The Ukrainian Revolution: Rethinking World War I and Revolution in Eastern Europe

In traditional historiography, the end of the First World War on the Eastern Front is associated with the “Russian Revolution,” the collapse of the Russian Empire, and the Russian “Civil War.” As a result, even though Ukraine played an important yet peripheral role in the “Russian Revolution,” the events in Ukraine are typically treated as the “mudroom” in the mansion of great Russian history. Lost in the “grand” histories of the First World War and the “Russian Revolution,” Ukraine’s history appears only in the form of short episodes that focus on unflattering events: the failed “nationalist” movement and its short-lived attempts to create an independent Ukrainian state and the violent 1919 anti-Jewish pogroms in Ukraine. This paper aims to redirect scholarly gaze toward Ukraine and place it at the center of historical analysis of the world war and revolutionary violence. As American historian Mark von Hagen noted, Ukrainian history can provide insight into “some of the most contested issues of identity formation, cultural construction and maintenance, and colonial institutions and structures.” Discussing the period of the war and revolution from the vantage point of Ukraine, this paper challenges traditional approaches of viewing the history of the region through the narrow prism of the “Russian Revolution” and the “Russian Civil War.” It illustrates the need to instead examine the history of (Eastern) Europe by studying the complexity of multilayered wars and violent encounters and exchanges in Ukraine that involved various national groups and regions within and beyond the collapsed Russian Empire. More broadly, by introducing the Ukrainian perspective on the world war and revolution, this paper will demonstrate how the history of Europe can transcend artificial academic divisions based on areas of study that have oversimplified the complex history of war and revolution in Europe.