During the revolutionary years of 1917–21, the Ukrainian provinces of the former Russian Empire experienced a kaleidoscope of regime changes, social and ethnic violence, pogroms, and civil wars. The spectrum of competing political projects included a number of Ukrainian statehoods (from socialist to conservative), the Bolsheviks (both Russian and local), the Russian Whites, a variety of local warlords, as well as the German, Austrian, and Polish troops invited by various local governments. How did all those actors strive to explain their aims and actions to the civilian population? How did an “information war” look like a hundred years ago in a post-imperial society with rather limited experience in mass politics and rather low literacy? This is a poorly-researched issue and the main topic of Stephen Velychenko's book.
Velychenko took pains to bring to the surface a survey of printed-text propaganda produced by Ukrainian states and political parties, the Bolsheviks, and anti-Bolshevik warlords (except for probably the biggest of them—Nestor Makhno and his semi-anarchist movement in southern Ukraine). The main sources are collected in two Kyiv state archives, and Velychenko is reasonably cautious, saying that his book “is necessary based on an illustrative and not representative sample and should be regarded as an initial survey of the subject” (5). He also rightly reminds his readers that the conflict in revolutionary Ukraine included more than two sides (192).
By comparing different political actors’ usage of propaganda tools, Velychenko comes to interesting conclusions. For instance, that the conservative Ukrainian State headed by the former Russian general Pavlo Skoropads΄kyi “produced almost no printed propaganda” (51), and “the Hetman's attempt to restore landowners discredited the Ukrainian State, which as an entity was too Russian for Ukrainians and too Ukrainian for Russians” (207). Another of his conclusions is that the Bolsheviks, if compared to their Ukrainian rivals, “demanded a much greater range of items from their civilian populations” (186) and much more often threatened them with penalties for disobedience. Ukrainian parties, on the other hand, “rarely used Russian to promulgate the national message” (189), and, unlike the Bolsheviks, “did not have a well-controlled propaganda organization” (199).
Velychenko pays special attention to the usage of “Ukrainian” as both an adjective and a noun in Ukrainian parties’ publications, and the Bolsheviks’ choice in favor of such phrases as “workers of Ukraine,” and “revolution in Ukraine” (106, 147, 151). In this response, a missing comparison to the Russian Whites’ propaganda could be of special interest. No less relevant could be a discussion of the Bolsheviks’ selection of words to define “Ukraine,” as well as Lenin's conscious choice in favor of the term “Ukraine” instead of “Little Russia” already during the First World War when it was rather rare in Russian political thought.
The book depicts a war of ideas and definitions in the propaganda texts. The Ukrainian socialist governments presented the Bolsheviks as an “imperial foreign power” and a purely Russian party, while the Bolsheviks spoke of the Central Rada and the UNR as “bourgeois” institutions, and the Red Army forces as an actor of class and not national war (157). Such topics as the Jewish question, the Polish question (particularly in the context of the Petliura-Piłsudski agreement and their joint offensive to Kyiv in spring 1920), and the anti-Makhno Bolshevik propaganda are also analyzed. In the latest case, it is a pity that Makhno propaganda itself is not presented in the book. In the first case—the Jewish topic—Velychenko thoroughly analyzes the dynamics of its propaganda usage by the Ukrainian parties and the Bolsheviks, and concludes that for understanding of the anti-Jewish violence “situational issues” are more significant that printed propaganda (190).
Concluding his research, Velychenko points out that “no one should either exaggerate Ukrainian failures or overestimate Bolshevik successes in the war of words. In the longer term, circumstances were crucial in determining how influential messages would be among audiences” (208).
Velychenko's book is a valuable contribution to the multi-faceted research on the Ukrainian revolutions. It could be productively used for comparisons of the Ukrainian situation with the other “national peripheries” of the former Russian Empire, for transnational study of propaganda in inter-war Europe, or for in-depth local studies of particular Ukrainian cities, towns, and villages during the revolutionary turmoil.
