The Ukrainian Revolution, the Bolsheviks, and the Inertia of Empire

Hanna Perekhoda

On February 21, 2022, Vladimir Putin gave a long speech justifying the Rus­sian Federation’s formal invasion of Ukraine, announced three days later. In it, Putin asserted what he considered to be irrefutable truths: Ukrainians and Russians are “one and the same people”, while the distinct national identity of Ukrainians is a pure invention, a result of a conspiracy plotted by those who wished to divide Russia.¹ These ideas are not new or marginal, having actually formed part of the Russian national narrative at its inception during the 19th century.

I will Startwith the fact that modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik, Communist Russia. This process started practically right after the 1917 revolution, and Lenin and his associates did it in a way that was extremely harsh on Russia - by separating, severing what is historically Russian land.

The war that Russia launched against Ukraine and its people from February 2022 was therefore justified, according to Putin, by the need to correct the er­rors of 1917 committed by Vladimir Lenin and his followers. The Russian pres­ident insisted in particular that the broader region of eastern Ukraine, “the Donbass”², was “stolen” from Russian by the Bolsheviks and then “given” to Ukraine.

“Isn't it a fact that the Donbas is a region that is historically more Russian rather than Ukrainian?” This is a question that researchers often heard in 2014, when Russia was already orchestrating a “civil” war in eastern Ukraine. When atrocities committed by the Russian army in Ukraine in 2022 come to light, however, few observers dared to openly question the historical legitimacy of Ukrainian independence as they could afford to do it 2014. Nevertheless, a sim­ilar idea predicated on much the same lines as President Putin's notion of his­tory on the eve of the invasion continues to circulate: that “the Donbas” is a re­gion with an ambiguous sense of historical belonging, where the population's state affiliation could thus be subject to revision.

At the time of writing, Ukraine is still undergoing the violation of its terri­torial integrity by Russia. In this specific context, the process of defining its boundaries, and especially its border with Russia, inevitably becomes a po­litically charged issue. Russian historians openly put forward the irredentist and neo-imperial view of Russian history and, when talking about eastern and southern Ukraine, insist on the allegedly unbreakable historic link between these lands and Russia. Ukrainian historians, on the other hand, have sought to legitimize the internationally recognized borders of their country by arguing that the ancestors of the modern Ukrainian people have inhabited this territory since time immemorial. It is important, however, not to give in to the tempta­tion to adopt a teleological and anachronistic approach typical of national his­toriographies. In reality, the territorial future of Ukraine, just like that of all other countries that emerged from the disintegration of the Russian Empire, including the Russian Federation itself, was anything but predetermined. The revolutionary period of 1917 to 1922 is, in fact, decisive for understanding the way in which Ukraine's present geographical form was established on the po­litical map.

Historians have produced a large number of works on the issue of state­building and nation-building strategies that the Soviet authorities began to develop as soon as they came to power in order to bring and maintain the lands and populations of the former Romanov Empire under their control.³ However, the controversies surrounding the territorial delimitation between Ukraine and Russia, and more specifically the question of “where the Donbas belongs”, have never been explicitly addressed. Even in works written by specialists in the regional history of the Donbas⁴ this question appears only as a point of cursory interest, never problematized as an object of research. A recent collection of essays edited by Olena Palko and Constantin Ardeleanu⁵, being the first comprehensive account on the making of Ukraine's modern borders, represents a significant contribution to the field. Its chapter on the Russo-Ukrainian border by Stephan Rindlisbacher in particular, provides a more considered understanding of the logic and mechanisms behind the formal delimitation of the boundaries between the two Soviet republics in the early 1920s.⁶ A few articles by Ukrainian historians are also worth men­tioning as they introduce interesting historical sources.⁷ However, before reconstructing the process by which these modern state borders were actually established, it seems necessary to first understand when and how the spatial representation of Ukraine as we know it today became a self-evident idea for the Bolsheviks; for although they did not “invent” Ukraine, they were in fact the ones who had to resolve the problem of what ultimately constituted this country's territory and, more specifically, where its borders were supposed to lie. However, drawing the boundaries of a new country within a previously centralized, transcontinental empire was not a trivial matter. Why did the provinces of Kharkiv and Katerynoslav (now Dnipro) come to be seen as part of Ukraine? When and how did the idea of the Donbas constituting a part of Ukraine become obvious - especially for the Bolsheviks? This chapter will fo­cus on how these institutional and ideological path-dependencies ultimately determined the “mental geographies”, influencing political strategies, and guiding political choices of the actors implicated in the process of delineating the Ukrainian political space.

Imagining a Ukrainian National Space in the 19th Century

The first territorial representations of modern Ukraine appeared in the middle of the 19th century among the intellectual circles of Kharkiv and Kyiv. Those who comprised these groups had already begun to build identities and their loyalties that were distinct from the “Little Russian”⁸ or the Russian imperial national project, being predicated, instead on a Ukrainian national idea. Imag­ining and building a nation in the context of the mid-1800s, also meant imag­ining its physical territorial form. However, this was not simply a question of defining the geographical limits of the Ukrainian ethnocultural space. Such an undertaking could only be achieved within a political perspective, taking as its goal the placement ofUkraine on the mental map of the progressive intellectual elites who, according to the then popular European Romanticist ideal, needed to first recognize themselves in their people in order to work for its emanci­pation. Such an approach perfectly exemplified “geographical romanticism”⁹: the use of the ethnographic unity of a contemporary population as a basis to imagine the political space of a nation. The political map of Ukraine would thus be equivalent to its ethnographic map. Such a definition is typical for a stateless nation: when one's identified homelands had long been subjected to an imperial power that denied the historical and cultural subjectivity of its in­habitants, while structuring local economies towards fulfilling the needs of the metropole, the criteria of historical legitimacy or economic rationality hardly offered substantive arguments.

The ideal Ukrainian homeland, however, was not to be found on any polit­ical or administrative map of the time. Indeed, on the eve of the First World War, the land populated by ethnic Ukrainians was itself divided between Rus­sia and Austria-Hungary, the latter controlling only the far western regions of present-day Ukraine.

The February Revolution: Defining the Boundaries of the Nation

In 1917, the February Revolution put an end to tsarist rule; in Ukraine, as in the rest of the former Empire, local soviets (workers councils) and the post-impe­rial Provisional Government began struggling for power. Mass demonstrations and various people's congresses asking for a wide autonomy for Ukraine also started to multiply as soon as the February Revolution had removed a num­ber of historical obstacles put in place by the former regime.¹² The sudden in­tensified politicization of the public sphere not only saw social consciousness develop among swathes of the populace who had previously existed outside of state power structures, but also suddenly precipitated numerous forms of national awakening.

Advocates for Ukrainian autonomy considered the Ukrainian people to be all those who had previously indicated “Little Russian” (Ukrainian) as their mother tongue. Logically, Ukraine should therefore comprise territories where this specific part of the population represented the majority.¹³ Although Russian largely served as the dominant language of the big cities, especially in the east and south, the Ukrainian-speaking population in the countryside was much more numerous. It should be remembered that Ukrainian society at the time was marked by an opposition between the countryside, Ukrainian and “backward”, and the city, centers of Russian imperial domination on the road to modernization. Moreover, those who could be identified as Ukrainian were also the least urbanized ethnic group - being Ukrainian was itself syn­onymous with being a peasant.¹⁴ Thus, such a division of labor between ethno- linguistic groups made it possible to establish a strong correlation between ethnicity and social position. While Ukrainians may have dominated in a demographic sense, modern political, economic, and civic life in the cities was still the prerogative of Russians, Jews, and Poles. The Ukrainian national movement therefore set itself the task of combating these inequalities, seeing political autonomy as a tool for enabling unhindered development, allowing the Ukrainian nation to emerge from its perceived rural obscurity and enter the sphere of urban modernity where it would finally have its own voice.

Based on this data, the Central Rada drew up a list of provinces that were to be included in the proposed autonomous Ukraine: Kyiv, Volhynia, Podolia, Poltava, and Chernihiv, as well as the eastern and southern provinces of

Kharkiv, Katerynoslav, Kherson, and Tauride.¹⁵ These claims were however not accepted by the Provisional Government in Petrograd, who were determined to keep the industrialized regions to the east and south under the direct control of Russian authorities.

Bolshevik Mental Geographies and the Challenge of the National Struggle

The autonomy of Ukraine and its future territory, subjects much discussed in the Ukrainian political circles of Kyiv, were, however, not a priority for the local militants of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, and even less so for its Bolshevik faction (RSDLP(b)). On the one hand, their mental geographies had been shaped by utopian visions of the future: since the ultimate goal of the Bol­sheviks was world revolution, the horizons of their political imagination had to be global, not national. On the other hand, their political activities were still limited to the territories of the former Russian Empire, finding fertile ground in the largely Russian and Russified industrial working-class of the major ur­ban centers. In fact, the geographical limits in which the Bolsheviks carried out their activities in 1917 were largely dependent on the networks formed by various soviets. Within the territory of the future Ukraine, there were three such networks in 1917: one at the territory’s political center in Kyiv, another in the Black Sea port of Odesa, and the third based in the eastern city of Kharkiv. This division reiterated and recreated the old tsarist administrative structure: instead of seeing Ukraine as a whole, the Bolshevik militants organized them­selves into three geographically defined regions. Heorhiy Lapchynsky remem­bered that the militants of his party were “extremely unprepared to grasp the idea of the unity of Ukraine” and did not ask themselves questions about its possible borders:

All our previous partisan activity taught us [...] that there were ‘three re­gions’ in the ‘south of Russia’ - Kyiv (Iugo-Zapadnyi krai or the South-western region), Odesa (the south of the Right bank, Bessarabia, and Crimea), and Kharkiv (Kharkiv, Donbas, Don). [...] We could not even clearly indicate where the borders of the ‘Ukrainian Republic’ were. Should it, for example, include Odesa, Katerynoslav, Kharkiv, Taurida, or should it be limited to Iugo-Zapadnyi krai, the Kyiv oblast only?¹⁶

The mental geography of the militants of the RSDLP(b) in 1917 was thus sub­ject to the inertia of the pre-existing material and ideational structures of the former empire. Revolutionary as they were, the Bolsheviks had not been able to think outside of the imperial geographic paradigm that they had inherited. However, the reality of Ukrainian national mobilization confronted the Bol­sheviks with the existing contradiction between the immensity of their politi­cal ambitions and the very concrete and local difficulties of a revolution which occurred in a contiguous land empire.

In October 1917, unlike in Petrograd, it was not the Bolsheviks who defeat and overthrow the Provisional Government in Kyiv, but the Ukrainian national movement that then proceeded to consolidate its authority. From then on, any force claiming power over this territory was obliged to position itself in relation to this new context in which the idea of an autonomous or even independent Ukraine becomes more and more popular. However, the Kyiv Bolsheviks did not immediately perceive this fundamental change of paradigm. At the very moment when the Central Rada celebrated its victory, Evgenia Bosch, one of the most respected and trusted activists, declared that the national idea was not popular among Ukrainians since “before the fall of tsarism, it has hardly ever manifested itself”.¹⁷ For her, it was “clearly out of the question to speak of any Ukraine”, as it was “only a nationalist invention”.¹⁸ In reality, not only the Social Democrats, but also the whole urban political environment had been surprised by the extent and speed of the Ukrainian political awakening, whose aspirations had previously been ignored, denied, and even openly derided. Ukrainians, once considered part of a Russian nation, were simply denied a separate voice, and, therefore, were absent from the imagery that dominated among the cultural urban bearers of imperial identity. However, those same Ukrainians had not only become an active subject in the territory’s political life, but had even taken power in Kyiv.

Consequently, the Bolsheviks saw themselves as now obliged to address a community whose nationalist demands should not, in principle, be worthy of the interest of a “conscious proletarian”.¹⁹ Volodymyr Zatonsky, a prominent member of the Party’s local branch, explained that “for the soviets, and thus for the parties of the urban proletariat, both the Bolsheviks and the Menshe­viks, Ukraine as such did not exist, because it did not exist for a worker of the city.”²⁰ However, the 1917 revolution in Ukraine had not only been the preserve of the urban workforce, but an expression of political agency by peasantry who were largely Ukrainian. Often wearing the uniform of a soldier, the peasants suddenly emerged from their perceived social obscurity and invaded the cities, irritating the bearers of imperial Russian culture, both socialists and monar­chists, who perceived their language as ugly, their culture backward, and their claims pretentious.

However, any political force seriously considering victory in the ongoing regional power struggle could no longer ignore them. The Bolshevik commit­tee of Kyiv even attempted to communicate for the first time in Ukrainian, before the militants realized that only three of them actually knew the lan­guage, a state of affairs that certainly gave “a bad impression” and prevented them from engaging with “the masses”²¹ as they sought other strategies that could help them “pull” the Ukrainian population “out of the clutches of the Cen­tral Rada”.²² They subsequently came to the conclusion that uniting Bolshe­vik activists and soviets from the south, east, and north of Ukraine, effectively acknowledging the unified territorial limits of Ukrainian autonomy, should be the first step in counteracting the competing political project of the Rada and establish Soviet Russian control over the region. This necessity led activists from the Kyiv RSDLP(b), who considered themselves, above all, “Russian social democrats, from the social democratic party of Russia”²³, to see for the first time the entire Ukrainian ethnic lands as a common political space and cultur­ally coherent whole.

Soviet Ukraine:

An Antidote to Nationalism or a Reactionary Fantasy?

Following a failed attempt at a coup against the First All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets, the Bolsheviks were chased out of Kyiv by the Central Rada and its military. They subsequently retreated eastwards to Kharkiv, seeking the pro­tection and support of their party comrades who had a much stronger base in this industrial city and could therefore count on the support of the working class, which was more numerous than in Kyiv. The newcomers wasted no time in seeking to convince their comrades to unite and beat the Central Rada at its own game. Under their influence, the Congress of Soviets in Kharkiv, initially conceived as a regional council but promptly reclassified to “All-Ukrainian”, de­clared on December 12,1917 the creation of a Soviet Ukraine. Tellingly, the name of this state was identical to the one chosen by the Rada: the People's Republic of Ukraine. Concerning territorial claims, the principle was equally clear: “In or­der to nip in the bud the criminal policy of the Central Rada, which had dared to act in the name of the working masses of Ukraine, the Congress of Soviets considered necessary to assume complete state power in the People's Republic of Ukraine”.²⁴ Thus, the aim was to substitute Soviet Ukraine for that currently under the rule of the Central Rada. However, by proclaiming “their” Ukraine for purely strategic reasons, the Bolsheviks had inadvertently increased the per­ceived legitimacy of the Ukrainian nation-state idea as it was defined by the national movement, including in its territorial dimension.

Nevertheless, from 1917 to 1922, the party still had several members, if not the majority, for whom “to create Ukraine, even the Soviet one” would be “a re­actionary decision”.²⁵ According to the Bolshevik leadership, to give a national form to a state would only mean a “return to the distant past”.²⁶ Founding a re­public based solely on the criterion of its relevance within a Marxist economic framework, by contrast, would be rational and therefore progressive. The So­viet Republic of Donets-Kryvyi Rih²⁷ was a typical example of this approach. Proclaimed by the Bolsheviks in eastern Ukraine in February 1918, it was sup­posed to be the embodiment of this form of future state organization. By cre­ating an “economic” and not a national republic, Bolshevik militants were con­vinced that they were defending a truly Marxist vision of the world and of his­tory. The founders of the Donets-Kryvyi Rih Republic even justified their de­sire to separate the region from Soviet Ukraine in order to join Soviet Russia as indicative of the need to put the resources of Donbas at the service of the “industrial centers of the North”, Petrograd and Moscow.²⁸ In contrast, the ex­istence of a Ukrainian republic, even a soviet one, was perceived as a harmful idea that risked breaking the unity of the economic and cultural bloc inherited from the tsarist era. “We want to join the whole country”,²⁹ insisted the leader of Donets-Kryvyi Rih, Fyodor Sergeev, implying that the whole country was, in essence, the former Romanov Empire and that it was necessary to preserve the integrity of this industrial region as part of the Russian imperial core.

Ultimately, Kyiv Bolsheviks who had found themselves confronting a pow­erful and organized national movement had begun, in spite of themselves, to see Ukraine as a singular polity. This was not the case for their counterparts in Kharkiv, who faced less direct confrontation from the Ukrainian peasantry while benefiting from the more substantial support of a Russian and Russified workforce. As a result, their respective mental maps did not have to undergo the same process of transformation and cultural realignment. Serafima Hop- ner, an RSDLP(b) activist in Katerynoslav (now Dnipro), noted that her organi­zation “never recalled” that it was even operating on the territory of Ukraine, perceiving it simply as “the South of Russia”. She had subsequently deplored this “most serious political omission” by her party, namely “the ignorance, or rather the complete oblivion regarding the national question”, combined with its disregard of peasantry.³⁰ This confession is symptomatic of the huge impe­rial blind spot: the two sections of the population whom the Bolsheviks “for­got” when seeking to establish their authority were the same ones whom the former empire had treated as colonized subjects - the peasants and the non­Russians. As progressive as they were in their rhetoric, the Bolsheviks failed to perceive these groups as active subjects instead of objects to be acted upon. By refusing to consider the reality of the peasantry’s colonial oppression by the urban-based imperial authorities, which in the Ukrainian case also meant the oppression of an indigenous culture by an imperial one, the Bolsheviks were perpetuating these structural inequalities. Except for a brief period during the mid-1920s, this specific type of “internal” colonialism would remain the persis­tent feature of Soviet internal politics.

Did Lenin Create Ukraine?

Independent Ukraine was proclaimed on January 22,1918 by the Central Rada in the context of an armed confrontation with Soviet Russia. Lenin himself had recognized this independence under pressure from Imperial Germany and the other Central Powers, with whom he had recently negotiated a peace agreement at Brest-Litovsk. One of the treaty’s key provisions had been the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Ukrainian territory along with the abandon­ment of Russia’s existing territorial claims. In this context, the project of a Soviet Ukraine put forward by the Kyiv Bolsheviks finally found support from the new Russian government, which relocated from Petrograd to Moscow in March 1918. The independence of Soviet Ukraine, which included Kyiv, as well as Kharkiv and Odesa, was proclaimed two weeks after the signing of the peace agreement and gave the local Bolsheviks the opportunity to oppose the armed forces of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Central Rada without Soviet Russia being viewed as responsible for their actions. However, the question remains as to why, long after the military defeat of the Ukrainian national forces, the Soviet authorities continued to support the concept of a unitary Ukraine while excluding any possibility for a partition of the Ukrainian political space?

After numerous military defeats, in which the hostility of the local Ukrainian populace played a determining role, the RSDLP(b) became con­scious of the power of its social and national aspirations. It soon became apparent that it was not only the mythical petliurists³¹ but large sectors of the population who were willing to take up arms for the Ukrainian national idea. The Bolsheviks had thus begun to understand that a minimum of respect for Ukrainian sovereignty was not only a useful tool for neutralizing the influence of local nationalists, but a sine qua non for the survival of Soviet power, which continued to hold only a precarious sense of legitimacy in those former impe­rial peripheries where the authority of the central state remained synonymous with colonial oppression. In this respect, the memories of Georgy Lapchynsky are evocative:

For a longtime, even after the proclamation of Ukraine as a soviet republic, some Bolsheviks continued to be followers of a ‘theory’ according to which a Ukrainian state was a‘fiction’ and aimed only at paralyzing the nationalist and petliurist feelings of the petty bourgeoisie. This ‘pseudo-international­ism’ persisted and was in fact a disguise for Great Russian chauvinism. But no one ever dared to go back and openly oppose the existence of Ukraine as a separate entity.³²

Thus, even the most intransigent “internationalists” abandoned the idea of par­titioning the Ukrainian political space. Instead, they embraced the political map of Ukraine articulated by the Ukrainian national movement; from this point of view, Ukraine consisted of the ethnically Ukrainian lands of which the Donbas was obviously part. By making a concession to the stato-national con­ception that wanted to match the nation with its territory de jure, the Bolshe­viks found a way to preserve the de facto integrity of the former Russian Empire while also reinforcing their ability to undertake centralized decision-making, guaranteeing the absolute political supremacy of party. It was not therefore the Bolsheviks who “invented” Ukraine: since the end of 1917, Ukraine had imposed itself upon them as a new political reality, including in its territorial dimen­sions.

Notes

1 Address by the President of the Russian Federation, 21.02.2022, Krem- lin.ru: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67828.

2 Donbas is a coal basin in eastern Ukraine, a primarily economic region. The use of this term by political actors is often abused and is most often

intended to designate the territory of the Ukrainian oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk.

For example: Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union; Smith, The Bolsheviks and the National Question; Suny, and Martin (eds.) AState of Nations; Martin, The affirmative action empire; Hirsch, Empire of Nations; Smith, Red Nations. Friedgut, Iuzovka and Revolution; Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror in the Don­bas.

Palko, and Ardeleanu, Making Ukraine.

Ibid; Rindlisbacher, “From space to Territory”.

Iefimenko, “Vyznachenniakordonu”; Sluzhyns^,ka, “Formuvanniaukralns'ko- rosiis^,koho kordonu”.

Little Russia was a political and geographical concept, referring mostly to a territory of former Cossack Hetmanate and more generally to the ter­ritory and population of modern-day Ukraine. Seen as one of the con­stituent and subordinate parts of the triune Russian nationality, a Little Russian identity was opposed to Ukrainian identity that insisted on the national distinctiveness of Ukrainians and their equality with Russians. Bilenky, RomanticNationalisminEasternEurope, p. 81.

The governors-general had extraordinary powers, thus compensating for the weakness of the bureaucratic apparatus on the ground. This form of administration was aimed at consolidating tsarist power in the annexed territories.

Miller, “The Romanov Empire and the Russian Nation”, p. 346.

Among the principles that will guide its work, the provisional government indicates “the abolition of all restrictions based on class, religion or na­tionality”. See Izvestiia, March 16,1917. It should be noted that the teaching and publication and Ukrainian language had been prohibited until then. Verstiuk, Ukrains'kyi natsional'no-vyzvol'nyirukh, pp. 148-154.

Krawchenko, Social Change and National Consciousness, pp. 1-44.

The borders of Ukrainian autonomy claimed by the Ukrainian national movement follow pre-existing administrative boundaries - those of the provinces, even though they were drawn by the tsarist administration in the last century without really taking into account the ethnic composition of the population. For example, Ukrainian peasants constituted the ma­jority of the population in some districts of the neighboring provinces of Voronezh, Kursk or even Grodno. In perspective, referendums were to be held to let the local population choose whether to join the Ukrainian au­tonomy or to keep the old administrative divisions. On the other hand, the Central Rada claimed only the mainland part of the Tavria province, considering the Crimean Peninsula as an ethnic territory of the Crimean Tatars, potential allies in the struggle for national emancipation of the non-Russian peoples of the empire.

Heorhii Lapchyns^,kyi, “Z pershykh dniv vseukrams^,koi' radians^,koι' vlady,” Litopysrevoliutsii, 5-6 (1927), pp. 48-49.

“Oblastnoi s”ezd RSDRP(b). ² Vseukrainskoe soveshchanie bol^,shevikov. Protokoly,” Letopis'revoliutsii 5 (1926), p.76.

Zatonslcyi, Volodymyr. “Uryvky zi spohadiv pro u,krains^,ku revoliutsiiu,” Litopysrevoliutsii 4 (1929), p. 141.

Lapchyns,kyi, “Z pershykh dniv”, p. 49.

Zatons,kyi, “Uryvky zi spohadiv”, p. 140.

Lapchyns,kyi, “Z pershykh dniv”, p. 62.

Proletarskaia mysl', November 9,1917.

Lapchyns,kyi, “Z pershykh dniv”, p. 48.

Zamkovoi, Valentin et al. Bolshevistskie organizatsii Ukrainy v period us- tanovleniia i ukrepleniia Sovetskoi vlasti (noiabr' 1917-aprel 1918 gg.): sbornik dokumentov (Kyiv: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury USSR, 1962), p. 21.

Zatons,kyi, “Uryvky zi spohadiv”, p. 163.

Donetskii proletarii, January 31,1918.

I translated Donetsko-Krivorozhskaia Respublika as the Donets-Kryvyi Rih Republic (and not as Donetsk-Kryvyi Rih). The adjective “donetskii” here refers to the region of the Donets River basin, not to the city of Donetsk. Myshkis, Khaia. “Materialy o Donetsko-Krivorozhskoi Respublike,” Letopis'revoliutsii 3 (1928), p. 256.

Donetskiiproletarii, January 31,1918.

Serafima Gopner, "BoPshevistskaia organizatsiia nakanune i v pervyi pe­riod fevral'skoi revoliutsii v Ekaterinoslave,” Letopis' Revoliutsii 2 (1927), pp. 28-29.

Symon Petliura - Commander-in-Chief of the Army and President of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (1918-1920), opponent of the RedArmy dur­ing the Civil War.

Lapchyns,kyi, “Z pershykh dniv”, p. 51.

Selected Bibliography

Bilenky, Serhiy. Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe: Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian Political Imaginations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).

Friedgut, Theodore H. Iuzovka and Revolution, Volume II: Politics and Revolution in Russia’s Donbass, 1869-1924 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

Hirsch, Francine. Empire of Nations. Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).

Iefimenko, Hennadii. “Vyznachennia kordonu mizh USRR ta RSFRR (1917-1920)”. In: Problemy istoril UkraIny: fakty, sudzhennia, poshuky 20 (2011): 135-176.

Krawchenko, Bohdan. Social Change and National Consciousness in Twentieth-Cen­tury Ukraine (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1985).

Kuromiya, Hiroaki. Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-Russian Border­land, 1870s- 1990s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)

Martin, Terry. TheAffirmativeAction Empire. Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).

Miller, Alexei. “The Romanov Empire and the Russian Nation”. In: Berger, Stephan/Alexei Miller (eds.) Nationalizing Empires (Budapest-New York: Central European University Press, 2015).

Palko, Olena, and ConstantinArdeleanu (eds.) Making Ukraine. Negotiating, Con­testing and Drawing the Borders in the Twentieth Century (Montreal; Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022)

Pipes, Richard. The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964)

Rindlisbacher, Stephan. “From Space to Territory: Negotiating the Russo- Ukrainian Border, 1919-1928,” Revolutionary Russia 31:1 (2018): 86-106.

Sluzhyns^,ka, Ivanna. “Formuvannia ukraι'ns^,ko-rosiis^,koho kordonu: dyskusil i politychni rishennia 20-kh rokiv XX stolittia,” in Smolii, Valerii (ed.), Re- hional'naia istoriia UkraIny. Zbirnyk naukovykh statei, 7 (2013): 115-126 (Kyiv: Instytut istoril Ukrainy NAN UkraIny, 2013).

Smith, Jeremy. The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917-1923 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).

Smith, Jeremy. Red Nations: The Nationalities Experience in and after the USSR (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Suny, Ronald Grigor, and Terry Martin. A State of Nations: Empire and Nation­Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Verstiuk, Volodymyr et al. (eds.) Ukramskyi natsional'no-vyzvol'nyi rukh.

Berezen-Iystopad 1917 roku: Dokumenty i materialy (Kyiv: Vydavnytstvo imeni OlenyTelihy, 2003).