In two publications released in 1919, Ukrainian communists identified Russian “colonialism” and global industrial capitalism as forces that had brought progress with a price to Ukraine as they had everywhere else. Echoing Bachynsky and Porsh and, like them, dissociating their judgment of capitalism's historical role in Ukraine from their condemnation of Russian policies, these two tracts presented the Ukrainian national movement as the “progressive” consequence of a socio-economic development typical of colonial countries. Arguing against Russian bolsheviks who claimed that economic development had created a huge integrated economic unit out of the Russian empire that had indissolubly incorporated Ukraine into Russia, and that Ukrainian separatist nationalism, led by reactionary literary intellectuals landowners and petite bourgeoisie, would economically undermine the revolution; Ukrainian Communists explained that global industrial capitalism had turned Ukraine into a developed Russian colony and its people into a modern nation. Echoing Lenin's Imperialism, they argued that further development had become contingent on separation from the empire and the existence of a socialist Ukraine with its own communist party independent of the Russian Bolsheviks. The Ukrainian national -liberation movement was not a bourgeois ethno-linguistic phenomenon, but one of the world's “progressive”, democratic “anti-capitalist” and “anti-imperialist” movements that had been produced by capitalism and was aspiring to national statehood.^[1] The short-lived Ukrainian Communist Party, in addition, was also the first and only Ukrainian party to explicitly describe Ukraine as an economically exploited Russian colony. In its 1919 memorandum to the Third International it identified Ukraine as a colony of the Russian state and a semi-colony of European capital that was less developed than Russia, but had been developing faster. Capitalism, it continued, had dragged an industrialized Ukraine into the world market and turned it into a national-economic unit whose further development had become contingent on its liberation from Russia via an “anti-imperialist” revolution led by its own national communist party. Russian colonialism was reflected not only in material exploitation but in the practice of settling Russian workers in Ukrainian cities. With no understanding of Ukrainian national issues they served as the base of a Russian communist party that also had no understanding of that issue and, as a result, impeded the evolution of Ukraine’s “bourgeois national revolution” and alienated Ukrainians from the socialist revolution.^[2] Because Ukrainian communists also characterized relations between Soviet Ukraine and Russia after 1917 as “colonialist” the Bolshevik Ukrainian politbureau censured them in 1920 – two years before Stalin began his campaign against Muslim Communists who had made similar accusations against Russia.^[3] Reduced to 150 members by 1924 the Ukrainian Communist Party dissolved itself in 1925, but party and non-party Ukrainians critical of Moscow’s policies towards their republic continued to see them in “colonialist” terms. Alexander Dovzhenko’s ambivalent portrayals of Russian Bolshevism in his Zvenyhora (1928) and Arsenal (1929) remain, perhaps, as the most powerful expression of this idea.^[4]
During the twenties historians had to be mindful of the fate of the Ukrainian Communist Party and that neither Lenin or Stalin had ever considered Ukraine a colony. Until 1934, however, the absence of official guidelines and broad interpretive limits made colonialism in pre-1917 Ukrainian history an acceptable subject. It was given additional relevance at the time by Moscow’s attempts to link European “anti-capitalism” with “Third World anti-colonialism” as part of its strategy directed against Britain and France – which allotted Ukrainians living in the three member states of France's Little Entente; Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia, a role as an “anti-imperialist” force. The Fifth Comintern Congress (1924) had directed communists in those countries to ally with “bourgeois nationalists” and exploit the grievances of Ukrainian minorities.^[5] With a role in the “struggle against imperialism” after 1917 analogous to that of Asian and African colonial movements in the Third World, the Soviet Ukrainian national state was supposed to serve as a model for Europe just as the Asian republics served as models for Asia, and as such it, was appropriate that it have a “colonial past”. Accordingly, historians were able to publish a sizable body of research on modern Ukrainian economic history relevant to the issue of colonialism.^[6] Matvei Iavorsky, the most important Ukrainian Marxist historian of the twenties, wrote a major synthesis of nineteenth-century Ukrainian history that explained how foreign capital had played the key role in developing Ukraine's heavy industry while Russian policies retarded its economy, kept it imbalanced and, therefore, colonial.^[7] He was careful to present Russian workers and Bolsheviks in Ukraine as part of Ukraine’s revolutionary movement, the Ukrainian “national bourgeoisie” as “progressive” only until the Bolsheviks took power, and the Ukrainian revolution as more anti-capitalist than anti-imperialist.^[8] Others were less cautious: “Between February and October 1917 Ukraine provides us an example of a bourgeois-democratic revolution in an oppressed colonized country”.^[9]
The subject of Ukraine’s colonial status figured in debates preceding the adoption of the First Five Year Plan and on the question of whether the 1917 revolutions in Ukraine and Russia were identical or distinct events. Drafts of the Plan treated the USSR as a single economic unit and allocated investments and construction with little concern for national borders – despite the resolutions of the 12 Party Congress of 1923 that had proposed resolving the “nationalities question” by equalizing the levels of economic development throughout the USSR via preferential policies in the non-Russian territories.^[10] Those in favor of the draft argued that Ukraine was not a disadvantaged region of the USSR and deserved no special consideration, or simply saw Russian ruled Eurasia as a single national economic unit within which non-Russian concerns were irrelevant to the spatial distribution of investments and development. Those opposed claimed that Ukraine was entitled to more investments because of it legacy of colonial backwardness. The key statement of this side was published by Mikhail Volobuiev in 1928. It argued that the term “colony” could not be limited to overseas countries which received capital exports, as Lenin had defined, but was also applicable to regions like Ukraine where capitalism had developed despite political dependency – and which could be called “colonies of the European type”. If the Plan did not treat Ukraine as a single economic unit and deprived it of investments in favor of the Central Russian industrial region, then Ukraine would again become the colony it had been rather than the equal socialist republic it was supposed to be, and it would not be prepared for future incorporation into the world socialist economy.^[11] Critics quickly condemned the author for mentioning that colonialism had persisted in the USSR after 1917, but not for characterizing tsarist Ukraine as a colony. Similarly, in a parallel discussion, those who condemned the view that Ukraine’s revolution was distinct from Russia’s differed with their opponents about the exact nature of colonialism in Ukraine and whether its primary centers had been the Russified cities – since even Russian and Russified workers could be revolutionary.^[12] But, except for one person^[13], no other participant denied that it had been a colony. Nevertheless, by the end of the thirties official historiography had stopped referring to tsarist Ukraine as a colony or to Russian policies towards it as colonialist.
This interpretive shift was part of the broader changes that occurred in historiography during the thirties when Stalin demanded that historians write Russocentric statist accounts of imperial Russian history focused on the similarities between Russians and non-Russians rather than their differences.^[14] The 1932 non-aggression pact with France and Poland also played a role because it lessened Ukraine's importance in Soviet foreign policy. Since it no longer served as a base for attempts to undermine a region on the western border that was now supposed to remain stable, there was little international political utility in retaining an account of history that drew attention to a “colonial” past. Accordingly, in a study that first appeared in 1939 and remained the established Soviet text on imperial Russian economic history for over twenty years, Piotr Liashchenko presented tsarist Ukraine not as a colony with an imbalanced socio-economic structure but as a “region of Russian capitalism” integrated “indissolubly and organically” with Russia.^[15]
During a period of “liberalization” in the 1960s the idea that Ukraine had been an economic colony re-appeared in dissident publications. One “reformist” historian was even able to explicitly challenged the official view of tsarist Ukraine's status with the claim that it had been economically exploited despite its relatively high level of industrialization on the pages of an official historical journal.^[16] This was quickly refuted and before the political situation worsened in 1972 only one other historian suggested that the subject had not been adequately studied and deserved closer attention.^[17]
After the revolution Ukrainian socialists abroad repeated the Ukrainian Communist condemnation of Soviet rule in Ukraine as “colonialist” during the early twenties in Lenin's sense as immiseration without progress.^[18] In 1928 Mykola Shapoval published what was perhaps the first attempt to demonstrate statistically Soviet Ukraine's “colonial dependency”.^[19] Non-Marxist Ukrainians analyzed the imbalanced nature of Soviet Ukrainian development in similar terms. Taking the notion of economic exploitation, then widely used not only by Marxists, but liberals and socialists and even Catholics, to condemn capitalist Britain and France, they turned it against the socialist Soviet Union. Émigré political leaders, in turn, used these inter-war studies of Soviet economic policies in Ukraine to bolster the legitimacy of their claim to independence with the argument that Russian colonialism existed Ukraine.^[20] One author noted that the Plan had separated Soviet Ukraine from the world economy and made it subordinate to the interests of a centralized system based on the principles of Russian economic nationalism rather than regional equalization. The fact that the Plan sought merely to increase Ukraine’s production of wheat and sugar beet when world prices were low meant that the Russian Republic would be its only market, while disproportionately small investments into manufacturing, food processing and new plant meant that Ukraine was to serve as a market for manufactured goods from the Russian republic.^[21] The author claimed that whereas the tsarist government had sometimes impeded Ukrainian development, while foreign capital had helped it, the Soviet regime did nothing good at all for it. A second study referred to Ukraine's colonial status under Tsars and commissars and also made what was perhaps the first attempt to statistically demonstrate that in the world economy all Ukrainian ethnic territories served primarily as providers of foodstuffs and importers of finished goods.^[22] The wartime Ukrainian nationalist underground centered in Western Ukraine also disseminated the idea that Ukraine was an underdeveloped exploited Russian colony before and after 1917.^[23]
The last major group of articles presenting tsarist and soviet Ukraine as Russian colonies appeared during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.^[24] Propounded by most non-Soviet Ukrainians from all sides of the political spectrum and reflecting “reformist” opinion in Ukraine at the time, in the context of the Cold War the only non-Ukrainians who agreed with this characterization were political conservatives.^[25] Those in Europe and North America who sympathized with or supported Asian and African “anti-colonialism” ignored the Ukrainians, as did academics interested in “Dependency Theory” – who also ignored the entire Soviet Bloc.^[26] Post-war anti-Stalinist Marxists, for their part, did see Soviet-Eastern European relations in imperial-colonial terms, while non-Marxists applied Dependency Theory to them but neither group studied relations between the Soviet republics from these perspectives.^[27]
Ivan Lysiak- Rudnytsky and Oleskander Ohloblyn dissented from mainstream Ukrainian opinion. They claimed tsarist Ukraine had not been a colony and Ohloblyn specified that although tsarist economic policies could be considered “colonialist”, the entire subject of Ukraine's modern economy was unstudied.^[28] Similarly, in what is perhaps the seminal article on the subject, Vsevolod Holubnychy distinguished between Ukraine as a territorial unit and Ukrainians living in Ukraine. Whereas Ukrainians were a “colonized nation” under tsarist and soviet rule before 1917 because they were a minority in cities, he explained, Ukrainian provinces were not colonies. They were better developed than Russia, their standard of living was higher, they had little Russian capital, they were not economically integrated with Russia and, what exploitation occurred did so only through the state budget. Nor did the tsarist government attempt to forbid foreign investment in Ukraine. Holubnychy recognized elements of colonialism after 1917 but did not consider the Ukrainian SSR a colony either because it had a fast rate of industrial development, and, a per capita income close to Italy's that was well above that of any existing or previous colonies.^[29]
During the 1980s non-Ukrainian post-war economic historians also doubted if central policies intentionally discriminated against Ukraine as a national unit. They cautioned not to overestimate the impact of political domination on economic development in general and implied that colonialism, if it existed in Russian ruled Ukraine, had little if any significant impact on development. More important in explaining the territorial distribution of industry, investment, expenditures and incomes in imperial Russia and the USSR were military-strategic and geographic considerations and market forces – which do not always generate manufacturing development. Low prices and incomes, they remind us, can be as much a result of low demand and high supply as monopolistic central market regulation. An independent Ukraine, from this perspective, would not necessarily have had a different place in the international division of labor than it actually had, nor would its population have been more prosperous than it was.^[30] That same decade historians who reconsidered eastern Galicia's alleged colonial status under Austrian rule also argued that it was more prosperous than hitherto thought,^[31] while Russia/Soviet analysts began to revise their view of “Russia” as a state that “happened to have imperial characteristics” and to regard it as “a state that was an empire”.^[32] By century’s end, against this background, historians began to approach Russian ruled Eurasia as an imperial space with colonies and compared it with other land and overseas empires. What consensus they reach concerning Ukraine remains to be seen.^[33]

Conclusion
Very few studies had been done on the impact of Russian political domination on Ukrainian socio-economic development before World War I. Bachynsky and Porsh argued that European capitalism, as a part of a global historical process, was developing Ukraine's economy despite Russian rule but, neither termed the policies they thought were impeding this development as “colonialist”. The word appears in reference to Ukrainian-Russian relations for the first time in 1911 when Stasiuk used it in the sense of immiseration without progress to describe Ukraine's economic condition. Nationally conscious Ukrainians did not consider themselves a colonized people, did not regard themselves as “anti-colonialists” nor did they compare Ukraine with other “colonized” societies. Yet, although the idea that Ukraine was an exploited colony was marginal to pre-war thought, its appearance deserves attention. It showed that individuals had begun to realize that the national movement should not confine itself to a struggle for cultural rights, but also strive to improve the economic well -being of the population. “Liberation” had to involve more than the ability to use Ukrainian in public since Russian political domination posed not only a cultural but also an economic threat to the nation. Although it cannot be proven on the basis of published sources, these suggest that Bachynsky, Porsh and Stasiuk were more influenced by List and Kautsky than Marx – a subject worthy of further inquiry.
During the revolution communists advocating Ukrainian political independence, for whom ethnic-linguistic criteria could not adequately explain nationality, depicted the Ukrainian national movement as one of the world's revolutionary anti-colonialist nationalisms produced by capitalism. Since the Bolsheviks posed as a great a threat to Ukraine's economic development and national movement as did the Tsars, their argument continued, only an independent national communist party would be able to create socialism in the country. Little known outside Ukraine, subsumed after 1945 within the heavily Russian-Soviet influenced notion of “anti-imperialism” and now dismissed, as are all modernization based explanations of nationalism as economically determinist, this Ukrainian communist analysis of Ukrainian nationalism as an anti-colonialist national-liberation movement deserves attention nevertheless from those interested in the transformation of Marxism into a philosophy of modernizing nationalism and the nationalization of communism.^[34] Until the 1930s Soviet Ukrainian historians devoted considerable attention to modern Ukrainian economic history and described tsarist Ukraine as a colony. But the party eventually cut short their attempt to create a grand narrative of national history with a “progressive” national bourgeoisie that led a Ukrainian “anti-imperialist” revolution against Russia. After 1945 historians either stopped categorizing Ukraine as a colony or, used the term “semi-colony” in reference to its status before 1917. The official interpretation claimed that despite political and cultural oppression Ukraine benefited economically from association with tsarist Russia. Within the official Marxist schema this meant that Ukraine had no economic basis for a “progressive national bourgeoisie”, separatist nationalism or a separate communist party. Accordingly, the only legitimate representative of Ukraine’s interests in 1917 was the Bolshevik party which led a revolution in Ukraine that was anti-capitalist rather than anti-imperialist and, just like everywhere else in the empire, socialist rather than nationalist. Whereas some post-war historians identified Russia as the source of Ukraine’s development and foreign capital as its major exploiter, most simply made no specific mention of tsarist policies as something that may have hindered development.
Ukrainians abroad after 1918 began using “colonialism” and “colony” in reference to tsarist as well as soviet Ukraine with increasing frequency as an additional indictment against Russian rule. Most histories of Ukraine written abroad also used colonialism in this descriptive sense, as a metaphor for injustice associated with external oppression, which can sometimes leave readers perplexed. It is not clear, for instance, how a favorably appraised tsarist policy like the Stolypin reforms relates to the “colonialism”. Since most Ukrainian authors writing after 1945 were not Marxists, their characterization of Ukraine as a colony did not place it within a context of world capitalism nor did it influence their interpretation of the 1917 revolution. They described Ukraine as poor, blamed Russian colonialism for its poverty and their understanding of colonialism appears to have been influenced primarily by Schumpeter. They did not use modernization, dependency, or mode of production theories, and with two exceptions,^[35] did not elaborate upon or attempt to popularize Volubuev’s idea that there were “colonies of the European type” or, to pursue the similarities between that concept and the more recent one of “internal colonialism”. Ukrainians abroad showed little interest in “anti-colonial” third world nationalists or their sympathizers who, in turn, ignored the Ukrainians.
Ukrainian intellectuals did not use the word “colonialism” in reference to the adverse cultural consequences of Russian political subjugation: its “denationalization” and the sense of inferiority or humiliation they claimed it produced. The term did not appear in the first debate on the question of Ukraine's cultural dependence on Russia that occurred in the 1890s between Borys Hrinchenko and Mykhailo Drahomanov,^[36] nor in the later discussion launched on the eve of the war by Dmytro Dontsov, who called for a rejection of Russian cultural domination,^[37] nor in discussions during the twenties concerning appropriate models for Ukrainian culture when Mykola Khvylovy and Evhen Malaniuk again condemned Ukraine's “psychological servility” to Russia.^[38]
By the end of 20th century a small number of historians had questioned the claim that Ukraine had been a colony on the basis of empirical comparative observation – which distinguishes their views from the “hard line” Soviet account derived from an ideological paradigm intended to justify Soviet rule. Drawing attention to the development that did occur, the impact of the world market and geography and, the multi-national nature of tsarist and soviet elites, they concluded that explanations attributing Ukrainian backwardness to conscious “colonialist” exploitation by Russians were too simplistic. This interpretation coincided with the appearance of revisionist views of European imperial rule in Africa and Asia that claim it made little difference in most instances to the country concerned. Specialization, disparities in wealth and, lack of self-sufficiency, they note, cannot be blamed exclusively on foreign political control. Except in regions with a large group of foreign settlers, colonial rule was not an insuperable obstacle to growth (the production of more goods and services without social change). At a some point dependency could inhibit development ( increases in per capita output that result in social transformation) and, the status could have may irritated or humiliated but, it did not necessarily impoverish.^[39] Similarly, in south- eastern Europe historians now note that the newly independence Balkan states after 1878 experienced no economic growth during the next 35 years while Austrian-ruled Bosnia and the Ottoman empire did.^[40]
This “revisionist” refusal to characterize either tsarist or soviet Ukraine as a Russian colony raises a number of issues. On the empirical level it reminds us, with respect to the tsarist period, to distinguish between the effects of incorporation of Ukraine into Russia and the effects of its incorporation into the modern industrial capitalist system, which in turn, requires a delineation between the results of economically motivated state policies in Ukrainian provinces and the results of the expansion of the world market into them. It also obliges those critical of the effects of Russian political domination on Ukrainian economic development to rethink their underlying the assumptions. Would independence in the capitalist world economy have meant prosperity? Would policies of an independent Ukraine in need of foreign capital not have been built around the export of raw materials when demand was high? Would a nineteenth-century Ukrainian government have coped with the adverse economic consequences of open indefensible borders, low agricultural yields, high birth rates, high fuel costs, and provided a better life for its people than they had under tsarist rule? Would it have built an Odessa and negotiated a treaty with Turkey sooner than Russia to obtain direct access to overseas markets via the Dardanelles? Could it have prevented trading partners from imposing high duties on finished exports? Would it have resorted to state monopolies – which do not necessarily increase output but which do centralize control and give rulers a source of patronage without raising living standards. Could it have raised the taxes or attracted the foreign capital necessary to pay for the transportation infrastructure, technical education and manufacturing subsidies which Russia did not provide, fostered free skilled labor, land reform, and the rule of law? Would living standards have risen if resources went into subsidies, arms and enforcing protectionism?^[41]
On a methodological level this refusal to label Ukraine a colony implies that “post-colonial theory” is irrelevant to it.^[42] More importantly, the revisionist claim also points to a need to determine whether Ukraine’s recent past is still best approached by a “revolution paradigm” (populist, nationalist and/or Marxist) as it has been since the mid-nineteenth-century. Is the “modernization paradigm,” which has no place for ideas such as “imperialism” or “colonialism”, more appropriate – with its underlying assumption that all countries should develop like North-western Europe and America? If it was not Russian rule but internal cultural and social “obstructions” that impeded modernization and reproduced “backwardness”, then was not the Ukrainian nationalism that emerged from those obstructions “traditionalist” rather than modern? Was Ukrainian culture therefore an obstacle to or conduit for modernization? Or, should Ukrainian historians reject the modernization model in light of post-modernist critiques?
A direction of inquiry was suggested Holubnychy forty years ago who drew attention to the predominance of Russian-speakers in Ukrainian cities from the end of the nineteenth-century. Can Ukrainians make the cities Ukrainian, he asked. “Here begins the theme of cultural colonialism or its legacy”.^[43] Accuracy demands, in addition, that we specify when Ukrainians themselves began to use this term and determine how they understood the relationship between cultural imperialism and modernity.