In a 1970 lecture at the University of Alberta, the Ukrainian Canadian historian Ivan Lysiak Rudnytsky elaborated his view of Soviet Ukraine as “the embodiment of a compromise between Ukrainian nationalism and Russian centralism” (Rudnytsky 1987, 464). Arguing against a then-common view that saw Ukraine as a Soviet Texas or Pennsylvania—a mere administrative subdivision of a monolithic Soviet Union—he advocated taking the Ukrainian SSR seriously as a historical formation. Even with all of the real limits on its sovereignty, he argued, the republic had a seat at the United Nations, the formal right to secession, and, after its expansion in World War II, borders that included all Ukrainian ethnic territories. In an age of decolonization, he provocatively asserted, the Soviet Union was an “anachronism” and relations between Soviet Ukraine and the Union might change (Rudnytsky Reference Rudnytsky1987).

By pointing out the tensions inherent in the Soviet federal structure, Rudnytsky was swimming against the influential “modernization” paradigm of Soviet history, which saw the Soviet Union as a modernizing state in which national, religious, and regional identities were being minimized (von Hagen 2004). In the subsequent decades and particularly after 1991, historians of the Soviet Union have addressed this oversight and greatly expanded our knowledge of the non-Russian republics. Soviet indigenization policies, including the creation of national republics with state apparatuses and Communist parties, have been recast as a form of nation building (Slezkine Reference Slezkine1994; Martin Reference Martin2001; Suny and Martin Reference Suny and Martin2001; Hirsch Reference Hirsch2005). In response to demand for works on Ukrainian topics, historians have written new synthetic histories of Ukraine, adopting various definitions of what constitutes Ukrainian history.

In the field of Ukrainian national history, two scholars published major textbooks covering the entire course of Ukrainian history around the time of the end of Communism in Eastern Europe. They gave opposing answers to the question of how Ukrainian history can be written. Orest Subtelny’s Ukraine: A History told the story of the Ukrainian people (Subtelny Reference Subtelny1988), while Paul Robert Magocsi’s A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its People took a territorial approach that explicitly included the non-Ukrainian peoples who had lived on the territory of what became Ukraine in the 20th century (Magocsi Reference Magocsi1996).

One of the key interpretive questions, nevertheless, remained unanswered: what was the Soviet Ukrainian state, how did it evolve, and what were the long-term consequences of its existence? Historians have mostly paid attention to its origins, describing it as a “compromise” between Russian imperialism and Ukrainian nationalism, as Rudnytsky had it, a concession to Ukrainian aspirations necessitated by power politics (Pipes Reference Pipes1997), and a laboratory for an evolving Soviet “affirmative action” policy toward the nationalities (Martin Reference Martin2001). Stanislav Kulchytsky explained the nature of the Soviet Ukrainian state by contrasting the regime’s formal goal in creating it—destroying the Ukrainian People’s Republic—with the national content given to it over time by the Ukrainian people (Kulchytsky Reference Kulchytsky2003). Other approaches point to the centrality of war in creating states and patriotisms among Ukrainians (Weiner Reference Weiner2001; Liber Reference Liber2016) and to the importance of Ukraine’s proximity to Eastern Europe in making Ukrainians feel more Soviet (Wojnowski Reference Wojnowski2017).

We think that examining the Soviet Ukrainian state in relation to the events and agendas of the 1917–1920 Ukrainian Revolution makes a great deal of sense, especially over the long term. Specifically, our contention is that the two revolutions—social and national—should be studied in tandem. How did the social, political, and national demands unleashed by imperial collapse intersect and influence the course of events? We follow the recent historiographical trend away from seeing the national republics as mere “concessions” to or “compromises” with non-Russian groups. Once they embraced the policy of indigenization, the Bolsheviks were quite serious about forging national identities for their peoples from the Baltic to the Pacific (Edgar Reference Edgar, Adrienne Lynn2004; Yekelchyk Reference Yekelchyk2004; Hirsch Reference Hirsch2005; Khalid Reference Khalid2015; Cameron Reference Cameron2018).

Moreover, rather than positioning the phenomenon on a Ukrainian-Russian axis, we think it is more productive to analyze the Ukrainian SSR in relation to its internal “other:” the nation-state vision that crystallized during the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1920 in the form of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Ukrainian State, and the Directory. To what extent did the Ukrainian SSR see itself as a successor, inheritor, or appropriator of the Ukrainian Revolution and all of its promises of cultural emancipation? Were Soviet promises of national and social liberation genuine or was the state’s existence a mere propaganda tool in the hands of the central government in Moscow? How did the Soviet Ukrainian state and its archenemies abroad view the revolutionary legacies of Ukrainian political aspirations in 1917–1920 over the long term? To what extent was the Ukrainian SSR a Ukrainian national state and what did the words “Soviet” and “national” mean for those political actors? In a nutshell, what was Ukrainian statehood?

These were the questions around which we decided to organize a conference at the University of Toronto in March 2017, almost 100 years after these revolutionary events. The articles in this special issue were initially presented as papers at this conference, called “A Century of Ukrainian Statehoods: 1917 and Beyond.” The goal was to explore the long-term consequences of the revolutionary events of 1917–1920 for Ukrainian state building over the course of the 20th century. Because the conference would take place during the centenary of 1917, we hoped this conference would both commemorate the Ukrainian Revolution and ensure that it was not marginalized in scholarly discourse about the Russian Revolution.

While the topic of Ukrainian statehood was at the center of our scholarly conference, we never pretended to carry out a comprehensive analysis of all of the subsequent and sometimes simultaneous attempts at building a Ukrainian state. We were rather looking for “clues” (Ginzburg Reference Ginzburg1979) able to reveal the reflections on the relationship between the two terms, state and nation. This special issue thus focuses on two issues: Soviet Ukrainian culture and the role of diasporas. Put another way, we evaluate the internal and external consequences of Ukrainian statehood in a Soviet guise.

Ukrainian history has often been understood as that of a stateless people. From 1917 onward, however, Ukrainian statehood was declared and states claiming to represent Ukrainian political aspirations have existed up to the present day. Propaganda claimed the Soviet Ukrainian republic was the fulfillment of Ukrainian demands for statehood and promised that Ukrainian culture would be developed under Soviet auspices. The Soviet state’s intense violence, its origins in war, and the sectarian nature of its politics created large waves of émigrés, who often brought their politics with them to their new countries. While many of the Russian conservative and revolutionary activists looked at the Soviet Union as a whole, Ukrainian activists concerned themselves with events in their homeland. The existence of Soviet Ukraine posed a challenge to their political ambitions. In the 1920s, it was not immediately clear what kind of conditions the Ukrainian SSR would provide for the development of Ukrainian culture, apart from its clear privileging of post-revolutionary and left-wing culture.

Many if not all of the Ukrainian émigrés traced their political orientations to the non-Soviet Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1920 and their choice of whether to engage or reject the Ukrainian SSR was a central concern. Christopher Gilley’s article in this special issue assesses the relationship between Bolsheviks and various left-wing émigrés, including activists in Western Ukraine. He argues that Soviet Ukraine exerted an attraction over left-wing Ukrainian nationalists, because it offered them the promises of national and social liberation. This was particularly true during the Civil War and into the 1920s, although its appeal to these émigré groups rapidly declined by the 1930s.

On the internal front, Mayhill Fowler, analyzes Soviet Ukrainian state theatre and argues that the category of Soviet Ukrainian culture was treated with utmost seriousness during the 1920s. Intellectuals and artists like Mykola Kulish were trying to make sense of the transformations produced by the policy of Ukrainization, and the success of Myna Mazailo proves that the public was also conscious of and somewhat engaged in the debate.

These developments were violently halted by Stalin’s revolution from above. On the one hand, collectivization decimated the Ukrainian population through the man-made famine known as the Holodomor. On the other hand, the political and cultural élite of the country either fell victim to repressions or tragically realized the impossibility of developing their projects in Stalin’s USSR. The most prominent examples of the latter include the writer Mykola Khvyl’ovyi and the Old Bolshevik Mykola Skrypnyk, both of whom committed suicide in 1933. In a classic exposition of early Soviet Ukrainian politics, Hryhory Kostiuk portrayed the Stalin revolution as being aimed directly against the Ukrainian state and party, both of which he posited were divided between Ukrainophile and Russophile orientations. Breaking Ukrainian political self-assertion was thus a key stepping stone to the consolidation of Stalin’s dictatorship (Kostiuk 1960). The rule of Pavel Postyshev represented an era of destructive retreat both on the development of Ukrainian state institutions and of national culture.

When combined with the effects of the Great Terror, the Second World War completely disrupted the institutions of the Ukrainian state. The personnel and institutions were hurriedly evacuated eastward to the Soviet interior, from which they coordinated various military, intelligence, and cultural work dedicated toward victory. Alternative state building projects like that of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists or Alfred Rosenberg’s semi-Aryan Ukrainian state were unable to hinder the construction of the colonial administrative unit of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine (Dallin Reference Dallin1957; Berkhoff Reference Berkhoff2004). The war also resulted in the expansion of Soviet Ukraine’s borders to include Western Ukraine, which necessitated the Sovietization and integration of this region into the structures of the Soviet Ukrainian state (Szporluk Reference Szporluk1975; Risch Reference Risch2011; Amar Reference Amar2015).

As time went on, and particularly after the Soviet victory in World War II and the “unification of all Ukrainian lands” under Stalin, it became clear that the Soviet Ukrainian state—absent a major new international conflict—would endure at least in the short and medium term. Stalin’s inability to deal with the new expectations of post-war Soviet society in a way other than violence only delayed much-needed reforms. Interestingly enough, the “relaunch of the Soviet project” (Fürst, Jones, and Morrissey Reference Fürst, Jones and Morrissey2008) also entailed a relaunch of the Soviet Ukrainian enterprise. Markian Dobczansky writes about how Soviet cultural memory in Kharkiv after 1953 dealt with the promises and expectations unleashed by the Soviet and Ukrainian revolutions. His contribution draws our attention to how early Soviet history was revisited during the 1950s and how Ukrainian bureaucrats attempted to imbue Soviet Ukrainian patriotism with new meanings.

The following decade would see a dramatic rise in the fortunes of the Ukrainian leadership within the party and the beginnings of another renaissance in culture. At the same time Petro Shelest’s tenure as first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine was a true turning point in the integration of Soviet Ukraine into the USSR: during this time, Ukrainian aspirations to develop their high culture, increase the use of Ukrainian in everyday life, and expand the network of Ukrainian schools began to seem like they belonged to another era. Shelest’s stance on the Ukrainian national question was due to his attempt to exploit Ukrainian nationalism to carve out a space of political autonomy and perhaps even a platform of personal power (Tillett Reference Tillett1975; Shapoval Reference Shapoval2003). The unintended consequence of the Thaw’s more liberal attitude was the emergence of a new generation of Ukrainian intellectuals and artists, the so-called 1960s generation (in Ukrainian shistdesiatnyky), whose commitment to building a state at the same time genuinely Soviet and national had disruptive consequences.

With the hardening of the Cold War and the decreasing likelihood of a hot war in Europe, émigrés were forced to think about more long-term considerations. Coming to terms with this would be a long and painful process. In his contribution to this issue, Simone A. Bellezza shows how this debate played out in the Ukrainian journal Suchasnist’, arguing that by 1973 the émigré organizations’ primary strategy toward the Ukrainian SSR shifted from rejection toward engagement. The goal was to strengthen the Ukrainian character of Soviet Ukraine in line with broader human rights goals.

After the dismissal of Shelest, the Soviet leadership reacted to demands for greater autonomy for the Ukrainian SSR with repression. The new secretary, Volodymyr Shcherbyts’kyi can be characterized as a caretaker in conditions of renewed centralism, although he was sometimes also able to defend some Ukrainian interests, especially on a formal level. Throughout this period, the rhetoric of building Ukrainian culture and developing Soviet Ukraine continued pro forma, thus establishing the state as the primary locus of hopes for the broader development of Ukrainian culture as well as education in the Ukrainian language, a hope that Ukrainophile dissidents mobilized quite strongly in the run-up to independence.

Nevertheless, even under these conditions of renewed centralism, examples of strong Ukrainian national feelings could develop in unexpected places. Olga Bertelsen writes about the national meanings that late Soviet Ukrainian bureaucrats read into their service to the state, as well as the psychological needs that were met by the existence of this state. Focusing on the case of Heorhii Shevel’, the Soviet Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1970 to 1980, she argues that he embodied the Soviet and Ukrainian features of this important ministry.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the birth of an independent Ukrainian state might seem to have resolved some of the problems of building a national state. In fact, however, the unresolved tensions inherent in Soviet state building have re-emerged several times in the history of independent Ukraine, to the point of reaching tragic outcomes such as the war that today devastates the Eastern regions.

In recent years, two books have attempted to move scholarship on Ukraine to bring it more in line with transnational approaches to Ukrainian history. Serhii Plokhy’s Gates of Europe looks at Ukrainian history through the lens of its positioning on the borderlands of Europe, arguing that the civilizational frontiers that ran through Ukraine had important consequences for its history (Plokhy Reference Plokhy2015). On the other hand, Serhy Yekelchyk’s Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation argues that the history of Ukraine in the 20th century is “the story of a conceptual change from an ethnic natsiia to a political nation situated against the backdrop of unusually turbulent and explosive times” (Yekelchyk Reference Yekelchyk2007, 9).

Although this last quote might correspond more to a hope than to reality, in his survey, Yekelchyk restated the interpretive dilemma posed by Soviet statehood:

For the purposes of this essay, we might add that it also provided a central locus around which émigrés of various eras could focus their arguments about the illegitimacy of Soviet rule in Ukraine. The Soviet Ukrainian authorities, in turn, took those critiques quite seriously and responded in kind. In the Soviet political imagination, the domestic and international audiences for their messages about Soviet Ukrainian statehood were inextricably linked. We think that the incomplete and contradictory history of Ukrainian statehood goes a long way toward explaining the present state of affairs in Ukraine and that it deserves further study, of which this special issue represents a first attempt.