From - Imperial - Russia - To - Colonial - Ukraine (By Mark Von Hagen)

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From Imperial Russia to
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Colonial Ukraine
Mark von Hagen
After the end of the Soviet Union and its eastern European empire and –
inspired to a very large degree by the work of Said – the emergence of
the subaltern school of south Asian history,1 as well as the publica-
tion of Gayatri Spivak’s understanding of ‘postcoloniality’2 and other
developments, cultural anthropologists and others have joined with
colleagues in comparative literature and made connections between
postcolonialism and postsocialism.3 One of the first to propose apply-
ing the label ‘postcolonial’ to post-Soviet Ukrainian literature was an
Australian scholar of Ukrainian ethnicity, Marko Pawlyshyn.4 Following
his ‘postcolonial’ lead, a Canadian scholar of Ukrainian ethnicity,
Myroslav Shkandrij, wrote a wonderfully entangled history of Russia
and Ukraine in modern literature.5 All the scholars discussed so far are
primarily known as literary historians. Literary historians of this post-
colonial orientation are a particular subset of cultural historians and are
usually held in some suspicion by other historians, who often accuse
them of anachronistically reading back into history their own contem-
porary multicultural politics. But more conventional and mainstream
historians, especially those who interrogate categories of identity in
national and imperial states, have begun to appropriate some of the
commonplaces of the literary scholars and anthropologists who have
been the most ardent ‘postcolonialists’. For example, many of the writers
discussed by literary historians or by anthropologists betray some fascina-
tion with what postcolonial theorists would recognise as ‘hybridity’,6 and
this is a theme that is becoming more prominent in studies of historical
identity in Ukraine and other parts of the former Russian and Soviet
empires. Andreas Kappeler, whose history of the Russian empire has
been highly influential in shaping the ‘imperial turn’ in Russian history
and who has also contributed to the multicultural history of Ukraine,
173
10.1057/9781137450753 - The Shadow of Colonialism on Europe’s Modern Past, Edited by Róisín Healy and Enrico Dal Lago
174 Mark von Hagen
has now embraced the paradigm of ‘entangled history’ (from the French
histoire croisée and the German Verflechtungsgeschichte) to write a history
of Russia and Ukraine through the biographies of two individuals with
such hybrid identities in an environment with Jewish, Polish, Russian,
Ukrainian and many other cultures all exerting various degrees of
attraction on individuals.7
Before I can make a case for revisiting the history of Ukraine from the
perspective of colonialism, I need to establish the legitimacy of view-
ing the Russian empire, the Soviet Union and possibly also Poland as
imperial states. This notion that Russia and the Soviet Union might be
considered as imperial states, rather than nation-states, might come as a
surprise to those outside the field. This may be due to the fact that his-
torians of Russia and the Soviet Union until the last couple of decades
had adopted as their primary paradigm the nation-state in embryonic
form. This had been the historical vision of the liberal Constitutional
Democratic Party (‘Kadet’ party), whose leadership included several
prominent historians of Russia and western Europe. Former members
of this party emigrated to the West as refugees and helped establish the
most influential academic programmes in Russian and eastern European
history. These historians saw the Russian state as a relatively progressive
force that was leading the backward society along the road to Europe
and its democratic and capitalist nations. A strong national state, in this
case identified as Russia, was part of what being modern and European
meant. Mainstream Kadet thought moved towards the more conserva-
tive slogan of ‘Russia, one and indivisible’ during the Revolution and
Civil War. Several Kadets ended up as advisors to the White govern-
ments in the south and Siberia, and they vehemently opposed any
movements for national liberation or independence, with particular
vitriol directed against the Ukrainian movement.
Similarly, taking a modernisation theory perspective, historians of
the modern Russian and Soviet periods and their political sciences col-
leagues also saw a state and society that was becoming more secular,
literate and technologically modern with previous religious and ethnic
identities becoming increasingly blurred as a common, modern Soviet
identity emerged. Joseph Stalin and his successors also came to support
a view of the Russian state as a progressive force in terms of leading
Russian society out of its backwardness. The Soviet leadership and its
educational and propaganda elites promoted the idea of an emerging
Soviet people, thereby repeating some of the aspirations of the Kadets
for the Russian state. Thus, there was one area of agreement between
specialists on the Soviet region and Stalin himself, who declared that
From Imperial Russia to Colonial Ukraine 175
the ‘national question’ had been settled by the early 1930s, an assertion
which he also made with regard to the ‘women question’. At the same
time, the Soviet party and state leadership proclaimed itself to be the
global leaders of the struggle against imperialism and colonial exploita-
tion, and it gave institutional form to this commitment in the creation
of the Communist International.8
A minority of historians of both imperial Russia and the Soviet Union
did not accept this ‘nation state in the making’ teleology. Many of
them were supported and encouraged by the anti-communist eastern
European diasporas in the West, and they also included influential
diaspora historians such as Richard Pipes, who long held the chair
of Russian history at Harvard.9 This Cold War version of Russian and
Soviet history was a narrative of unmitigated and constant imperial
aggression against weaker neighbours10 and was politically enshrined
in the ‘captive nations’ movement that called upon Western civilisa-
tion to overturn the Soviet conquest of eastern Europe, at times not
shying away from calling for World War III. Among the diaspora
communities in the West, Ukrainians played a very large role in such
initiatives as the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, a multi-national
non-governmental organisation that publicised cases of human rights
abuses and Russification measures in the Soviet Union.11 These diaspora
groups viewed their ‘captive nations’ as brutally exploited colonies of
the Soviet empire and based their politics of national liberation on this
historical understanding.
An early pioneer of the history of non-Russian peoples – but from a
decidedly left-of-centre perspective – was Ron Suny with his history of
the Baku Commune during the Russian Revolution in the Caucasus.12
In the context of Cold War academic politics, Suny refused to refer
to the Soviet Union as imperial, reserving that label for the pre-1917
history of Russia. Since the end of the Soviet Union, Suny has been
one of the leaders of a movement of scholars advocating the ‘imperial
turn’ and has fully acknowledged that the Soviet Union can be usefully
understood and investigated as an empire, albeit of a different kind.13
This dramatic change in perspective is reflected by two periodicals
recently established by a younger, international generation of histori-
ans: Kritika in the US and Ab Imperio in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan in
the Russian Federation. However, the same trend can also be identified
in the main American Slavic studies journal Slavic Review.14
The acknowledgement of the imperial aspects of Russian and Soviet
history did not automatically imply acceptance of the concept of ‘colony’
with regard to all the non-Russian peoples, and with some good reason.
176 Mark von Hagen
Firstly, for most of their history Soviet leaders denied that they were
imperialists, insisting instead that they were the leaders of the anti-
imperialist camp in world politics. Francine Hirsch has identified what
she calls a rather self-consciously anti-imperialist form of Soviet impe-
rialism in the 1920s that encouraged a more critical look at Russia’s
own past, but also served as a critical tool for organising life among the
multiethnic population of the new Soviet Union.15
Generally speaking, the Russian empire – though it spanned 11
time zones and claimed authority over a hundred diverse ethnic and
national groups – did not think of itself as a colonial power. It rarely
used the term in relation to itself, though the concept existed in Greek
and Byzantine history, to which Russia had strong connections. When
a region and its people were conquered by Russia, there was no colo-
nial office to administer the new lands. Instead, an ad hoc Kazanskii
prikaz took over the administration of conquered Kazan and the Tatar
population there until it was deemed sufficiently ‘colonized’ and assimi-
lated into general Russian and imperial structures. The same approach
was adopted in relation to Siberia, which had its Sibirskii prikaz, and
Ukraine, or the Cossack Hetmanate, which had its Malorossiiskii (or
Little Russian) prikaz.16 The closest the empire came to agencies that
had a pan-imperial purview along these lines was a late-imperial agency
for the resettlement of Russian and Ukrainian peasants to what were
perceived to be fertile and under-utilised lands in Turkestan and Siberia.
Despite the fact that the imperial administration did not have an office
for ‘colonial affairs’,17 the autocracy did use the concept of ‘colony’,
but in rather interesting and perhaps unexpected ways. As part of
Catherine’s ‘enlightened absolutist’ reign and her determination to
improve her empire, she invited foreign settlers to move to the Russian
empire with incentives of free farmland, tax benefits and exemption
from military service for a period of time. These mostly German farm-
ers were administered as ‘colonists’ by one of Catherine’s favourites,
Grigorii Orlov, in a special chancellery. The expectation was that the
immigrants, or colonists, would bring with them all sorts of human cap-
ital that would be beneficial for backward Russian and Ukrainian peas-
ants. In other words, colonists were invited because of their presumed
superiority to the native population, whether due to their Protestant
work ethic, or their technical skills. This bears comparison with the
‘settler colony’ practice of Britain in North America, Australia and
New Zealand, where British settlers were expected to bring Christianity
and private property to the indigenous population. Later Catherine,
who imagined herself as a Greek empress if not the goddess of war and
wisdom herself, encouraged a number of Greek colonisation projects

along the northern coast of the Black Sea, a region that had been colo-
nised by Greek merchants in antiquity, thus, in effect, neo-colonisation.
Germans, Greeks, Serbs and others were invited to ‘improve’ New
Russia, the lands to the north of the Black Sea from which the Tatar and
Cossack inhabitants and rulers had been largely removed to make way
for the new settlements.18 Most of these colonies were in the lands that
would become Ukraine.
Subsequently, under Tsar Alexander I, a social experiment called
‘military colonies’ was undertaken under the supervision of Aleksei
Arakcheev, a military man. Ironically, the schools in these colonies were
inspired by British Quaker ‘Lancasterian’ schools, one of which was the
site of the prototype of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, made famous by
Michel Foucault as the all-seeing observation tower of modern prisons.
Bentham spent time in Ukraine while writing his Panopticon.19 Russian
America, or Alaska, provides another opportunity to test the utility
of the concept of ‘colony’ for understanding the complexity of the
Russian empire. It is one of the few known cases in which the Russian
empire sought to imitate the model established by the British and
Dutch in their East India companies. The Russian-American Company
was founded in 1799 to exploit the riches of the sea otter fur trade. The
company was wound down in 1867 after Alaska was purchased by the
United States. The Russians sent Orthodox priests to proselytise among
the native tribes and built fortresses along the Pacific coast to protect
their merchant-trader outposts in ways that resembled earlier French
settlement of eastern North America.20
One of the first and most influential uses of the term ‘colony’ as a
critique of the Russian empire occurred in a volume entitled Siberia as a
Colony, which was published by Nikolai Yadrintsev in 1892. Yadrintsev
was a member of a group of Siberian regionalists, or oblastniki, who
came together in the imperial capital during their university years. In
a curious irony of imperial history, two of this circle, Yadrintsev and
Serafim Shashkov, had come to St Petersburg after being exiled from
Kiev and Kazan for their oppositional activities.21
A less obscure source of concepts of Russia as a colonising state –
though in this case colonisation was positively connoted – were the
writings of the ‘father’ of modern Russian history, the Moscow univer-
sity professor Vasilii Kliuchevskii. In 1904, he wrote that Russian history
is ‘the history of a country that colonizes itself. The space of this colo-
nization widened along with the territory of the state.’22 Kliuchevskii’s
own doctoral dissertation was about monastic colonisation in medieval
178 Mark von Hagen
Muscovy. From the insights gleaned from this research, he went on to

argue that ‘the colonization of the country is the single most important
fact of Russian history’ and that, from the Middle Ages onward, the
standard periodisation of Russian history merely reflects ‘the major
moments of colonization’. Alexander Etkind has brought us back to
the classics of Russian historiography to recover this theme of ‘internal
colonization’, which is the title of one of his latest books.23 For the most
part, Etkind writes about colonisation, and not quite yet colonialism,
though he includes some postcolonial writing among his inspirations.
Outside the field of cultural studies, social scientists have turned to the
term ‘internal colonialism’ from various vantage points. In the 1970s,
the Marxist sociologist Alvin Gouldner made a case for understanding
Stalinism, in particular the forcible collectivisation of the peasantry,
as an example of ‘internal colonialism’.24 He argued that Stalin related
to the peasantry as an alien colonial power would. He also highlights
the turn from foreign enemies in Soviet politics to internal ones: the
kulaks, the peasantry, Trotskyites. The peasantry, which is of particular
interest to historians of Ukraine, was ‘defined as outside the moral com-
munity’. As was typical of this stage of the history of peasant studies,
Gouldner made no mention of nationality; peasants were assumed to
be ‘Soviet’ or perhaps Russian, though this was implicit rather than
being stated directly. The famine of 1932–1933, which hit Ukrainians
and Kazakhs hardest of all peoples, has inspired comparisons with the
Irish famine of 1846, the Gorta Mór. Indeed, mid-nineteenth century
British officialdom, including the religious hierarchy, viewed the Irish
peasants as less than human in many critical instances and was not ter-
ribly alarmed at the very high mortality rates among what it viewed as
lazy Catholic subjects.25 Even more recently, a decidedly non-Marxist
sociologist, Michael Hechter, proposed ‘internal colonialism’ as a frame-
work for understanding the development of the core and periphery of
the British Isles, with a special focus on Wales, while retaining ethnic
differences between the metropole and the colony as key to this internal
colonialism.26
Since the ‘imperial turn’, historians in the United States and Europe
have increasingly applied the label ‘colonial’ to Russian expansion into
the Caucasus, into the steppe frontier, and into Turkestan/Central Asia,
but they have been more reluctant to think of relations between Russia
and its western borderlands (Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic nations) in this
way.27 At various times in history, Great Russian statesmen, intellectuals
and even revolutionaries viewed certain parts of the Russian empire as
having a greater entitlement to autonomy, independence or secession
than others. During the nineteenth century, the focus of discussion

among the Russian elite shifted from the ‘Tatar’ or ‘Turkish’ question
(after the Crimean War), to the ‘Polish question’ (which became par-
ticularly acute after the 1863 Polish rebellion, and the ‘Jewish question’
(after the first violent anti-Jewish pogroms of the 1880s). However, it is
harder to identify a ‘Ukrainian question’ in Russian thought, as Ukraine
was predominantly viewed as part of the Polish and Jewish questions.
For a variety of reasons, Russian writers, historians, and bureaucrats
found it particularly difficult to recognise Ukraine’s history as being
distinct from that of Russia. I wish to reframe this understanding of the
Ukrainian question by proposing that, from the Pereiaslav Agreement
between Cossack Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky and the Muscovite Tsar
Alexei Mikhailovich in the mid-seventeenth century, Ukrainian-Russian
relations can be understood and studied as Russian colonial rule over
Ukraine. Even during periods that have been viewed as being character-
ised by ‘liberalization’ or greater tolerance on the part of the imperial
capital (Moscow/Petersburg) towards the territory and population of
Ukraine, such as the Soviet 1920s, colonial rule nonetheless prevailed
in the relationship between the core and the periphery.
Let me begin to make a case for considering Ukraine’s history in the
late early modern and modern periods as colonial. Jürgen Osterhammel
distinguishes between colonialism and imperialism. He defines imperi-
alism as the behaviour of imperial states in general, while colonialism
is a subset of this and refers specifically to the metropole’s relationship
with its colonial peripheries. He mentions Russia and the Soviet Union
only in passing, though he seems willing to include both in his cat-
egory of imperialist powers. He defines colonialism as ‘a relationship
of domination between an indigenous (or forcibly imported) majority
and a minority of foreign invaders. The fundamental decisions affect-
ing the lives of the colonised people are made and implemented by the
colonial rulers in pursuit of interests that are often defined in a distant
metropolis’. He stresses that ‘no matter what formalities may have been
observed, it [the colonial state] was a government by administrative
decrees of the governor, his council, and his staff.’28
Recent scholarship suggests that the First World War had the effect of
encouraging geographers, historians and other social scientists to think
about Russia in colonial terms.29 In tandem with this new fascination
and the prospect of a colonial future for Russia, critical opposition to
these ambitions emerged. The subject peoples of Russia’s empire were
not alone in experiencing these conflicts, but Russia and the Russian
Revolution played a very important role in accelerating the global spread
180 Mark von Hagen
of anti-colonial nationalism. Russia was located somewhere between the

model British empire and the ‘weak man of Europe’, the Ottoman empire,
in that it was both a colonising power and a semi-colonial power by virtue
of its economic and cultural relations with western European empires.
Russia’s defeat by Japan in the 1905 war marked the beginning of a
radical change in the attitude of colonial peoples towards the idea of
European civilisational superiority. Cemil Aydin asserts that ‘the Russo-
Japanese War in 1905 became a truly global movement; by shattering
the discourse of the racial and civilisational superiority of the West over
the East, and thus the legitimacy of European hegemony, the Russo-
Japanese war confirmed that non-western societies, if they followed the
path Japan had taken, could indeed fulfil all the standards of civilisation
within a very short period of time.’ This reorientation gave rise to early
forms of pan-Islamism and pan-Asianism.30 But the 1905 revolution,
which also grew in part out of the Russo-Japanese War, also saw the first
instances of anti-imperial nationalist movements within the Russian
empire, including in Ukraine.31
The term ‘Wilsonian moment’ has been coined to refer to the new
opportunity for the emergence of anti-colonial nationalism which was
present in the post-war period. Arno J. Mayer has written the classic
study on the ‘new diplomacy’ of American President Woodrow Wilson
and Russian Bolshevik leaders Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky.32 Newer
studies highlight the way in which the Versailles negotiations and the
treaties were viewed in the colonial territories, and these view the rise
of anti-colonial nationalism as occurring in the context of the crisis of
the international system and the disappointed hopes of colonial peo-
ples throughout the world, who had looked to Wilson as the potential
shaper of a better, more just world order. Aydin is one of several authors
who highlight the Wilsonian moment. Erez Manela studies the evolu-
tion of revolutionary nationalist politics in India, China, Korea and
Egypt, but argues that these are only individual cases of a global phe-
nomenon. He views the First World War and the ‘unprecedented deci-
mation of human lives and the myriad political, social and economic
dislocations it caused’ as the ‘crucial context for the articulation and
dissemination of the Wilsonian message and shaped the perceptions
and responses to it.’ Furthermore, ‘the war strained the resources of the
European powers, exposed as hollow their claims to superior civilisa-
tion, and decimated the image of western military invincibility already
tarnished by the Japanese defeat of Russia in 1905.’ What Manela
describes as the Wilsonian moment ‘lasted from the autumn of 1918,
when Allied victory appeared imminent and Wilson’s principles seemed
destined to shape the coming new world order, until the spring of 1919,
as the terms of the peace settlement began to emerge and the promise
of a Wilsonian millennium was fast collapsing.’
Manela concludes: ‘Many in the colonial world who had followed
Wilson’s increasingly dramatic proclamations in the final months of
the war, however, came to expect a more immediate and radical trans-
formation of their status in international society. As the outlines of the
peace treaty began to emerge in the spring of 1919, it became clear that
such expectations would be disappointed and that outside Europe the
old imperial logic of international relations, which abridged or entirely
obliterated the sovereignty of most non-European peoples, would
remain largely in place. The disillusionment that followed the collapse
of this ‘Wilsonian moment’ fuelled a series of popular protest move-
ments across the Middle East and Asia, heralding the emergence of anti-
colonial nationalism as a major force in world affairs.’33 The colonial
elites viewed the Versailles settlement as ‘the apex of imperial expan-
sion’ for the victorious powers, especially Britain, France and Japan.
The Allies had directed the language of self-determination at national
groups under the control of the enemy Central Powers. And, indeed,
national groups in the Habsburg empire adopted this language in their
campaign for independence. The politics of self-determination quickly
spread to the Russian empire as well. The collapse of the Russian and
Habsburg empires resulted in the emergence of the independent poli-
ties of Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and
Slovenes.34 Most recent scholarship acknowledges that the socialist
alternatives to the liberal Wilsonian politics of self-determination only
made headway after the collapse of the Wilsonian moment,35 though
Mayer highlights the significance of the peace declaration of the
Petrograd Soviet in March 1917 as an important catalyst in the struggle
for a new set of rules for international politics, and above all national
self-determination.36 In May, the Executive Committee of the Petrograd
Soviet, which was still in moderate socialist hands, issued an appeal ‘to
the socialists of all countries’ for a ‘general peace on a basis which is
acceptable to the toilers of all countries who do not want conquests, do
not strive for plunder, and are equally interested in the free expression
of the will of all peoples and in the destruction of the power of interna-
tional imperialism […] the program of peace without annexations and
indemnities on the basis of self-determination of peoples.’37 The 1917
revolutions brought together in a powerful movement of protest the
anti-war and anti-imperialist politics that had been an important part
of the discussion in international socialism.
182 Mark von Hagen
Vladimir Lenin must be viewed as an important source of Soviet-era

postcolonialism, and he continued the interest that Karl Marx had
devoted to this subject in his writings.38 Although he was not the origi-
nal source of the concept of the Russian empire as a ‘prison of nations’
(tiurma narodov),39 he studied the problem of empire, imperialism and
colonialism in several seminal works, including Imperialism: the Highest
Stage of Capitalism (1916); The Right of Nations to Self-determination, and
his ‘Draft Thesis on National and Colonial Questions’ prepared for the
Second Congress of the Communist International.40
What came to be seen as the Leninist alternative to Wilson’s liberal
vision of the new world order dates back to the articulation by Lenin
and the German Social Democrat Rosa Luxemburg of the far-left posi-
tion on the war and imperialism among Europe’s socialists. At the
International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart in 1907, the leftists secured
the adoption of a resolution that committed all socialist parties, if war
should break out, ‘to strive with all their power to utilise the economic
and political crisis created by the war to rouse the masses and thereby
hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.’ The congress also voted
to oppose any support of colonialism. At the same congress, German
Social Democrat leader Karl Kautsky also delivered a critique of coloni-
alism more broadly.41 After the outbreak of war, advocates of this leftist
position, who were still clearly a minority in the Russian and German
socialist parties, denounced the manner in which the socialists obedi-
ently lined up in their parliaments to vote for war credits, and Lenin,
Luxemburg and the growing left wing condemned it as the collapse of
the Second International and the betrayal of socialism. Lenin called for
the creation of a new International to restore the socialist movement to
its true revolutionary path.42 The first meeting of the leading socialist
parties after the outbreak of war convened in Zimmerwald, Switzerland
in September 1915. From this conference emerged the ‘Zimmerwald
Left’ manifesto, which was another important step in a process which
resulted in Lenin organising the Third International in March 1919. It
also marked the definitive split of the left wing from the socialists of the
Second International.
Shortly after the Bolsheviks came to power in November 1917,
Trotsky, as the first Commissar of Foreign Relations, joined the anti-
colonial forces against the imperialist powers. In his peace plan of
29 December, 1917, he denounced the Allies as hypocrites for their
endorsement of Wilsonian principles while oppressing national groups
in their own empires, among which he singled out Ireland, Egypt, India,
Madagascar and Indochina. The Brest-Litovsk negotiations with the
Central Powers presented the Bolsheviks with their first opportunity to

practice the new diplomacy that Lenin had advocated, but the weak-
ness of the Bolsheviks’ armed forces and the overwhelming strength
of the German armies rendered this first attempt a failure. Lenin had
to persuade his colleagues in the party leadership and throughout
Soviet Russia that a dishonourable peace was better than the defeat
of the revolution.43 The German victory was itself very short-lived. In
November 1918, the German generals were forced to surrender and the
Hohenzollern dynasty was replaced by a secular republic dominated by
the mainstream Social Democrats. Following the November Revolution,
the German left broke from the mainstream and appealed to the
Bolsheviks to aid them in their revolution.
Lenin invited delegates from dozens of countries to a four-day
conference in Moscow in March 1919 to found a new Communist
International to better further the cause of revolution worldwide. The
congress adopted a ‘Manifesto of the International’ which declared the
recent war to be one ‘over colonies’ and ‘fought with the help of the
colonies.’ It went on to highlight the ‘bloody street fighting’ in Ireland;
the ‘uprising of colonial slaves’ in Madagascar, Annam and other coun-
tries, and the ‘revolutionary movement’ in India and elsewhere. The
delegates denounced Wilson’s programme ‘as no more than changing
the label on colonial slavery.’ The manifesto distinguished between the
colonies in Asia, Africa and the Middle East on the one hand, and the
‘smaller and weaker peoples’ of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and
the tsarist empire on the other. But just as Wilson’s promises to colonial
peoples were masks for continued imperialism and colonial slavery, so
too the ‘imperialist Allies’, while they ‘never cease talking about the
right of nations to self-determination,’ have ground that right ‘into the
dust both in Europe and throughout the rest of the world.’ The only
guarantee of self-determination for the small nationalities is the prole-
tarian revolution.44
Although Irish independence was always on the Bolsheviks’ anti-
colonial agenda, Russia’s Bolsheviks did not accede to requests from
the Ukrainian socialist revolutionary parties for membership in the
Comintern. The Ukrainian Communist Party (Borotbisty) was formed by
left-wing militants of the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary Party. On
the other hand, Mykola Skrypnik addressed the Congress of the Third
International ‘as a representative of the Communist Party of Ukraine’,
which was admitted as a delegation with a decisive vote. The CPU was
one of the radical offshoots of Ukrainian Social Democracy, close to
the Menshevik position. Skrypnik reported that the party had nearly
184 Mark von Hagen
30,000 members, and that their formal rivals, the Ukrainian Socialist
Revolutionaries ‘are simply coming over as a whole to our party’. And
he called for ‘our revolutionary movement to spread even wider. It will
engulf Galicia and form a bridge for the revolution to cross from Russia
to Hungary.’45
The next international initiative that Lenin undertook was to invite
delegates from more than two dozen peoples to the First Congress of
Peoples of the East, which was held on 1–7 September 1920. In a spe-
cial session devoted to the national and colonial questions, once again
Ukraine was highlighted as a success story for the Leninist alternative
of national self-determination. Mikhail Pavlovich, a former Menshevik-
Internationalist turned Bolshevik and currently an employee of the new
Commissariat of Foreign Relations, delivered the report to the delegates.
Pavlovich condemned the Poles for their ‘long series of wars against
Ukraine’ and the Allies for seeking to turn over Ukraine to French stock-
brokers, and announced that ‘tens of hundreds of honest Ukrainians
who sincerely desire the national and cultural rebirth of Ukraine […]
including […] Hrushevsky and Vinnichenko, have become convinced
that only Soviet power can now fulfill to the end the role of liberator of
Ukraine from all forms of oppression.’46
In these complicated and ambiguous political situations, scholarship
took up the anti-colonial message, at least during the 1920s. Early Soviet
literary historians47 and historians of economic relations48 followed in
the path of the fiercely anti-imperialist Russian-Soviet historian Mikhail
Pokrovskii, who sought to disprove all prior ideas of a benevolent and
enlightened Russian autocracy.49 Several scholars – particularly linguists
and anthropologists – some with Imperial Academy training, developed
a critique of European colonialism, particularly in Turkestan and the
Tatar-Bashkir worlds.50 This anti-colonial critique presaged in many
ways the pioneering work of Edward Said in Orientalism and Culture and
Imperialism.51 More recently, a colleague in Britain, Vera Tolz, has made
a more direct and persuasive link between Said and several Soviet-era
academicians and scholars, especially the linguist Marr, the Orientalist
Bartold, and the academician Sergei Oldenburg. She demonstrates that
Oldenburg influenced Middle Eastern scholars, who in turn influenced
a Marxist sociologist from Egypt whose essay Edward Said cites in his
Orientalism.52 All this original and creative work fell foul of evolving
Stalinist views, which redefined the ‘prison of nations’ as the ‘friendship
of peoples’, discouraged any suggestion that there were multiple paths
to revolution or socialism, and designated the Russian people the ‘big
brother’ of the non-Russians.53
Although these anti-colonial histories were especially attractive to

scholar-activists from Turkestan (soon Central Asia) and the Caucasus,
some Ukrainian scholars and political activists also began to argue that
Ukraine had the status of a colonial possession in the Russian empire,
while subtly implying that certain features of this relationship between
Russia and Ukraine persisted into the present.54 A relative liberalisation
of cultural policies in Ukraine during the years when Petro Shelest was
the Communist Party’s first secretary in Ukraine encouraged students
and intellectuals to organise literary and historical circles, which soon
led to arrests and other forms of persecution against so-called ‘bour-
geois nationalists’. In this climate of renewed repression, Ivan Dziuba
penned a critique of contemporary Soviet nationalities policies, which
he argued were anti-Leninist and anti-communist.55 Dziuba re-asserts
the view that the history of the tsarist empire was one of colonialism,
that this colonialism persisted into the early years of the Soviet state,
and that this persistent colonialism was a legacy of Russian and non-
Russian revolutionary democrats of the nineteenth and early-twentieth
centuries.56 He also reintroduces a broader critique of Great Russian
chauvinism, which the Communist Party committed itself to over-
coming at its Tenth and Twelfth Congresses (1921 and 1923),57 in the
resolutions of the Communist International58 and through the policies
of Ukrainianisation of cultural and educational facilities and the promo-
tion of ethnic Ukrainians into positions of political and cultural power.
He starts from a critique of what he sees as the betrayal of Lenin’s policy
by Stalin and Khrushchev and a mistaken push towards the assimilation
of the Soviet peoples at the expense of their national characters and
state independence.59 He evokes the memory of the Borotbisty com-
munists, a breakaway faction of the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries
who called themselves communists and were accepted as such, at least
temporarily, by Lenin and the Bolshevik Central Committee.60 (This
insistence by Dziuba that Lenin saw Great Russian chauvinism as a big
obstacle to any revolutionary transformation of the empire has been
echoed by Roman Szporluk with regard to Lenin’s early years. Szporluk
has also written extensively about the problem which nations pose
for Marxists and about the early anti-imperial school of Soviet Russian
historiography under Mikhail Pokrovskii).61 Although Dziuba does not
go as far as to explicitly describe Soviet Ukraine as a form of colonial
oppression by a new socialist version of the Russian empire, he makes
the case in an implicit manner throughout his text by demonstrating
how contemporary policies in education, culture, politics, economics
and administration all contribute to the degradation not only of the
186 Mark von Hagen
Ukrainian nation, but of all the nations of the Soviet Union, including
the Russians themselves, and that Russification is the new cultural tool
of imperialism in Soviet conditions.62
Among those whose memory Dziuba evokes are Ukrainian commu-
nists and their allies who called for cultural and national autonomy
during the 1920s, all of whom met tragic ends, either through suicide
or in Stalinist camps.63 Mykhailo Hrushevsky returned from exile in
1924 to work in the Soviet Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. His national
model, though deemed bourgeois – a judgment which was reinforced
from a communist perspective by his leadership role in the 1917–1918
Ukrainian republics – was nonetheless at least partly in line with anti-
colonial trends.64 The head of historical studies of the Ukrainian Institute
of Marxism-Leninism, Matvii Iavorskyi, had worked on a model based
on the Marxist understanding of history to apply to Ukraine. Even this
suggestion of a distinct Ukrainian path to socialism brought disfavour
and condemnation on Iavorskyi by 1928. He was accused by none other
than Pokrovskii of having fallen under the influence of the ‘bourgeois’
historian Hrushevsky.65 Most of those associated with Hrushevsky were
also deemed to be ‘bourgeois’ Ukrainian historians and were arrested
in 1931 for their associations with an underground organisation, the
‘Ukrainian National Centre’, that had been ‘discovered’ by the GPU. It
was in this wave of arrests that Pavlo Khrystiuk first lost his freedom.
Historians have followed the political counterparts of these intel-
lectual trends through the evolution of the left wing of the Ukrainian
Socialist Revolutionaries into the Borotbisty and the evolution of some
Bolsheviks in Moscow and Ukraine into Ukrainian nationalism. In
an unpublished article, Stephen Velychenko makes a convincing case
that there was an anti-colonialist trend among left-wing Ukrainian
Social Democrats. He also compares Ukrainian politics with contempo-
rary developments in Ireland, as well as with the politics of the Tatar
Sultan-Galiev and Turar Ryskulov in Turkestan.66 The pamphlets of
Vasyl Shakhrai and Serhyi Mazlakh entitled Do Khvyli (On the Current
Moment) written in 1918 are part of this trend, though they have
mainly been dismissed as utopian or quixotic. Shakhrai and Mazlakh
advocated a version of ‘anti-colonial Marxism’ and considered them-
selves to be Ukrainian communists.67 Others in this wing of Ukrainian
Social Democracy ‘accused the Russian Bolsheviks of invading Ukraine
in 1918–1919, subverting its indigenous revolution and reinforcing
rather than dismantling imperial structures of domination.’ Documents
from the Ukrainian Communist Party (which broke away from the
Ukrainian Social Democrats and was in opposition to the Communist
Party of Ukraine, which was set up by Moscow to represent the Bolshevik

party’s interests in Ukraine) make open references to the Bolsheviks as
new ‘communist governor-generals’ (a reference to the tsarist rulers of
the provinces) and informed the leadership in Moscow that it repre-
sented ‘the metropole desirous of benefitting from the colony.’ Iury
Mazurenko, co-founder of the UCP, demanded that the Bolsheviks
respect the ‘character of national economic liberation’ and the national
movement.68 Another co-founder of the UCP, Andryi Richytsky, also
insisted that his party ‘is that of a proletariat in an oppressed colonial
nation.’69 These charges were made in response to the vague declara-
tions made by the Comintern congress ‘on the national and colonial
question’.70 Another study entitled The Economic Independence
(Samostiinist’) of Ukraine, which was published in Vienna in 1921 by
Vasyl Mazurenko (another UCP theorist and leader), was an early cri-
tique of Bolshevik centralism. He cited the arguments of Russian econo-
mists that Russia could in fact exist economically without Ukraine, and
argued that Ukraine’s dependence on Russia for manufactured goods
was the outcome of decades of colonialist imperialism. He called for
the International to ‘save communism from Muscovite imperialism!’71
Such observations brought him accusations of ‘national communism’,
a cardinal sin in the Bolshevik-controlled world.
Khrystiuk provides a very interesting account of the period of the
World War, Revolution and Civil War in Ukraine.72 He shows how a
historian attempts to develop and frame his understanding of a period
of great turmoil and change, and the particularities of a recently ‘imag-
ined’ place. What he calls his ‘Notes and Materials towards a History of
the Ukrainian Revolution’ is in fact fragments left unfinished. They also
expose the author’s own involvement in the events that he describes.
Khrystiuk also seeks to understand the rapidly evolving politics of revo-
lution in Ukraine and insists that the revolution in Ukraine, though
connected in intimate ways with the revolutions in Petrograd and
Moscow, quickly began to diverge from the Russian model in response
to local Ukrainian conditions. As a veteran political activist at the age
of 27 in 1917, Khrystiuk is familiar with the major political parties and
their leaders in Ukraine and the Russian capitals. He is an astute reader
of the party newspapers and the platform statements and resolutions
of congresses and conferences. He captures the political life of Kyiv,
Kharkiv and other Ukrainian cities across class and ethnic divides. His
perspective is that of an avowed revolutionary, someone who is fight-
ing for the liberation of Ukraine from its double – national and socio-
economic – oppression. Indeed, he offers this history as part of the story
188 Mark von Hagen
of ‘intensified efforts on the part of oppressed peoples everywhere to

throw off the shameful and heavy yoke of national oppression’, but also
the story of the ‘world-wide struggle of working and exploited classes
against the contemporary bourgeois capitalist socio-economic system
and for a new socialist society.’73
At the same time, Pavlo Khrystiuk writes from the perspective of an
active and important player in the events he describes, both in the vari-
ous Ukrainian national center-left governments and in the insurgency
against the ‘Hetmanate dictatorship,’ as he calls it. A leading member
of the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary party, Khrystiuk also tries to
explain what happened in Ukraine from the perspective of his particu-
lar type of class analysis, but one coupled with a sensitivity to national
identity that is remarkably absent in the accounts of the events given by
both the revolutionaries previously mentioned. Another Russian Social
Democrat, the Georgian Iraklii Tsereteli, spoke of a ‘blindness’ on the
part of Russian revolutionary democracy with regard to the ‘national
question’, by which he meant that the all-Russian parties could not
reconcile class with national oppression and resistance, despite con-
ventional commitments to the right of self-determination of nations,
a commitment that proved much harder to realise than had been
anticipated.74 This frustration of Khrystiuk with Bolshevik and Social
Democratic ideas about nations and – a related idea for Ukraine and
all colonial societies – about peasants, a category which included the
overwhelming majority of the Ukrainian nation (no matter how it is
defined), brings us back to Dziuba. Like Dziuba, Khrystiuk never explic-
itly describes the Bolsheviks in Ukraine as Russian colonialists, but he,
like Dziuba, implies that by their behaviour and statements they have
thoroughly imbibed the Ukrainophobic legacy of ten generations of
Russifiers in Ukraine.
Khrystiuk accepts that ‘bourgeois’ nationalism can be found among
the elite classes of society, for whose benefit the recent war [the First
World War] was waged, but he laments the fact that national chauvin-
ism is not limited to the Russian elites, but manifests itself in the lead-
ership of the working classes of the dominant nations [Russia] in the
form a lack of appreciation of the importance of the national element,
ignoring demands for the liberation of the workers and peasants of the
oppressed nations and betraying their national intolerance and chau-
vinistic centralist tendencies.’ He does not shy away from criticising
the nationalist excesses of some of the Ukrainian parties, particularly
those of his social milieu which he labels ‘petty bourgeois’. In fact,
Khrystiuk declares that the greatest tragedy of the events he describes is
that they involve the first war in history ever to be waged between two
revolutionary and socialist states after the Bolshevik Council of People’s
Commissars in Petrograd declared war on the Ukrainian Central Rada.
Benedict Anderson begins his influential reflections on nationalism in
Imagined Communities by admitting that he is confused as to why a com-
munist Vietnam was engaged in bloody war with its communist Laotian
and Cambodian neighbours, and by asking what has happened to inter-
national proletarian solidarity and the international class struggle?75 In
his ‘Notes’, Khrystiuk may well have identified some historic precedents
for conflict among ‘socialist’ nations, a prospect Marx and Engels had
never considered. (A similarly utopian theory of liberalism which
regards free markets as the basis for peace has been part of European
thought since Immanuel Kant published his treatise Perpetual Peace.)
Khrystiuk, because of his steadfast adherence to his own version of
Ukrainian national revolution, a revolution based primarily on the peas-
ants but also on Ukrainian workers, exposes the dilemmas that nation-
alism has posed for Marxists and scholars with Marxist sympathies. He
makes this contribution to nationalism studies by means of a political
history of the revolution in Ukraine. He does so through extensive cita-
tion of important documents that he has had access to, even in exile
in post-war Vienna. The documents are mostly quasi-governmental
statements of the Rada and other rival governments in Ukraine, includ-
ing the Provisional Government in Petrograd, the Petrograd Soviet of
Workers and Peasant Deputies, the Bolshevik government after the
October Revolution, the governments of Germany, Austria-Hungary
and others. They also include excerpts from stenographic accounts of
the conferences and congresses of various parties, social movements,
and other mass organisations in Ukraine. Khrystiuk ruthlessly analyses
these documents as political rhetoric in order to expose the class inter-
ests which inform them, as well as how these class interests overlap with
‘national’ interests.
In conclusion, Khrystiuk’s history of the Ukrainian revolution is
part of a leftist tradition which views Russian imperial rule and early
Bolshevik rule in Russia and Ukraine as colonialism. The left-wing ori-
gins of Khrystiuk’s perspective might have resulted in the marginalisa-
tion of this potentially very productive framework for understanding
Ukrainian history, but for the ‘turn to the right’ of Ukrainian émigrés
in the 1920s and afterwards. To the followers of Dmytro Dontsov and
his brand of Ukrainian nationalism, many of whom saw themselves as
allies of the Nazi New Order in Europe, leftists and communists were
dangerous rivals for political and cultural power over the Ukrainian
190 Mark von Hagen
population. Perhaps now, twenty years after the end of the Soviet Union
and its particular variant of socialist colonialism, scholars might be able
to revisit these earlier contributions with greater dispassion.
Notes
1. Gyan Prakash, ‘Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism’ in American
Historical Review 99:5 (1994), 1475–90.
2. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History
of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
3. Sharad Chari and Katherine Verdery, ‘Thinking between the Posts:
Postcolonialism, Postsocialism, and Ethnography after the Cold War’ in
Comparative Studies in Society and History 51/1 (2009), 1–29.
4. Marko Pawlyshyn, ‘Post-Colonial Features in Contemporary Ukrainian
Culture’ in Australian Slavonic and East European Studies 6:2 (1992), 41–55.
5. Myroslav Shkandrij, Russia and Ukraine: Literature and the Discourse of Empire
from Napoleonic to Postcolonial Times (Montreal: McGill Queen’s University
Press, 2001).
6. Homi Bhabha, ‘The Commitment to Theory’ in New Formations 5 (1988),
5–23.
7. Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multi-Ethnic History (Harlow:
Pearson Education Limited, 2001, orig. pub. in 1992) and Andreas Kappeler,
Kleine Geschichte der Ukraine (Munich: Beck, 1994).
8. C. Ford, ‘Memorandum of the Ukrainian Communist Party to the 2nd
Congress of the 3rd Communist International, July–August 1920’, Debatte 2
(2009), 248–62.
9. See Pipes’s first monograph, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism
and Nationalism, 1917–1923 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1954).
10. Taras Hunczak, ed., Russian Imperialism: From Ivan the Great to the Revolution
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1974).
11. See Vic Satzewich, The Ukrainian Diaspora (London: Routledge, 2002).
12. Ronald Grigor Suny, The Baku Commune, 1917–1918: Class and Nationality in
the Russian Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972).
13. See Ronald Grigor Suny ‘The Empire Strikes Out: Imperial Russia, “National”
Identity, and Theories of Empire’ in R. G. Suny and Terry Martin, eds, A State
of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Stalin and Lenin (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001), 23–66; Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action
Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations:
Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2005).
14. Ab Imperio has as its subtitle ‘Studies in New Imperial History and
Nationalism in the Post-Soviet Space’; the subtitle of Kritika is ‘Explorations
in Russian and Eurasian History’; the Slavic Review recently changed its sub-
title to ‘Interdisciplinary Quarterly of Russian, Eurasian and East European
Studies’.
15. Hirsch, Empire of Nations.
16. Boris Nolde, La formation de l’empire russe: Etudes, notes et documents (Paris,
1952).
17. Willard Sunderland, ‘The Ministry of Asiatic Russia: The Colonial Office That
Never Was But Might Have Been’ in Slavic Review 69 (2010), 120–50.
18. Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy,
2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995–2000).
19. Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization, Russia’s Imperial Experience
(Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 133–37.
20. See Ilya Vinkovetsky, Russian America: An Overseas Colony of a Continental
Empire, 1804–1867 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
21. Mark von Hagen, ‘Federalisms and Pan-Movements: Re-imagining Empire’ in
Jane Burbank, Mark von Hagen, and Anatolyi Remnev, eds, Russian Empire:
Space, People, Power, 1700–1930 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
2007), 494–510.
22. P. Fedorovich, Kurs russkoi istorii (Moscow, 1956), 31.
23. See chapter 4 in Etkind, Internal Colonization.
24. See Alvin Gouldner, ‘Stalinism: A Study of Internal Colonialism’, Telos 34
(1977), 5–48.
25. Christian Noack, Lindsay Janssen, Vincent Comerford, eds, Holodomor and
Gorta Mór: Histories, Memories, and Representations of Famine in Ukraine and
Ireland (London: Anthem, 2012).
26. Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National
Development (London: Routledge, 1975).
27. Jörg Baberowski, ‘Auf der Suche nach Eindeutigkeit: Kolonialismus und zivi-
lisatorische Mission im Zarenreich und in der Sowjetunion. Kolonialismus
als Projekt der Moderne’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 47:4 (1999),
482–504.
28. Jürgen Osterhammel, Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Princeton: Markus
Wiener Publishers, 2005, orig. pub. in 1995), 51, 33, 58.
29. See the recent conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, 8–9 June 2012,
St. Petersburg State University, entitled ‘Empire and Nationalism in
World War I’.
30. See chapter 4 of Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions
of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York: Columbia
31. Teodor Shanin, Russia, 1905–07: Revolution as a Moment of Truth (London:
Macmillan, 1986).
32. Arno J. Mayer, Wilson vs. Lenin, Political Origins of the New Diplomacy,
1917–1918 (Cleveland, Ohio: Meridian Books, 1964) and Arno J. Mayer,
Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at
Versailles, 1918–1919 (New York: Knopf, 1967).
33. Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International
Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007),
5–6.
34. On East Central Europe, see Victor S. Mamatey, The United States and East
Central Europe 1914–1918: A Study in Wilsonian Diplomacy and Propaganda
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957).
35. See Manela, Wilsonian Moment, 7.
36. See Mayer, Wilson vs. Lenin, 61–97.
192 Mark von Hagen
37. Merle Fainsod, International Socialism and the World War (New York: Anchor
Books, 1969), 170.
38. Shlomo Avineri, ed., Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization: His des-
patches [sic] and other writings on China, India, Mexico, the Middle East and
North Africa (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1968).
39. See Marquis de Custine, La Russie en 1839 (Paris, 1843).
40. This was first published in June 1920. See Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 31,
144–51 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965).
41. John Riddell, Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary International: Documents
1907–16, the Preparatory Years (New York: Monad Press, 1984), 5–36.
42. Georges Haupt, Socialism and the Great War: The Collapse of the Second
International (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); and James Joll, The Second
International, 1889–1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1966); also Merle
Fainsod, International Socialism.
43. Mayer, Wilson vs. Lenin, 293–312.
44. John Riddell, ed., Founding the Communist International: Proceedings and
Documents of the First Congress: March 1919 (New York: Anchor Foundation,
1987), 226–28.
45. See Skrypnyk’s report on Ukraine in Riddell, ed., Founding, 95–99.
46. John Riddell, ed., To See the Dawn: Baku, 1920. First Congress of the Peoples of
the East (New York: Pathfinder, 1993), 141–42.
47. See N. Svirin, ‘Russkaia kolonialnaia literatura’, Literaturnyi kritik (1934),
4–79. See also S. Piontkovskii, ‘Velikoderzhavnye tendentsii v istoriografii
Rossii’ in Istorik-Marksist, 1930, 21–26.
48. See Mace, Communism and the Dilemmas, 161–90.
49. See M. N. Pokrovskii, Russkaia istoriia v samom szhatom ocherke (Moscow:
Gosizdat, 1920).
50. See chapter 4 in Vera Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and
Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods (Oxford: Oxford
51. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978); Edward Said, Culture and
Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993).
52. See Vera Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient and Anouar Abdel-Malek, ‘Orientalism in
Crisis’ in Diogenes 44 (1963), 102–40.
53. Lowell Tillett, The Great Friendship: Soviet Historians on the Non-Russian
Nationalities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969).
54. Mace, Communism and the Dilemmas, especially chapter 5. See also Shkandrij,
Russia and Ukraine and George S. N. Luckyj, Literary Politics in the Soviet
Ukraine, 1917–1934 (Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 1956).
55. See Ivan Dziuba, Internationalism or Russification? A Study in the Soviet
Nationalities Problem (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968, orig. pub. in
1968).
56. See Dziuba, Internationalism or Russification?, 16, 68, 74, 78, 80, 166–69.
57. Dziuba, Internationalism or Russification?, 11, 131–33, 136, 200.
58. Dziuba, Internationalism or Russification?, 129–30.
59. Dziuba, Internationalism or Russification?, 8, 15, 213.
60. Dziuba, Internationalism or Russification?, 57, 180.
61. Roman Szporluk, ‘Lenin, “Great Russia”, and Ukraine’ in Harvard Ukrainian
Studies 28:1–4 (2006), 611–26.
62. See Dziuba, Internationalism or Russification?, 66–81, 88–87.

63. See Dziuba, Internationalism or Russification?, 11, 34–37, 57, 80, 116, 143,
145–46, 172.
64. See Serhii Plokhy, Unmaking Imperial Russia: Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the
Writing of Ukrainian History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005),
chapter 4.
65. See in Mace, Communism and the Dilemmas, chapter 7; Plokhy, Unmaking
Imperial Russia, 398–413.
66. Stephen Velychenko, ‘Ukrainian AntiColonialist Thought in Comparative
Perspective: A Preliminary Overview’, Ab Imperio 4 (2012): 339–71.
67. Peter J. Potichnyj, ed., On the Current Situation in Ukraine (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1970).
68. Chervonyi prapor, 8 February 1920, cited in Pavlo Khrystiuk, Zamitky i materialy
do istorii ukrainskoi revoliutsii, 4 vols. (Vienna, 1921–1922), Vol. 4, 55–56, 72.
69. Chervonyi prapor, 4 and 26 March, 19 June 1920.
70. This memorandum was published as a pamphlet in Vienna in 1920.
71. Ekonomichna samostiinist Ukrainy v tsyfrakh (Vienna, 1921), cited in Mace,
Communism and the Dilemmas.
72. Pavlo Khrystiuk, Zamitky i materialy do istorii ukrainskoi revoliutsii, 4 vols.
(Vienna, 1921–1922), Vol. 4, 55–56, 72.
73. Khrystiuk, ‘Foreword’ in Zamitky.
74. I. Tsereteli, Vospominaniia o fevralskoi revoliuitskii (Paris: Mounton and Co.).
75. Anderson, Imagined Communities, preface.

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11

From Imperial Russia to

wisdom herself, encouraged a number of Greek colonisation projects

Muscovy. From the insights gleaned from this research, he went on to

than others. During the nineteenth century, the focus of discussion

of anti-colonial nationalism. Russia was located somewhere between the

Vladimir Lenin must be viewed as an important source of Soviet-era

Central Powers presented the Bolsheviks with their first opportunity to

Although these anti-colonial histories were especially attractive to

Party of Ukraine, which was set up by Moscow to represent the Bolshevik

of ‘intensified efforts on the part of oppressed peoples everywhere to

62. See Dziuba, Internationalism or Russification?, 66–81, 88–87.

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