After the Russian Empire collapsed in February 1917, events in Ukraine did not take the same course as in Russia.

An autonomous state was formed in Kyiv; no equivalent of the October Revolution occurred; and when the Bolsheviks invaded from the north in January 1918, the Ukrai­nian government declared independence.

However, early Bolshevik historians described the complex story of revolutionary Ukraine with candor. Moisei Rafes in 1920 and Moisei Ravich-Cherkasskii (real name Rubinshtein) in 1923, painted a picture that already by the middle of the decade had become an embarrassment to Soviet leaders. As a result, the Communist Party commissioned new works, including studies by Nikolai (Mykola) Popov published in 1927 and 1930. These, too, were not to Moscow’s liking and in the thirties, all previous Bolshevik histories were pulped and most of their authors silenced, either through arrest or murder.

Why were these early accounts considered offensive? First, because they showed that in 1917-18, the Ukrainian and Jewish populations over­whelmingly supported the Ukrainian government in Kyiv, the Central Rada, and opposed the Bolsheviks. Second, because they demonstrated that the transfer of allegiance to the Bolsheviks by most Jewish activists in 1919 and 1920 had been a reluctant and fraught affair. These accounts made clear that the Jewish population desired cultural autonomy—a stick­ing point in the relationship of Jewish parties, in particular the Bund, with Bolshevism for over fifteen years. Above all, the histories revealed fundamental tensions within the Bolshevik membership in Ukraine. Ukrainians and Jews who wanted to create an autonomous party and republic clashed acrimoniously with Moscow centralists. They accused the latter of Russian chauvinism and an imperialist or colonialist mental­ity. The centralists leveled the counter-charge of bourgeois nationalism.