BOROT´BISM: A CHAPTER IN THE HISTORY OF THE

UKRAINIAN REVOLUTION. By Ivan Maistrenko. Ed. Chris

Ford. Trans. George S. N. Luckyj with the assistance of Ivan
L. Rudnytsky. 2nd rev. ed. Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and
Society 61. Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2019. 407 pp., notes,
index. ISBN (paper) 978-3-8382-1107-7.

In the spring of 1918 landowners and industrialists with German back-

ing deposed the Central Rada and made General Pavlo Skoropads´kyi
Hetman of the Ukrainian State. The majority parties, the Ukrainian
Social Democratic Labor Party (SDs) and Ukrainian Party of Socialist
Revolutionaries (SRs) rejected Skoropads´kyi. They refused to join his
government and adopted the role of political opposition. Historians now
argue that had these moderate socialists joined the government and
not later overthrown it, Skoropads´kyi and the Ukrainian State could
142 Harvard Ukrainian stUdies 38, no. 1–2

have survived the revolutionary years as did Finland under Marshal

Mannerheim. Be that as it may, left-wing Ukrainian SRs formed the
Borotbist party in the summer of 1918, and it was they, not the left
wing of the local branch of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party
(Bolsheviks organized in the Communist Party of Ukraine—CPU),
who were the main organizers of peasant revolts that summer. After
the moderate-socialist Directory overthrew the Hetman in Decem-
ber 1918, the Borotbists refused to recognize it. They allied with the
Bolsheviks against the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR), aiming to
create instead a Bolshevik Ukraine in a federal relationship with the
Bolshevik Russian republic. Their partisan units fought primarily the
Whites. They sometimes joined and at other times fought UNR troops.
Maistrenko mentions only one instance of their fighting against Red
troops. In 1920 they dissolved their party and some entered the CPU
as individual members.
In Ukrainian historiography, émigré moderate socialists and conser-
vatives argued that Ukrainian radicals helped the Russian Bolsheviks
destroy Ukrainian independence in the name of Marxist chimeras.
The radical Ukrainian interpretation of the revolution, developed by
men like Matvii Iavors´kyi during the 1920s, described the Ukrainian
workers’ and peasants’ parties as making a Ukrainian revolution that
resulted in the USSR of NEP and indigenization (korenizatsiia), which
represented the realization of their national and social demands. By
1933 that interpretation had disappeared, together with its creators,
into closed archival collections, the hell of the Gulag, and the horror of
the Famine—which émigrés took as vindication of their interpretation.
In the subsequent official Bolshevik narrative, there was no Ukrainian
Revolution. It explained that the workers and peasants of Ukraine, led
by Russian Bolsheviks and workers, made а revolution in Ukraine that
created the USSR of Five-Year Plans, collective farms, and the “leading
role of the Great Russian people.” This interpretation linked Ukrainian
political independence from Russia exclusively to foreign plots and
cabals. After 1991, historians in Ukraine interpreted events of the rev-
olutionary years from the perspective of the moderate-socialist and
conservative paradigms that had been preserved abroad. The prevailing
consensus now is that a Ukrainian attempt at national independence
was destroyed by Russian Bolshevik invasions. How, within this par-
adigm, historians interpret national and social issues and the role of
political groups, how much space they devote to which parties, and
how they interpret the relationship between ethnic identity and political
loyalty, depends on them and not on governmental diktat—contrary to
what is implied in the introduction (p. 23).
 reviews 143

Some critics, writing from the perspective of Marxism, and others

from the perspective of faulty but fashionable Anglo-American liter-
ary-critical relativist postmodernism, regard this postindependence
focus based on national history and the importance of independence
as dated or wrong. They do not seem to realize that historians of all
countries from America to Ireland, as well as Asian and African coun-
tries after 1945, did exactly the same after independence. Interpretive
methodological evolution, for good or bad, will inevitably happen in
Ukraine as it did in other countries where relativist-postmodernist lit-
erary criticism appeared. The Russian invasion of 2014 and the ongoing
war will, however, slow this development.
This book was first published in 1954. It was the first work in English
explaining the evolution of the Ukrainian national movement and show-
ing that it was primarily a left-wing phenomenon whose activists made
an important contribution to debates about nationalism and social-
ism—a fact that many of those who today call themselves left-wing
still do not realize. Maistrenko showed that Ukrainian socialists, who
tied social liberation to national independence, were like socialists in
all other countries subjected to foreign empires. His was the second
academic English-language work on revolutions in Ukraine, alongside
John Reshetar’s The Ukrainian Revolution (1952). It complemented
Richard Pipes’s Formation of the USSR (1954), which, for the first time
in English, described events in non-Russian territories of the tsarist
empire and showed that Bolshevik nationalities policy was more rheto-
ric than reality. After 1991, none of the Ukrainian-language publications
about the Borotbists based on previously closed archives significantly
change or refute Maistrenko’s work. Especially important is fond 57 of
the old party archive (today the Central State Archive of Public Asso-
ciations [Tsentral´nyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Hromads´kykh Obi’ednan´,
TsDAHO]). One such finding confirms Maistrenko’s assessment that
as of March 1920, when its leaders dissolved it, the Borotbist party had
fifteen thousand mostly Ukrainian members. This was four thousand
more than the CPU. A second finding shows that regardless of the
promises of Russian leaders who forced the Borotbists to dissolve, by
1922 they excluded from the CPU all except 118 of them.
By 1939 Stalin had had all Borotbists living in Ukraine shot. In his
memoirs, Maistrenko attributes his own survival to his Jewish NKVD
interrogator who in 1937 had him sentenced to prison, not death. Before
he joined the Bolsheviks, this interrogator had been an anarchist in
Makhno’s army and, like his prisoner, had fought the Whites. Mai-
strenko knew that Lenin had decided to dissolve the Borotbist party in
May 1919 (p. 213), but he did not, and could not have known, that the
144 Harvard Ukrainian stUdies 38, no. 1–2

previous month Lenin had dismissed the Borotbists as “abominations/

little shits [merzavtsy]” because the phrase was in a secret telegram
unpublished until 1950. Nor could he have known that the Russian
Communist Party’s (RCP’s) central committee formally decided to
dissolve the party already in November 1919, not in February 1920,
when it also ordered Comintern leaders to reject the Borotbists’ mem-
bership application. Neither Maistrenko, nor anyone else then, knew
that in February 1920, a few days after Borotbist leaders agreed to a
“total subordination [polnoe podchinenie]” to the RCP, Moscow sent
them 200,000 rubles—two things not mentioned in published public
accounts at the time about the dissolution of the party. Accordingly,
his claim that Borotbists never “renounced the idea of independence”
(p. 266) and that Shums´kyi’s fall in 1926 was the Ukrainian commu-
nists’ “first serious setback” (p. 273) are wrong. The latter was rather
the second such setback. Finally, historians today have the statistical
evidence unavailable in the 1950s indicating that the CPU before 1923
was comprised overwhelmingly of Russians, Russified apostate Jews,
and Russified Ukrainians. Openly admitted by party leaders like Niko-
lai Bukharin, Iakov Iakovlev, and Volodymyr Zatons´kyi at the time,
Maistrenko does not elaborate on this fact or its implications. He only
mentions that Bolshevik leaders considered Ukraine the invention of
some intellectuals (p. 214). He makes passing reference to “Red impe-
rialism,” “philistine Russian ‘colonizers’ in Ukraine,” and the “victory of
philistinism” within the CPU (pp. 231, 268). He does not use the phrase
Russian Great-power chauvinist faction.
Originally written in Ukrainian, the book has not been published in
Ukraine. This second edition includes an extended, in places polemical
introduction, containing some dubious assertions, on revolutionary
Ukraine. It summarizes the socioeconomic background and charac-
terizes tsarist Ukrainian lands as a colony. In as many words (p. 59), it
shows how reaction to Bolshevik invasion turned the Ukrainian social
revolution into a war of national liberation. The book also contains
the author’s biography, his account of events in his native district of
Kobeliaky, translations of three documents, short biographies of the
major Borotbist leaders, and a summary of official Soviet reactions to
the book. Maistrenko’s Borot´bism focuses on political and intellectual
history and will remain the standard reliable English-language account
of the subject until a monograph appears that incorporates post-1991
research. As noted in the foreword, the book illustrates how revolution-
ary events in Ukraine differed from those in Russia, and that by 1921 the
Bolsheviks ruled Ukraine because they had militarily conquered it. It
is a book all those interested in nationalism, Marxism, and revolution
 reviews 145

should read. Whether this will include those who consider themselves
leftists yet support Vladimir Putin’s neoimperialist revanchism and his
2014 invasion of Ukraine is moot.

Stephen Velychenko
University of Toronto