tragic, and based on extensive firsthand research, Trotsky brilliantly illuminates the fateful and dramatic life of one of history’s most captivating and important figures.