Note to Readers

Mark LaGory, one of my now-retired colleagues at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, often responded to the convoluted state of the world with a pithy phrase: “It’s all so complex!” How true this statement remains, especially after the completion of this interpretative essay and the host of special challenges it presented.

In envisioning this political and social history, I sought to write an easily comprehensible narrative that described and analysed the impact of the twentieth century’s total wars on the formation and development of mod­ern Ukraine and its evolution as a geopolitical pivot and as a divided state. I strove to make my story understandable to a broader audience without oversimplifying it.

Russian and Ukrainian are normally transcribed in the Cyrillic alpha­bet, and there is no standard system of transliterating these languages into English. I tried to give the English-language reader a reasonably accurate rendition of the original, while avoiding diacritical marks and other subtle­ties which linguists may consider necessary. In this book I used a slightly modified Library of Congress version for Russian and Ukrainian, as adopted by the Journal of Ukrainian Studies, published by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, Edmonton, Alberta.

To make this text as readable as possible, I adopted common English- language renderings of personal and place names wherever possible: for example, Kiev, Moscow, Warsaw, Bukovina, Alexander II, Leon Trotsky (not Lev Trotskii), Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Grigory Grinko (not Hryhory Hrynko). In the endnotes, I left personal names in the language in which they appear in the original text and added soft signs.

In light of the complex impact of imperial and state policies on the evo­lution of national identities, I employed geographic names less familiar to the American reader in the official language of the state that ruled over di­verse sets of people at the time: thus, Lemberg until 1918, Lwow from 1918 to 1939, then Lviv after 1939.

In my description of the region under study, I relied primarily on territor­ial (such as “Right Bank”) and administrative (such as “Galicia”) terms. To distinguish between the old and new ways of looking at the world, I applied the terms (1) “Little Russian,” “Ruthenian,” or “Rusyn” to those who viewed local traditions compatible with imperial rule; and (2) “Ukrainian” to activists who questioned the unity of the East Slavs and the legitimacy of the Austrian and Russian empires. This inquiry traces how this small second group defined, attracted, expanded, and helped secure this national project within the cauldron of conflicting multilingual, multi-confessional, and multi-political worlds in East Central Europe in the first half of the twenti­eth century.

“Narodna” may be translated either as “national” or “people’s.” In deal­ing with the revolutionary period in chapter 3, I will employ the term “Ukrainian National Republic” (not “Ukrainian People’s Republic”) for Ukrains’ka Narodna Respublika.

To designate areas with large potentially Ukrainian populations in my text and maps, I utilized the term “majority Ukrainian-speaking territor­ies (or provinces),” which does not necessarily presuppose a developed national consciousness on the part of the majority Ukrainian-speaking population. Nor does it imply an “ethnically pure” Ukrainian population within the multiple administrative borders and subdivisions the Russian, Austrian, Austro-Hungarian, Polish, Czechoslovak, Romanian, or Soviet states created.

Just as empires differ from states and states from nations, in this text I distinguished between “ethnicity” and “nation.” By ethnic or ethnograph­ical, I mean groups which recognize their differences with other groups in terms of their language, religion, and/or culture, but which cannot pre­cisely define the borders of these dissimilarities with all groups. When pressed, members of ethnic groups hesitantly describe themselves as part of small, compact, local, or regional communities.

When individuals or groups identify their cohort in more sophisticated terms, I characterized these persons or groups as possessing a “national consciousness,” an awareness that one or one’s people belongs to a larger imagined community with a common vision of the past, present, and fu­ture. The emergence of a national consciousness does not necessarily make one a nationalist, someone who aspires to create an autonomous political arena for one’s group or an independent nation-state. But it remains a ne­cessary precondition for the emergence of mass nationalism.

National identities are not primordial, acquired at birth, or permanently fixed after their development. The process of acquiring a national identity is neither preordained nor inevitable; nor does it emerge or develop in a social or political vacuum. Although Joseph Stalin defined the key ele­ments of a nation in such supposedly objective terms as “a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture,” nations and national consciousness are not divorced from subjective and situational environments.

I have gleaned many valuable bits of information from Imperial Russian and Soviet censuses and statistical handbooks and included them in these pages. Despite my reliance on them, I agree with Gwendolyn Sasse, who as­serted that “Soviet statistical data is problematic and can, at best, indicate trends” (The Crimea Question:Identity, Transition, and Conflict [Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2007], 122).

For the sake of convenience, all dates follow the Julian calendar until 1 January 1918. Soviet Russia adopted the new (Gregorian) calendar on 14 February 1918; the Ukrainian Central Rada embraced the modern chronological framework on 1 March 1918.

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