This article examines how the Jewish experience can change the larger picture of revolution and war in Ukraine and conventional history of “the Russian Revolution.” The case study of Kyiv's Jewish community shows that its creation as an imagined community and development in 1917 was in fact made possible by the war, which served as a catalyst for social development. The interethnic relationships in revolutionary Ukraine were built on the legacy and foundation of prewar tensions, which were reinforced by the ethnicization of politics brought by the war. The collapse of the Russian empire, the rise of nation-states, the emergence of a new order, which was neither known nor universally welcomed, pushed people to transgress old boundaries of social behavior, leading to mass violence in 1919 and 1920.

This essay discusses the Ukrainian revolution of 1917–1921 from Kyiv's perspective. It emphasizes that mainstream historiography (that is, a concentration on reconstructing political and military events combined with an elite-centered approach) has exhausted itself. In order to explain the revolutionary events and how they were experienced, new approaches are needed. This essay demonstrates the potential of focusing on “little people,” of examining the revolutionary years from a polycentric perspective, and of broadening our perception of the revolutionary epoch as a way out of World War I. The essay demonstrates how an inclusive urban Kyiv narrative with a focus on ordinary life raises a number of new research questions and provides a variety of fresh topics. It also shows how productive it can be to study “big events” while closely following the life of a city and its dwellers.

This article discusses the possible ways of conceptualizing the revolutionary and nation-building struggles in the Ukrainian lands between 1917 and 1921. The author argues that these processes, which stemmed from the collapse of two European empires, display features not easily accommodated within the traditional interpretive model of the “Russian Revolution.” In comparison, the Ukrainian concept of “national-liberation struggle” is too reductionist and teleological. The term “Ukrainian Revolution,” which was widely used by the participants of these events, is better suited for an inclusive analysis of this period that emphasizes the significance of the national factor without ignoring the others. Rather than “nationalizing” the story of the Revolution, such an approach highlights the transnational dimensions of the Ukrainian question.

Frontiers are locations of geopolitical assertion, reification, definition, and experiment, whether physical or symbolic, spatial or temporal. The papers for this special Slavic Review Forum examine important linked and parallel frontier-forming practices. These practices span the postsocialist space yet also, as several authors argue, negate that chronotopic and sociopolitical identifier. Frontier-reformulation practices include ideological constructions of emergent, yet familiar, enemies, new and refurbished commemorative rites and installations, mediated threat prediction, and discourses about undeclared wars that seem to promise to eventuate into future declared or at least named wars. As Neringa Klumbytė tells us in her introduction to this Forum, these practices both point to and produce “eventfulness.”

The war in eastern Ukraine continues to produce casualties and an ever growing number of refugees and displaced persons every day. When urban public space is dedicated to commemorating the dead who have died since the Maidan protests, the frontiers of war become inscribed in the urban landscape and in the everyday life of many Ukrainians. These commemorative spaces are an unrelenting reminder of the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine that threatens to remake political borders once again. Commemorative practices articulate new understandings of relatedness as symbolic statements that, once inscribed in public space, have the potential to affect the thinking of locals and far outlive the actual armed conflict that produced them.

This paper is programmatic: it defines the concept of “phantom borders” and describes its heuristic potential. The proposed approach positions itself between structuralist methodologies that postulate stable social and cultural regional structures and deconstructive viewpoints that reject the former, while focusing on the discursive dimension of regions. The paper takes this tension as its point of departure. Viewed from a situational perspective, phantom borders are neither to be understood as immutable structures nor as purely discursive constructions, but rather as an outcome of the interaction between three interwoven levels, which are simultaneously: 1) imagined in mental maps and discourses, 2) experienced and perceived by the respective actors, and 3) shaped by everyday practices and continuously updated and implemented. Phantom borders are context sensitive. We argue that the topic of phantom borders is not only relevant for research on eastern Europe, but also for research in “new area studies” in general.