Since 1991 historians of the Russian Revolution, much like historians of the French Revolution before them, have been publishing works departing markedly from earlier analytical frameworks. At least five major shifts can be identified. First, historians have extended their temporal framework back to 1914 and forward to 1922. Second, they attempt to place Russian events in a broader European context. Third, they study daily life and devote more attention to events outside Moscow and Petrograd. Fourth, they look at previously ignored groups like women and white-collar workers, and fifth, they study peoples’ subjective understanding of events.
Before 1991 Ukrainian historians had been isolated from the rest of the world. They were ignorant of non-Stalinist analytical frameworks, and for sixty years only a chosen few had access to archival materials relating either to non-Bolshevik parties and organizations or to pre-1929 Ukrainian-language works on the revolution. Post-independence scholars had much catching up to do but moved quickly.^[1] Among the more important publications that have appeared since 1991 are five collections of documents,^[2] a social analysis of the Ukrainian National Republic’s officer corps, and a biographical guide to the members of the Central Rada.^[3] Also noteworthy are new archival studies relating to the Bolshevik terror,^[4] and valuable primary-source / archival-based examinations of hitherto unstudied or little-studied subjects: the national governments’ secret-police and intelligence services,^[5] their foreign policies,^[6] their policies toward urban industrial workers and churches,^[7] self-governing “village republics”,^[8] the otamany,^[9] Jewish political parties,^[10] the important wartime émigré political organization League for the Liberation of Ukraine, and the role of Masonic ties in high politics.^[11] Valery Soldatenko, meanwhile, published a three-volume monograph integrating Soviet and non-Soviet accounts into an interpretation reaffirming the synthesis created in exile during the 1920s by the former socialist leaders/ministers Mykhailo Hrushevksy, Pavlo Khrystiuk, Volodymyr Vynnychenko and Mykola Shapoval. Although he focuses on elite political and intellectual history in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Lviv, Soldatenko’s study will remain the definitive and indispensable work on the subject for the foreseeable future. His 38-page bibliography includes 56 Ukrainian dissertations written since 1991.^[12] The two books under review provide an example of work done outside the capital; specifically, in Zaporizhzhia, Odessa, and Simferopol. They show that unlike in Soviet times, when the only significant scholarship was done in Kyiv, and to a lesser extent in Lviv, today scholars throughout the entire country are publishing important work that their counterparts abroad cannot ignore.^[13]
Whereas the first book contains primary-source based studies and descriptive surveys, the second is a collection of five analytical-interpretive essays based mostly on recent Ukrainian and foreign-language secondary sources. As indicated by their titles, the first book covers all tsarist Ukraine while the second, focusing on southern Ukraine, is an example of post-independence regional history.^[14] Called “New Russia” when it was annexed to the tsarist empire, the region was later divided into Katerynoslav (Ekaterinoslav), Kherson, and Taurida provinces. Both books share common themes. They cover all sides of the conflict and incorporate research on previously unstudied subjects. They draw attention to similarities between Ukrainian and European developments, and differences between Ukraine and Russia in 1917-1922. Both give some attention to national minorities, and the first two chapters of the second book discuss socio-economic issues in detail. Both books focus on national political and intellectual history, and only the second book gives any attention to women.
Ukrainska revoliutsiia opens with a review of Ukrainian language historiography centered on the interpretations of seven important issues; among them, the actual achievements of the Central Rada, the relationship between Ukrainian socialists and conservatives, the degree of indigenous support for Bolshevism, and the relationship between social justice and national liberation. The official Soviet interpretation imposed after 1930, which highlighted the similarities between events in Ukraine and Russia and claimed the Bolsheviks had massive Ukrainian support after October 1917, they stress, was simply wrong. Since 1991 the consensus among historians has been that local Bolsheviks had limited support and would never have been able to take over what had been tsarist Ukraine without the support of the invading Red Army (Pp. 8, 10, 57). Reaffirming the validity of the pre-Stalinist Soviet and émigré views, serious historians today divide over the same issue as their predecessors: was political independence (the national question) more important than land reform (the social question)? The authors are inclined to support the first view, claiming that countries that successfully separated from empires and avoided communist revolutions after World War I demonstrated that only national statehood and a market economy could resolve socio-economic problems (P. 44). The authors note that the peasantry, as well as white-collar and industrial workers, remains unstudied (Pp. 37-38). Chapter two reviews the programs and relative strengths of imperial (All-Russian), autonomist, and separatist parties, and the author regrets that so few of Ukraine’s political leaders were separatists in 1917. He reminds us that the Bolsheviks supported the Rada only in so far as it opposed the Provisional Government, and includes in his work original research on the Ukrainian branches of non-Bolshevik Russian parties. Although these parties all included groups willing to support Ukrainian autonomy, the author claims their influence was negligible. To make his point he adds that, in reaction to the Rada’s declaration of autonomy in December 1917 (The Third Universal), Russians in Ukraine formed an umbrella organization called the Great Russian Council to unite Bolsheviks and monarchists in the common cause of imperial territorial integrity (Pp.73-74). Both of these issues deserve more detailed study before any conclusive generalizations can be made about Russian attitudes to the Rada in 1917, however. An examination of Ukraine’s 751 Russian-language newspapers, for instance – of which only 25 were Bolshevik – would undoubtedly shed more light on this subject and is much overdue.^[15] Similarly, it would be useful to collate and then classify the complete results of the July 1917 municipal elections not according to nationality, but according to parties’ positions on Ukrainian autonomy. Chapter three reminds readers of the phenomenon of “multiple loyalties” and that many “Little Russian” professionals and landowners initially supported the Rada. Yet, throughout the first months of the revolution, its Ukrainian socialist leaders rejected their overtures – but not their financial donations – and denied them representation (Pp. 145-46, 153). By autumn, the moment for compromise had passed. Bolshevik agrarian radicalism had forced Ukrainian leaders to make their hitherto moderate agrarian policy fit their radical rhetoric and most “Little Russian” landowners and professionals, faced with dispossession and destitution under the Rada, decided first to support Russian parties/organizations, and then to topple the Rada. This chapter is particularly valuable because it directs us to the crucial issue of 1917 in Ukraine: did social radicalism nullify Ukrainians’ attempt to establish a national state because it alienated important potential supporters, or was state building possible only thanks to the energies unleashed by social radicalism?
Although the title of the next chapter suggests it deals with minorities, the author focuses on non-Ukrainian political parties in Ukraine. Polish, German-Mennonite, and Jewish party leaders, as a rule supported the Rada and Ukrainian autonomy. Russified Jews in Russian parties tended to oppose it. Only Polish parties supported Ukrainian independence. Although the author recognizes that not all Jews necessarily shared the opinions of their political leaders, she makes no such distinction for other nationalities. The most valuable section of this chapter are the pages, based on an unpublished thesis, that indicate no more than 10% (P. 14) of Ukraine’s city soviets recognized the Bolsheviks after they took power and even these still considered the Rada the highest political authority in Ukraine (P. 177). The weakest section is the one devoted to the Russian parties. The author characterizes Russian parties as uniformly anti-Rada before the Bolshevik coup and pro-Rada afterwards, yet implies that despite this shift little had changed in reality because their recognition was based only on anti-Bolshevism – as if political moves motivated by tactical considerations rather than principles are unimportant or insignificant. Generals Kornilov and Alexiev allowed the Ukrainization of military formations not because they sympathized with the Rada but because they were convinced that this would improve morale and battle-worthiness. Did their motives lessen the beneficial consequences of their actions for Ukraine? The author tends to equate Russian parties with Russians in Ukraine, to ignore the distinction between Russians and Russian speakers and the impact of the Provisional Government’s recognition of the Rada just before the municipal elections of July 1917 on Russians and Russian speakers. She also ignores divisions that existed within the Ukrainian branches of all the Russian parties, except the extremist-nationalist ones, on the issue of Ukrainian autonomy, and implies all Russian speakers shared the opinions of the extremist parties.
Chapter five examines the Orthodox Church and the relationship of those who wanted a national Ukrainian church with the Rada. Using local materials it suggests a high level of popular religiosity and support for a national church. Despite their toleration of religious ceremonies during their proclamations of autonomy in Kyiv, the author notes, Ukraine’s agnostic anti-clerical socialist leaders were indifferent, if not hostile, toward the religious aspirations of the common people. Both leaders and Orthodox national activists favored the separation of church and state during the first months of 1917, and initially the Rada refused to establish a religious affairs ministry or to exploit the state-building potential of a national church. This weakened the Ukrainian cause. Both sides came to a working agreement in November and the Rada did finally support the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The Rada fell before taking a formal decision on the legal separation of church and state. The author mentions that in light of Ukraine’s historical circumstances such a separation was undesirable (Pp. 221, 223), but some elaboration on the relationship between this principle and the problems of revolutionary state and nation building would have been useful.
The last chapter reviews Ukrainian-Russian relations up to January 1918. The author does not relate the Provisional Government’s policies toward the Rada to its leaders’ attitudes toward Ukrainian issues, as most do, but to political circumstances. Thus, Petrograd decided on the restrictive “Temporary Instructions” of August 1917 due to the stabilization at the front and the failure of “the July days.” Reiterating earlier conservative critics of Ukraine’s socialist leaders, she concludes that Bolshevik armies conquered Ukraine not because few would fight for the Rada, but because of its leaders’ political mistakes. She then claims that the Ukrainian National Republic was bound to collapse because it could not possibly have withstood all of its foreign enemies (P. 257). The first opinion is shared by the editor (P. 40) and the author of the second chapter, Oleksandr Starukh. He draws attention to, but does not develop, a central related issue of modern Ukrainian history with his claim that the Rada’s populist leaders invented and promulgated a myth about Ukrainians being underdeveloped and unprepared for independence in 1917 to excuse their own failures (P. 109). The pessimistic determinism of her second claim is unwarranted. What if General Skoropadsky, for instance, had decided not to resign on December 25 (January 6) but had instead successfully led a coup against the Rada – as the Rada feared he might?^[16] Grouping remaining Ukrainian troops around the still-disciplined units of his First Army Corps, he could have then stopped the Bolshevik offensive, kept Ukraine on the Entente side during the last year of the war, and become a Ukrainian Mannerheim or Piłsudski.
The chapters in Pivdenna Ukraina may each be read separately as studies in their own right. The first covers modernization-related issues, the second outlines the local socio-economic impact of the war, while the next three focus on regional elite political history. All the chapters attempt to situate southern Ukrainian events into their broader contexts and mention non-Ukrainians. The book begins with a section demonstrating that from Kyivan times the northern Black Sea littoral was ethnically and culturally, if not politically, Ukrainian. Those who might consider this archaic should know that the authors’ home town, Zaporizhzhia (Aleksandrovsk), was one of the last to switch from Moscow to Kyiv time after 1991, and that today it remains a center for people who still think that there is a “Little Russia” that should be part of a “Great Russia.”
The authors remind us that southern Ukraine had more towns, urban dwellers, rural Russians, and literate males in the early twentieth century than Ukraine’s other six provinces. The region had ten of Ukraine’s 15 stock markets and received more government investment than other Ukrainian provinces, while its peasants were better-off and its workers better paid. He might have added that of the nine Ukrainian provinces, these three had fewer landless and poor peasants, the smallest number of rural dwellers engaged in non-agricultural work, the fewest internal work-passports issued per capita, and the most co-operatives. The authors note that official tsarist categories did not reflect the real level of urbanization in the empire. Using corrected figures they show that in 1917 at least 20% of Ukraine’s population, and 32% of its southern population, was urban (Pp. 29-30). Subsequently, however, the authors revert to using the official categories and thus do not adequately describe socio-economic conditions and trends.
At the turn of the century in the eight Ukraine provinces there were approximately 100 settlements with trade and manufacturing each inhabited by more than 2,000 inhabitants. These were officially listed as “towns” and contained approximately 12% of Ukraine’s total population But, in reality, Ukraine had at least 700 settlements with more than 3,000 inhabitants where at least 50% of the labor force worked in manufacturing, processing, or transport. On average, 60% of industrial workers lived in such “villages” and the majority of peasant migrants sought their fortunes there rather than the official “towns”.^[17] In Kiev province, for example, Mankivka, with 4156 inhabitants, two schools, a clinic and pharmacy, a weekly fair, barbershop, 3 tailors and 3 small factories was officially a “village,” while Antonivka with 1734 people, one school, and 2 mills was a “town.” Pokotylova and Khrystynivka both had just over 3,000 inhabitants and approximately the same number of mills, fairs, schools, clinics, small shops and factories. Khrystanivka even had a railway repair garage and telegraph office. Yet, the former was officially a “town” while the latter was a “village.” Places like Hulai Pole, Iuzivka, and Kryvyi Rih (Krivoi Rog), with big factories and populations of over 10,000, were officially “villages.” As is known, the smaller the town the higher the percentage of Ukrainian speakers living in it. The author would have strengthened his point about modernization had he added that Hulai Pole in 1914 was not the sleepy backwater that it was in 1994. With 16,000 inhabitants it was within an hour’s ride of a train station. It had three high schools, ten elementary schools, two churches, a synagogue, library, bank, theater and printing press, 50 retail stores, a telegraph and post office, a resident doctor, pharmacist, and lawyer, dozens of windmills, two steam mills, and two big agricultural-machinery factories (converted to armaments works during the war).^[18]
Correctly revised total urban population figures for Ukraine might reveal that as much as 25% of its population lived in towns by 1914. This could not be compared with countries like Britain or Germany. But it would be comparable with Canada, the United States, and smaller European countries Accordingly, until someone regroups the tsarist data from 1897 and 1910-1914 and counts the de facto urban-type settlements officially listed as “villages” as towns instead, all generalizations derived from official tsarist statistics concerning issues like assimilation, urbanization, and moderni-zation in Ukraine must be considered provisional. In light of the faulty statistics upon which it is based, the claim that Ukrainian political independence in 1917 was beyond the nation’s possibilities because people were not “mobilized,” their social structure was “deformed”, they were poorly represented in towns and culturally and educationally under-developed, is open to serious doubt.
The authors examine three issues of particular importance in modern Ukrainian history using the official categorizations. First, they argue that the three southern provinces were integrating with their six northern neighbours into a single Ukrainian national economic unit, and not with the imperial Russian economy (Pp. 32, 278). Second, they conclude that although Ukrainians were initially reluctant to take jobs in nearby cities because they had a higher standard of living on their farms, they did begin to enter the urban labor force in considerable numbers in the decade before the war (Pp. 45-46). And third, again, using the official tsarist categorizations, they conclude that Ukrainians were supposedly weakly represented in the modernized sectors of the economy and that capitalism was not “becoming Ukrainian” (Pp. 50, 59, 61). The authors do not examine whether the mass influx of peasants into towns in the decades before the war was “ruralizing” the towns, or whether these towns were “urbanizing” the peasants. Finally, the authors draw attention to the fact that although the Russian extreme right was very strong in the south, non-Ukrainian regionalism was stronger here than in other Ukrainian provinces (Pp. 62, 69).
As regards the first issue, the authors might have found it useful to examine whether local market networks and rail-tariff policies reinforce or weaken their claim. A quantitative description of the communications network (telephones, telegraphs, the postal system, paved roads, rail lines, and newspapers) would have been informative also. In so far as nothing conclusive can be said about issues two and three until we re-examine the underlying statistical data, there is little point in dwelling further upon them except to say that the authors fail to place them within the context of an important debate at the time. Namely, Petr Struve’s claim that Ukrainian nationality had no future because “Little Russians” had been unable to organize their own trade and manufacturing, and because “capitalism spoke Russian.” The authors leave this question open but lean toward Struve’s position (Pp. 50, 59, 68). They link capitalism with Russian/Russophone southern-Ukrainian regionalism, not to the Ukrainian national movement. The authors cite an article by Hordienko on this issue, but do not mention that this was Mykola Porsh’s pseudonym or that he had written a long and detailed reply to Struve arguing that capitalism was making peasants “Ukrainian.” Porsh echoed the ideas of Karl Renner and Otto Bauer, who had claimed that the development of the proletariat was conducive to the formation of modern nations. He explained that capitalism created nations and nationalized cities by dispossessing peasants and forcing them to migrate to towns where they had to sell their labor cheap. Their numbers ensured that landless Ukrainian migrants would assimilate Russian immigrants, while the rise of national consciousness would eventually nationalize capitalism in towns. He claimed that good business sense was already leading Russian companies in Ukraine to advertise in Ukrainian. Industrialization involved foreign capital in all countries, Porsh continued, and in Ukraine, where Russian capital represented only a small percentage of total foreign investment, native capital would eventually displace it and all others –as had happened elsewhere. If Russian was the dominant language in Ukraine it was because of governmental policy, not “capitalism,” whose language would be determined by the local Ukrainian markets, merchants, and labor force.^[19] Issue four also deserves more consideration. Recent work on pre-war political parties, for instance, suggests that Russian extremists were more extreme and liberals were more moderate in Ukraine than in Moscow or St. Petersburg. Was this indeed so and is this perhaps why the extreme right experienced such a phenomenal decline in Ukraine after 1907, while the liberals continued to represent a serious political alternative? Discussion of the co-op movement, divided between regional / Ukrainian and imperial / Russian orientations, would have been useful.
In chapter two the authors note that during the war fewer men were mobilized from the three southern provinces than the six northern ones, and that the percentage of Ukrainian speakers among urban workers remained stable. The burden of agricultural work fell on women after 1914. Comprising on average 10% of the regional war-time heavy-industrial labor force, they averaged 5% of the total urban work force. While the number of workers increased during the war, wages and productivity declined. This led to shortages and government regulation, but comparatively, the south remained more stable than the north because its peasants were better off, more food was available, and the differences between wages and prices were not as big as further north (P. 113). Due to war-time changes the empire’s main north-south rail line ran through Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia and, consequently, the southern population was well informed about events in the rest of the country. The authors note that an inflow of approximately 300,000 refugees and prisoners of war into the southern provinces was matched by the deportation of an unspecified number of local non-naturalized Germans in 1915. It is reasonable to assume, as the authors do, that contact with refugees and prisoners also broadened local peoples’ horizons, but some evidence for this would have been welcome. Although the influx of newcomers generated ethnic tensions this did not overflow into violence before 1917 (P. 95). The authors do not discuss the attitudes or fate of these newcomers or of the region’s long-settled non-Ukrainians.
The next three chapters focus on the political history of the region to 1922. The authors make little attempt to relate events to the socio-economic trends they identified in the first chapter. Their main theme is that although Russian Bolsheviks ultimately won political control over most of the tsarist empire, Ukrainian resistance forced them to recognize that Kharkiv, Kherson, and northern Taurida provinces were not “New Russia” but “southern Ukraine,” and to attach these territories not to the Russian Republic but to the Ukrainian SSR. They might have added that even local Russians and Russian speakers disgruntled with Ukrainian independence today don’t think in terms of “Novaia Rossiia.”
The authors classify Russian and Jewish parties in Ukraine as “opponents of the Ukrainian movement” and are critical of the Provisional Government for refusing to give Kyiv jurisdictional authority over the three examined southern provinces in August 1917 – despite the desires of the region’s majority, clearly expressed via the ballot box. The authors do not think that Petrograd’s recognition of the Rada’s authority over the six other provinces that month had an appreciable impact on non-Ukrainians’ attitudes toward the Rada. These changed only after the Bolshevik seizure of power three months later, which forced local parties to choose between Ukrainian, imperial, or regional-territorial orientations (Pp. 145-49). They do not mention that all Russian parties, except the Monarchists and extreme right, were divided on the issue of Ukrainian autonomy, but do note that after the Bolshevik coup the majority of Ukraine’s soviets and city Dumas, dominated by the Mensheviks and Russian SR’s, supported the Rada as the local center of power according to the terms of the August agreement with the Provisional government. The entire subject of Russian and Russian speakers’ attitudes in 1917, however, as noted above, deserves more study.
The authors reaffirm the generally accepted interpretation of Bolshevik triumphs in Ukraine that winter. They attribute it to armed might, the weakness of the Ukrainian national movement outside the Kyiv region, weak socio-economic ties between Kyiv and other Ukrainian provinces, and the Rada’s failure to devote more attention to administration (Pp. 131, 135). Like the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks did not consider southern Ukraine part of the Ukrainian National Republic. The authors remind us that only in March 1918, to a great degree because of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, did they decide to dissolve the Odessa, Donetsk-Kryvyi Rih, and Taurida Soviet Republics into the Ukrainian SSR, which until then was limited to the five northern Ukrainian provinces. But even then the Bolsheviks explicitly stated: “We never regarded the Ukrainian Soviet Republic as a national republic [sic] but exclusively as a soviet republic on Ukrainian territory” (P. 172).
Chapter four examines the role of southern Ukraine in foreign affairs. It explains how Bolshevik policies alienated the local rural population and drove them into the armies of Hryhoriiv and Makhno. These men made and broke alliances with each other as well as with every other interested group and ultimately both were defeated. In the interim, however, the Bolsheviks could not control southern Ukraine in the summer of 1919. Having to simultaneously deal with a White offensive in the region, their armies could not march west in support of the Hungarian Communists led by Bela Kun. Without Russian support the Hungarians had to withdraw from Slovakia in July and their armed attempt to extend the communist revolution in central Europe that year failed.
The final chapter examines the relationship between Makhno and the Ukrainian Directory, and how the Bolsheviks finally subdued southern Ukraine. Using recent research the authors demonstrate that after two years of war and requisitions by Whites and Bolsheviks, more southern Ukrainian peasants than before knew about Ukrainian independence and were prepared to support it primarily those on the western side of the Dnipro (P. 240). The Whites under Vrangel had also changed and were prepared, at last, to recognize Ukrainian independence. Makhno himself, based on the eastern side of the Dnipro, was inclined to fight alongside Ukrainian National Republic forces, but was unable to sway his closest associates who regarded the Directory as a “counter-revolutionary bourgeois” state and preferred to side with the Bolsheviks, who destroyed Makhno’s army after defeating Vrangel and occupying the Crimea in late 1920. National leaders in Kyiv, meanwhile, were unable to accept the southern peasantry’s economic demands and considered Makhno a bandit. Thus, two major Ukrainian forces never united in a common cause (P. 270).
The decisive factor in Makno’s defeat was famine. Incessant requisitions, a bad harvest in 1920, and then drought led to hunger in 1921. Although the Bolsheviks controlled southern Ukrainian towns by then, they neither lowered procurement rates nor provided relief. They did this deliberately to cause famine, argue the authors – and almost all Ukrainian historians agree. By the end of 1921 an estimated two million people in southern Ukraine had died of starvation and armed resistance stopped (Pp. 248-253). As there are still some who doubt Bolshevik intent, it is worth noting that recent work on Bolshevik policies elsewhere shows they were not very concerned with niceties when it came to imposing their authority. Faced with strong resistance they used poison gas against the civilian population in Tambov province, and in February-March 1919 systematically executed every inhabitant of the Don Region they could capture in what amounted to intentional genocide.^[20]
After independence Ukrainian historians quickly assimilated earlier non-Soviet historiography and then integrated it with the empirical findings of Soviet-era scholarship. At the risk of oversimplifying, Iaroslav Hrytsak in 1996 might be identified as the first historian to look at Ukrainian events in their European context and raise doubts in print about events or developments that most had routinely until then considered unique or particular to Ukraine.^[21]Other historians were not far behind him and were already going to the sources with new questions. The reviewed books indicate that historians today are more interested in determining contexts and “what happened” than in pondering the old questions: “why did we lose?” or “how did we win?” The opening chapters of Pivdenna Ukraina give us a glimpse of the insights that socio-economic studies can provide into Ukraine’s revolutions. Yet, historians still write within the framework of national history. Few know, and fewer have applied, new methodologies.^[22]Most concentrate on political and intellectual history, while few write on social history in general or on peasants as subjects in particular. Someone has yet to write a history of wages and prices during these crucial years. The anarchist Mariia Nikiforova (“Marusia”), meanwhile, would appear to be an ideal subject for post-modernist feminist examination. A hermaphrodite born in Katerynoslav province, Marusia was imprisoned for the first time when she was 17. She then fled to Paris where she had her male parts surgically removed and in 1914 joined the French Foreign Legion. After completing an officers’ course she returned to Ukraine in 1917 where she joined Makhno. With a reputation as one of his most vicious commanders, at one point she shot 34 men with her own hand. Nonetheless, he transferred her out of the front and put her in charge of his schools, hospitals, and nurseries. Married to a Polish anarchist who worked for the Bolsheviks, she had a weakness for sweets, which she would devour by the handful in the cafes and bakeries her troops expropriated. Probably hung by the Whites in 1919, people thought she led anti-Bolshevik uprisings through 1921, although the Bolsheviks considered her a hero after her death.^[23]
Ukrainian historians are held back methodologically in part because neither they nor libraries can afford to purchase foreign books. But influential as well are underlying attitudes about the purpose of historical writing in general. As an American recently noted, Ukrainian historians still judge the significance of people, events, ideas, and institutions in 1917-1921 according to their role in the national-state project. In Ukraine’s major historical journal, Ukrainskyi istorychnyi zhurnal, only seven out of 86 articles on the revolution were devoted to peasants or workers between 1991 and 1998.^[24] Between 1998 and 2003 none of its 23 articles on the revolution dealt with either of these subjects. Of 25 articles in Istoriia Ukrainy: malovidomi imena, podii, fakty (2001-2003), and Ukrainskyi istorychnyi zbirnyk (1997-2000), only four dealt with peasants. Somewhat better is the regional journal Siverianskyi Litopys published in Chernihiv, which in general includes more writing on social history than do central journals. It published six articles on peasants between 1995 and 2003 out of 31 about the revolution.^[25] In a collection of 45 articles on the Central Rada, none mention the peasants and only three deal with social issues.^[26]
Given Ukraine’s past this lacuna is understandable. But the country is now independent. With each passing year more people become acquainted with foreign literature and fewer remain of those who still doubt the existence of a Ukrainian nation. Accordingly, the new generation of historians will be more knowledgeable and less defensive. They will inevitably move beyond political history and the national paradigm and devote more attention to the non-national aspects of events in 1917-1921. Their work will provide vital raw material for the long overdue social history of Ukraine’s revolutions.