SUMMARY:

Not unlike all peoples who experienced modernization through domination, Ukrainians in the Russian Empire have developed a tradition of anticolonialist thought. This article draws attention to the Ukrainian Marxist anticolonialist critique of Russian tsarist and Bolshevik rule as a body of thought that should be included in contemporary discussions of colonialism and its legacies. Stephen Velychenko contends that Ukrainian Marxist anticolonialist thinkers who combined Marxism with nationalism to justify national liberation can be placed alongside Amilcar Cabral, Tan Malaka, Frantz Fanon, and Aime Cesaire. These Ukrainians, like their Asian/African counterparts, lived in societies with a small native working class and argued that their people were experiencing industrialization, urbanization, and modernization under conditions of dependency. They created a body of anticolonialist Marxist literature that condemned not only tsarism, but Russocentric Russian Marxism as well. The article offers an analysis of this Ukrainian “national revolutionary” body of literature that was Marxist but anti-Bolshevik, and nationalist and anticolonial at the same time.