Introduction: Ukraine in Revolution, 1917–1922

Thank you to Harriet Murav for inviting me to organize this forum, and for her patience as it has developed. Thank you to my forum contributors for their patience, and we all thank our anonymous reviewer, Harriet Murav's comments on our contributions, and our multiple interlocutors who read our pieces.

The years 2017–2022 mark the centennial of war, revolution, and state-making and unmaking across Eurasia. Yet the years 1917–1922 unfolded differently across the collapsing empires. Kyiv's Central Rada, the basmachi rebellions in Central Asia, the Menshevik experiment in Georgia, and the sudden existence of Poland (never mind leftist uprisings in Hungary and in Germany) all emerged from the vacuum of power in Petrograd that inspired and catalyzed social, political, and cultural movements. In Ukraine, in particular, the story of revolution is one of war and multiple and competing political, social, and national projects.

This forum aims to address this period in Ukraine, but the question of names poses an initial challenge. The region under investigation is Ukraine—or rather, the southwest provinces of the Russian Empire that eventually became Soviet Ukraine. One might also focus on the eastern provinces of Austrian Galicia, however, which experienced the Polish-Ukrainian war and became part of independent Poland. The competing projects of the region, after all, crossed imperial boundaries. The specification of chronology is equally as challenging. All four forum contributions interrogate the term “Russian Revolution,” attempting to pay attention to the entire “revolutionary” period: World War I, the collapse of the tsarist empire, and the ensuing “civil war,” which encompasses the Polish-Bolshevik war, the Polish-Ukrainian war, violence between the armies of nationalists, Bolsheviks, Symon Petliura, Anton Denikin, peasants and anarchists, and the emergence of new states, in particular independent Poland and Soviet Ukraine.

The multiple histories of this region are vast, overlapping, and often not studied together: The experience of the Jews¹; the story of villages and peasants²; the vagaries of nationalism and nation-building³; the cases of Donbas, Odesa, and peripheral cities that at times were central⁴; the history of the wars themselves⁵; and the geopolitical and diplomatic dimension.⁶ This forum cannot do everything, but all of the forum's contributions put the “Ukraine” story in larger context,...