Christopher Gilley’s research while affiliated with Durham University and other places

This article examines the attempts by left-wing Ukrainian nationalists to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable: Ukrainian nationalism and Soviet socialism. It describes how leftist Ukrainian parties active during the Revolution and Civil War in Ukraine 1917–1921 advocated a soviet form of government. Exiled members of the two major Ukrainian parties, the Social Democrats and the Socialist Revolutionaries, then took this position further, arguing in favor of reconciliation with the Bolsheviks and a return to their homeland. After the Entente recognized Polish sovereignty over Eastern Galicia and Soviet Ukraine introduced a policy of Ukrainization in 1923, many West Ukrainian intellectuals took up this call. The Great Famine of 1932–1933 and the Bolsheviks’ purge of Ukrainian Communists and intellectuals all but ended the position. However, it was more the Soviet rejection of the Sovietophiles that ended Ukrainian Sovietophilism than any rejection of the Soviet Union by leftist Ukrainian nationalists. Thus, an examination of the Ukrainian Sovietophiles calls into question the accounts of the relationship between Ukrainian nationalism and the Soviet Union that have common currency in today’s Ukraine.

This article asks: ‘What was the Ukrainian revolution?’ It questions the nationalist narrative of an intelligentsia‐led movement in favour of independence by revealing some of the many strands that made up the revolution in Ukraine: the peasant struggle for the land and its produce, the urban and proletarian revolutions, the Ukrainian leftist intelligentsia's pursuit of national and social liberation, and the restless violence of the otamans. It also studies the fraught relationship between Eastern Galicia and Dnipro Ukraine. In this way, it seeks to counter current attempts to detach entirely the Ukrainian developments from those in Russia.

Book review of Mark R. Baker. Peasants, Power, and Place: Revolution in the Villages of Kharkiv Province, 1914-1921.Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2016. Distributed by Harvard UP. Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies. x, 286 pp. Notes. Works Cited. Index. $39.95, paper.

This article investigates whether the partisans and warlords (otamany) active in Ukraine during the Russian civil wars were ‘fighters for the independence of Ukraine’ as the Ukrainian laws on historical memory claim. Following Sheila Fitzpatrick, it suggests that the partisan leaders were ‘tearing off the masks’, that is, trying to create new identities, often via imposture, in response to the collapse of the old order. The article reconstructs this process by examining the career of the insurgent Andrei Vladimirov, the political proclamations of the otamany and the warlords’ invention of their perceived Cossack heritage. In this way, it acknowledges the situative aspect of political loyalty and national identity, while also recognizing that the warlord’s leaflets are useful historical sources.

On the basis of largely unused archival materials in Kyiv, this article re-examines the responsibility of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR) for the pogroms of 1919. It consciously puts aside the question of Symon Petliura’s personal guilt, preferring to concentrate on the broader responsibility of members of the Ukrainian national movement for propagating antisemitic stereotypes and engaging in anti-Jewish violence. This approach reveals a widely held belief among members of the UNR that they were fighting a Jewish Bolshevik enemy. This led to pogroms but also probably prevented the UNR from punishing its soldiers who had perpetrated them. Despite the declarations by UNR figures condemning pogroms and the creation of an organ to investigate them, there were apparently very few, if any, convictions, at least in 1919, the year of the worst pogroms.