Von Hagen, Mark (2015-2016), Wartime Occupation and Peacetime Alien Rule (Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 34. 1-4)

Wartime Occupation and Peacetime Alien Rule: "Notes and Materials" toward a(n) (Anti-)
(Post-) Colonial History of Ukraine

Author(s): Mark von Hagen
Source: Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1/4, THE FUTURE OF THE PAST: NEW
PERSPECTIVES ON UKRAINIAN HISTORY (2015-2016), pp. 153-194
Published by: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/44364491
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Harvard Ukrainian Studies 34, no. 1-4 (2015-16): 153-94.
Wartime Occupation and Peacetime Alien Rule:

"Notes and Materials" toward a(n) (Anti-) (Post-)
Colonial History of Ukraine
Mark von Hagen
This thethe
history
historyessay is of an ItUkraine.
of Ukraine. attempt
has several It hasorigins:
important to engage
firstseveral
of with important the "imperial origins: turn" first and of
all, my study of the occupation in Ukraine during World War I and
the Civil War; and second, my recent fascination with the life of a
Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary, Pavlo Khrystiuk, whose best-known
work is evoked in the subtitle of this essay,1 and who dedicated that
work to all peoples struggling under the double oppression of class
and nation. For Khrystiuk, who was a member and chronicler of the
Central Rada and later socialist governments, the Ukrainian peasantry
comprised that class and nation whose interests he saw trampled in the
first months of Bolshevik rule. Khrystiuk also offers a window into a
broader leftist critique of early Soviet state practice and ideology that
was brutally crushed in the late 1920s and early 1930s.2 Khrystiuk was
one of several former Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries and Social
Democrats who returned from exile in Central Europe to a now Soviet
Ukraine. He arrived earlier than his mentor, Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi,
taking hope from the Ukrainization policy of the Soviet leadership.
Nearly all of these former revolutionaries articulated some version of
Khrystiuk's anticolonial critique. Nearly all of them perished as a result
of Stalin's campaign of arrests and political trials against invented
Ukrainian separatist organizations and parties and against genuine
Ukrainian critics of Stalin's emerging line on the nationalities policy.3
This crushing of the Ukrainian anticolonialist left accompanied the
attacks on Ukrainian priests and party members, and the physical
destruction of millions of Ukrainian peasants. Khrystiuk himself was
sentenced to Stalin's Gulag, where he eventually perished.4 Together
154 VON HAGEN
with other suppressed "Ukr

and revolution, Khrystiuk
questions about the imper
understanding of Eastern E
nialist understanding of U
diasporas in Europe and N
What I propose to do in
and bring to Ukraine's hist
empires since the "imperial tu
Ukraine was divided betwee
during World War I; the em
national liberation had stron
was not fated to attain last
be repartitioned between
nationalizing Second Polis
resembled imperial rule. W
rule over Ukraine was supp
of the Third Reich. Ukrain
harshest policies but also
Ukraine was the site of an
made famine and terror,
in western Ukraine, was im
warfare against local nation
century Ukraine's history c
of "peacetime" colonialism
which those who opposed
To a great extent, the his
the histories of the Ukra
imperial and colonial warfa
appeared as legal internati
of independence had its im
the occupation policies of t
man-Ukrainian and Polish-U
legacies of conquest, occupa
siderable debt to my colleag
for introducing me to post
WARTIME OCCUPATION AND PEACETIME ALIEN RULE 155
Wartime Occupations and Colonialism: Russia's First Campaigns

in the Western Borderlands
As a European empire, Russia pursued colonial policies during

nineteenth century, the heyday of late European imperialism. Ma
historians would include among Russia's colonial wars the brutal c
paigns that Russian armies fought for most of the century ag
Muslim tribes in the North Caucasus. The Caucasian wars of that
century had their modern expression in the recent wars of the Soviet
Union in Afghanistan followed by Russia in Chechnya, all of which are
known for their atrocities and disregard for civilian losses. Some histo-
rians have argued that the Russian army's response to the revolutions
of 1905-7 in the empire, punitive expeditions that were particularly
brutal in the empire's peripheries, was an important change in using
such techniques to quell domestic unrest.9 Peter Holquist asserts that
the violence that the Russian army used in 1904-6 to put down wide-
spread peasant unrest and urban violence during the revolution was
in line with the practices of colonial warfare that the army had learned
over the course of the nineteenth century and in conscious imitation
of French and British imperial practices.10
The behavior of the Russian army after the outbreak of World
War I certainly illustrates the harshness of colonial war and wartime
occupations in the very first year of the campaigns in the western
borderlands that are, roughly, today's Belarus, Lithuania, Ukraine, and
Poland. Alexander Prusin has captured this harshness in what he calls
Russia's "military pogroms." In 1914-15 the Russian army initiated a
brutal campaign of persecution and forcible relocation of more than
half a million Jews to Russia proper; violent pogroms in Jewish settle-
ments accompanied Russian offensives and retreats.
For soldiers and the Cossacks, violence also became an expedient tool
to make up for hardship and supply shortages.... In fact, letting troops
go on a rampage as reward for capturing a locality has been a traditional
practice of many armies since antiquity and is known as the "tax of
violence." Therefore, the Russian officers mostly tolerated the predatory
habits of their subordinates who ran amok in Jewish residential areas.
Time and again, the modus operandi of the pogromists was almost
156 VON HAGEN
identical: a charge of some "tre

shooting at the troops from Jewi
in quick succession by plunder, r
[In October 1914] "Wild" viole
tematic persecution consistent wi
in Russia proper. The second cy
of 1915.... The Russian retreat s
High Command initiated a scorch
destruction of property along the
of the population. Conceived as a
degenerated into widespread plun
orders to "clean up" ( ochistiť ) th
burned houses and crops, blew up
roads, and forced the population
institutionalized violence, for th
official function of depriving the e
hanged Jewish "spies," looted hou
I start with the fate of the Jew

ment in the Russian Empire a
under Russian occupation durin
year of the war to the racialize
colonial administrations in Afr
ulations governing life in the P
of "othering" and legal discri
ple of colonialist thinking and
Much of Prusin's evidence comes from the wartime memoir of an
important Jewish intellectual, humanitarian, writer, and ethnographer,
S. An-ski, the pen name of Shlomo Zanvil Rapoport, who recorded
his encounters with uprooted Jews and Russian officers during these
"pogroms."12 A recent work on Rapoport's ethnographic expeditions
into the prewar Pale is titled The Jewish Dark Continent, in which the
author underscores the "racialized language of colonial exploration"
that shaped the understanding of both Rapoport and even the father
of the history of Jews in Eastern Europe, Simon Dubnow.13
Other "peoples" and ethnoreligious communities fell elsewhere
in the spectrum of colonial practices that were meant to organize the
populations of the empire along confessional and estate lines; later,
WARTIME OCCUPATION AND PEACETIME ALIEN RULE I57
along class and ethnic ones. Although the attitudes of the Ru

imperial elites toward the Ukrainian question and Ukrainian cult
differed significantly from the framework in which Jews lived
adapted, the behavior of the Russian military, political, and relig
authorities toward Ukrainian culture in occupied Galicia reveals a
hallmarks of a culture war intended to eradicate any institution
cultural presence of an alternate identity to that of the Great Ru
nation that was understood to include Ukrainians and Belarusians.
Andrii Zhuk, a leader of the wartime exile Ukrainian national organi-
zation Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, left vivid descriptions of
this culture war in his archive.14 Zhuk fled with the retreating Habsburg
armies and spent much of the war in Vienna, overseeing the publica-
tion and organizational work of the Union.
Zhuk described the Russian army's destruction of Ukrainian
institutions and even the extensive changes that were made to the
toponymy of occupied Galicia; Polish, Ukrainian, and, of course, Ger-
man street and place names were replaced with Russian ones, such
as Pushkin Street. He described this as "not just a military invasion,
but a political-cultural occupation." The war waged on religion and
language extended to the shutting of schools and the bookstore of the
Shevchenko Scientific Society; the Russian military authorities seized
the keys and arrested the store manager. Among the buildings occu-
pied by the Russian Zemstvo and Towns Relief Committee ( Zemgor ),
and the Red Cross were those belonging to shuttered Ukrainian soci-
eties, museums, and credit associations.15
He recorded the arrests of Ukrainian activists associated with
the journal Dnister and the newspaper Dilo, and the arrival and
active work of a whole panoply of Russian "aid" societies that had
long been active in supporting Russophile and Orthodox elements in
Galicia: the Galician-Russian Philanthropic Society (with branches
in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kyiv, Odesa, and other cities), the Slavic
Philanthropic Society, Slavic Committees, and church brotherhoods.
All these culture-war initiatives were headed by Count Vladimir
Bobrinskii, a relative of the Governor-General Georgii Bobrinskii,
and included special assignments given to N. D. Chichachev, another
leader of the forces of Russification. After the devastation wrought
by the Russian invasion, these Russophile philanthropic committees
organized aid to peasants, which was accompanied by the political
158 VON HAGEN
and cultural message of "reuniti

Not surprisingly, Zhuk viewed
Russification, and noted the re
and luliian Iavors'kyi, émigrés f
Russian Ukraine and now arrived
After the Russian retreat of 191
sian army's destruction of Kholm
order of 7 May 1915 on forced e
Much better known are the arr
Andrei Sheptyts'kyi by General
chief of staff. A second Greek C
Peremyshl, and a third prelate w
Greek Catholic Church withou
In general the Ukrainian movem
pended, the Ukrainian national
Shevchenko's "incendiary" collec
cated, and several hundred mem
were arrested. The spread of the
front to the rear of the army l
figure in the Ukrainian national
Hrushevs'kyi. Hrushevs'kyi was
days after he arrived in Kyiv vi
home in the Austrian Carpathian
Lviv and Kyiv were searched. (Iro
him under surveillance while he was there and also issued a warrant
for his arrest as a Russophile.)19
Similar stories were recorded about the assault on Polish institu-
tions and Poles under Russian occupation.20 They also reveal the lack of
consistency in Russian policy, as well as the inlportance of a change in
personnel. The first occupation governor, Sergei Sheremet'ev, pursued
a Polonophile policy, thereby enraging the Russifiers and their Galician
Russophile allies, who orchestrated his defeat and replacement by
Bobrinskii, a man closer to their values and politics.21
The Central Powers' and Second Russian Occupations
The Central Powers launched a counteroffensive, returned to Gali

and formerly "Russian" Poland, and sent the Russian army fleeing
ward in what would become the Great Retreat. They, too, now
to "liberate" oppressed nationalities from the Russians and purs
sort of Ukrainian Piedmont policy that was designed to demons
how Habsburg and German rule were better and more huma
enlightened than that of the Russians. Of course, allowing the
local languages in schools and lower-level administration wa
departure from Austro-Hungarian practice in Galicia, but no
Central Powers extended their practices to lands that had been
Russian rule. This inter-imperial anticolonialism, namely, the su
of those "national entrepreneurs" who opposed their enemy em
had the unanticipated consequence of raising the profile of
like the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, who now played a
in the Austrian occupation analogous to that of the Galician
Philanthropic Associations under the Russian occupation.22 C
teristically, independence, autonomy, or even a separate crown la
a postwar Habsburg empire was never on the table in any serious
but the nationalist activists of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine
and allied expatriate organizations calculated that their futures looked
better with a hoped-for Central Power victory in the Great War. This
state of affairs would last only until the Russian army reorganized after
its retreat and mounted the successful Brusilov offensive, the army's
most decisive- and last- victory. The Russians, too, had learned some
lessons from their first disastrous occupation and moderated their
policies toward the Ukrainian language and institutions.23
The Provisional Government and Ukraine: Reluctant and

Failed Decolonization
The political order that followed the fall of the Romanov dyn
the autocracy did not "resolve" the issues of colonial rule, or, a
known in the Russian Empire, the "national question." It only
in their transformation along the lines of popular sovereignt
clashes of imperial "liberals" and conservatives with social
Ukrainian Central Rada's conflicts with the Provisional Government
and the Petrograd Soviet comprised one area of the battle over decol-
onization, which was seen from Kyiv as the rightful devolution of
political and cultural authority away from the capital and closer to
the "people," however defined.24
l60 VON HAGEN
But we also see a new st

movement that had its ori
and regionalists, a small co
its pyrrhic victory in Sept
Peoples in Kyiv that elect
first president.25 This sen
national coalition of "oppr
evolution of the Rada Sec
for Jewish, Polish, and Rus
Another site of the bat
movement for Ukrainizati
composed of ethnic Ukrain
guageand began adopting t
quickly radicalizing soldie
and centrist Central Rada
The Army Ministry relu
the formation of Ukrainia
successes in winning war-
form, but the Petrograd So
movement, as did the Ky
Revolutionary but also a
ruchev.27 During the first
former imperial officer an
friendly to the Ukrainian
of Ukrainian soldiers' rig
military units to fight for
for a Ukrainian army was
Armenians, Georgians, Cz
and many others to create
homelands. These movemen
leadership and in the liber
to oversee the reforms of
With the overthrow of the moderate-left coalition of the "dual
authority" in Petrograd by the Bolsheviks, the socialist-nationalist
Rada faced a new regime in Petrograd and, soon, Moscow, which also
claimed to offer its own socialist alternative on the national question.
The Rada quickly found itself embroiled in the first-ever war of two
self-proclaimed socialist states, and with the Bolsheviks and their
WARTIME OCCUPATION AND PEACETIME ALIEN RULE l6l
armed forces exhibiting much of the same anti-Ukrainian animu

had been characteristic of the tsarist army, whose dissolution g
to the Red Army then the White Army and several Ukrainian
as well. Ukraine and postimperial Russia were born out of c
wars; the armies that formed after the collapse of the empire
also born in those wars.
Bolshevik Occupation and Colonialism: War between Soviet

Russia and the Ukrainian Central Rada
In February 1918 Bolshevik Red Guards units shelled Kyiv for el

days, then occupied the Rada's capital for two weeks and subj
the local population to a wave of anti-Ukrainian and other forms
targeted Bolshevik terror. Russian imperial army officers and O
dox clergymen, together with Ukrainian nationalists, were terror
arrested, and executed.28 Pavlo Khrystiuk, a member of the Rada
ernment, was an eyewitness to the first Bolshevik conquest of Ukr
which he traced to Bolshevik agitation among the soldiers ag
the Ukrainian cause. The success of such agitation was seen in
savage destruction by Russian troops of Ukrainians (regardless of
convictions); Russian troops shot anyone in Kyiv who spoke Ukra
and considered himself a Ukrainian; of course, all this was done
by communists, but by ordinary 'brothers' and 'comrades,' under
leadership of officers trained in the old school, similar to the polic
[Lt. Colonel] Muravev, who, in his siege of Kyiv, took special delig
bombarding the building of the 'separatist' Hrushevs'kyi with he
artillery, of which he later boasted in public speeches."29
Khrystiuk recorded the Bolsheviks' justification for their inva
of Ukraine, who claimed that they were "liberating" the Ukrainian
letariat from the "bourgeois" Rada; he deconstructed that "libera
ist" rhetoric and insisted that "Soviet Russia's army's attack on Uk
had all the earmarks of occupation and national struggle; so we w
pay any more attention to the Ukrainian Central Executive Comm
since it had not played a positive role; instead, war was wage
Commander in Chief of the Soviet Russian army Muravev." H
noted that a "token" Ukrainian, Iurii Kotsiubyns'kyi, was secreta
military affairs in the CEC, but he had no army, no apparatuses
1Ó2 VON HAGEN
no influence on military eve

on Muravev's bayonet, a scr
policy." Khrystiuk cited Mu
ing Soviet power in Ukraine
the ends of our bayonets an
in every way possible with
townsfolk, bourgeois intel
tsarist police in Ukraine too
"take ferocious revenge again
pogroms against Ukrainian
Ukraine. The agitated and e
heard speaking Ukrainian
a grey cap; among those m
of agrarian affairs. Ukraini
Ukrainian intelligentsia. In
in all city schools, the old
guage and Russian teachers
positions.
The Bolsheviks completely destroyed the fairly large Ukrainian
press under the pretext of struggling against the Ukrainian bourgeois
press. However, the "bourgeois" Ukrainian press was not replaced by
proletarian and peasant Ukrainian-language newspapers but by the
Bolshevik Russian-language press, which "sometimes, to prove the
equality of languages, printed individual small articles or chronicles in
Ukrainian. Ukrainian books were suppressed; likewise, the Ukrainian
theater fell silent. Such was the cultural devastation brought to Ukraine
by the Russian Bolsheviks. They pursued a policy of total occupation
in Ukraine, intended to restore the dominant Russian nation to its
position of managing a colony- Ukraine."30
Brest-Litovsk: German-Austrian Occupation and

Colonial Rule (1918)
The Ukrainian Rada fled the devastation wrought by the Bolsheviks

and was saved by the Central Powers and the Ukrainian delegation's
success at negotiating in Brest-Litovsk. The negotiations themselves
were the result of the Bolshevik government in Petrograd issuing
its "declaration of peace" and call for all the belligerents to accept
an armistice followed by peace talks. In February 1918 the Treaty of
Brest-Litovsk brought Ukraine recognition by Germany, Austria-
Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire, as well as from a reluc-
tant Bolshevik Russia in a separate treaty one month later. But that
same world war and the civil war that followed it also doomed that
short-lived experiment in proto-statehood. Ukraine's brief emergence
as an internationally recognized state happened as a result of the rival
imperial and anticolonial policies pursued by the Central Powers and
the Entente states. All the empires were caught up in these revolu-
tionary policies of promoting anticolonial movements in their rival
empires, while presenting "their" own exile nationalist activists with
the alternative of coming under their, "better," form of colonial rule.
The Austrian variant of this was a more tolerant second occupation
regime and included a behind-the-scenes scenario (and sometimes not
so behind-the-scenes) of a Habsburg prince assuming the throne as
hetman of Ukraine in a new, Austrian- protected Ukraine.31 The Brest
Treaty recognized an independent, and even neutral, Ukraine, but the
Central Powers, especially Germany, quickly acted to circumscribe the
new state's authority, a move which culminated in support for a coup
against the Ukrainian National Republic by the authoritarian general
Pavlo Skoropads'kyi.
For some time the German military and political leadership had
seen its goal as the permanent weakening of Russia as a rival and
obstacle to German great-power status. Moreover, leading German
specialists on Russia had shaped a view of the Russian Empire as a
multinational state ruled by coercion and repression, and they fanta-
sized about peeling away the borderland peoples ( Randvoelker ) from
the Russian core, a form of "brittle" colonial rule in this interpreta-
tion. Now that Russia was Bolshevik and claiming the right to support
national self-determination movements in the surviving empires, the
Germans offered their own version of beneficent German colonial
rule. The bigger and long-term picture had the "borderlands," as the
Germans saw them, between Germany and Russia transformed into
political and economic satellites of Germany, so-called Nebenstaaten.
Their own answer to Lenin's advocacy of national self-determination
and to Wilson's Fourteen Points was their own politics of Selbstbestim-
mung, which targeted Finns, Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians,
164 VON HAGEN
and Belarusians. (They also sup

national liberation fighters, in
The conquest of Ukraine last
1918 Ukraine was occupied b
man troops. Seventeen Russ
occupied. (Allied intervention
in the scholarly literature, wo
Within weeks the occupation a
measures of repression; for ev
local military authorities were
soldiers or inhabitants. They o
ruption of the food supply or v
censorship was introduced for
down was the Russian-langua
Thought), which had been Leon
The newspaper offended the G
antagonizing the peasantry w
newspaper was allowed to reope
critical of the Germans. The G
public buildings and began ins
the city. Local inhabitants view
material symbol of their shack
Ordnung schaffen" (We shal
explained their mission to the
The Rada was embarrassed by
and tried hard to keep the det
Marshal Eichhorn took the ag
and ordered sowing in time fo
paign to restore private prope
promised grain frustrated the
conservative, landowning, for
threw the socialist governmen
the "Ukrainian state." (His proc
relationship with the Austrian
with a similar title, but by his
Germans had the best contacts
parties, the Austrians in the s
common cause with local Russi
zations, whose aims, of course, were diametrically opposed to those

of the organizations being courted by the Germans.
How things were expected to work in Ukraine is illustrated by the
negotiations between Kaiser Wilhelm II and Skoropads'kyi. The kaiser
approved Skoropads'kyi's candidacy to replace the Rada government
if he agreed to "our conditions," which included "a ban on forming any
Ukrainian army, as long as Central Power troops remained stationed
in Ukraine; a requirement that occupation field courts try Ukrainians
charged with crimes against the occupiers; that all government offices
be purged of undesirable elements; and that all restrictions on private
trade and property be removed to restore the free circulation of goods
and created conditions for the promised grain deliveries." Eichhorn's
order essentially stripped the Ukrainian judicial authorities of the
right to try their own citizens. The Germans oversaw the arrest of all
the socialist Rada ministers, and Ukrainians understood quickly who
held the real power now. The Germans insisted all along that they
"had been called by the Ukrainians to create order in the land," even
evoking the call of ancient Rus ' to the Varangians. Accordingly, they
banned strikes and subordinated the Ukrainian railway administration
to German military law, instituting the death penalty for any destruc-
tion of railroad property.33
War, Revolution and the Articulation of an Anticolonial

Critique in Ukraine
Pavlo Khrystiuk experienced all these stages of the Ukrainian revolu-

tion, and when he sat down to make sense of it all and write a sketch of
its history, he articulated a view of the Ukrainian revolution that saw
it as a protest against Russian imperialism and the colonial rule under
which Ukraine and its inhabitants lived. He chronicled the struggle
between the Ukrainian version of a liberal-moderate socialist federa-
tion and its all-Russian counterparts in the Provisional Government
and Petrograd Soviet in the experience of the Central Rada, which
would ultimately face insurmountable odds, only to have to witness
the predictable (based on experience as early as Mykhailo Drahoma-
nov's critique of the Russian revolutionaries in exile) but crushingly
disappointing behavior of revolutionary Russia's new Red Guards and
l66 VON HAGEN
their brutal and open host

Khrystiuk himself barely
seeking the relative safety
His anticolonial critique
part of the revolt of mu
eventually triumphant Bol
of the Central Powers in t
his Ukrainian state. Khrys
the next "alternate," imp
dynasty: the White Army
Khrystiuk's experience wit
tions in the revolution an
offered no better alternat
national self-determinati
that was no better than an
earlier moment in the hi
has called "the Wilsonian m
imposed their internationa
the defeated successor st
Empire, but rejected any s
onies might warrant some
toring as well.34 Khrystiu
History of the Ukrainian R
of "intensified efforts on
throw off the shameful and
the story of the "worldwi
against the contemporary
and for a new socialist soc
The Bolsheviks did not seem to have "learned" from the disas-
trous mistakes of their first attempts to conquer and occupy Ukraine.
The second campaign of 1918-19 was marked by new anti-Ukrainian
violence as well as atrocities against Jews and Russians.35 Elsewhere
in the former empire, in the Don region, the Bolsheviks committed
atrocities against another socialcultural group, the Don Cossacks.
The Don Cossacks also played multiple roles in the revolution and
civil war in the Don Territory, and they both perpetrated and were
victims of fierce violence. Peter Holquist has identified a new, albeit
temporary, stage in the Bolshevik revolutionary war: the Bolsheviks'
near-genocidal campaign to "liquidate" the Cossacks in early 1919.

He cites an Orgbiuro circular of 24 January that called for the "total
extermination" of the Cossacks and also mapped out a colonization
program to replace the exterminated Cossacks in the region.36
White Russian Occupation and Colonial Rule
For the White armies under Generals Anton Denikin and Petr Wran-
gel, Ukraine was a space to reclaim their vision of Russia, "one and
indivisible," from the Bolshevik hordes and the Ukrainian separatists.
For the Kadets and others who advised the White governments, Het-
man Skoropads 'kyi, even though he came from a similar political and
cultural pedigree as most of the White officer corps, was more of a
threat to the integrity of a strong, unified Russia than the Bolsheviks.37
The Whites had an opportunity to show their understanding of a new
Russian nation, and who and what it excluded and included in their
brief occupation of Ukraine in 1919. (The Volunteer Army occupied
Kyiv from 31 August to 6 December 1919, and Kharkiv from 24 June to
12 December.) As Peter Kenez has written, the Whites treated Ukraine
"as an occupied country and regarded the population as a defeated
enemy."38 He noted that the basic statute concerning administration
was titled "policies governing occupied territory" (65). Correspond-
ingly, Denikin appointed three military governors to administer the
country, replicating the tsarist practice of privileging military over
civil rule. The political-ideological tone of the White occupation
was overseen by Vasilii Shul 'gin, the infamous anti-Semitic Russian
nationalist editor of Kyiv's most anti-Ukrainian newspaper, Kievlianin
(66-67, 175).39
Replaying the role of the Russian imperial occupation army in the
first years of the Great War, not surprisingly, during the horrible years
of mass murder in the Civil War period, the Volunteer Army had the
largest number of Jewish victims. According to Kenez, "Its pogroms
differed from mass killings carried out by it competitors" (166). Kenez
argues that "the Volunteer Army succeeded in murdering as many
Jews as all the other armies put together" (170) and, moreover, that
"the officers of the Volunteer Army were obsessed with anti-Semitism"
(172).40 Moreover, as with the Russian Army in 1914-15 in Galicia, the
l68 VON HAGEN
pogroms were accompanied

Ukrainians. The Whites att
and shut down newspape
the existence of the Ukra
Little Russians were one o
Great Russian people. He b
an invention of foreign an
views in a proclamation to
in which he promised "libe
fools and traitors and vow
people enslaved and misled."
be restored to the lost unit
nine provinces that had bee
"Ukrainian state" were pro
ically forbade the persecut
agencies, school, and priva
Ukrainian nationalist deman
The Soviet-Polish-Ukrainian War and Its Occupations
The newly independent Polish state, which confronted the leg

of vastly different political, institutional, social and cultural prac
from its history during the partitions by Prussia, Russia, and Au
nonetheless embarked on a war of conquest in the name of "reco
ing" lost, historic lands in space now claimed simultaneously by
national movements of Lithuania, Ukraine, and even Belarus, not
mention White and Red (Bolshevik) Russia.42 Vasyl' Kuchab
another eyewitness-participant to these events, viewed newly in
pendent Ukraine - in his case, the Western Ukrainian Republi
caught between Polish imperialism and Bolshevik so-called in
nationalism, the latter of which appeared to those in its way as
more than a new version of Russian imperialism.43 Józef Piłsud
the conqueror of Ukraine in 1920, insisted he was not an imp
ist and not even interested in the long-term occupation of Ukra
Instead, he saw Ukraine as part of a border federation with Pola
the strongest partner to defend Eastern Europe from Bolshevik R
That understanding was articulated in two agreements concluded
April 1920: a political agreement and a military convention. Poland

recognized the independent Ukrainian state in the Directory, headed
by Symon Petliura. Ukrainian forces submitted to Polish command up
to the Dnipro River; Poland also promised to provision the Ukrainian
army. The agreements included a special clause stipulating that the
administration was to be taken over by Ukrainian authorities to dispel
any suspicion that the Poles planned an indefinite occupation. General
Tadeusz Kutrzeba confirmed that the sooner the Poles could get out,
the better. He estimated it should take the Poles twelve weeks to outfit
six regular Ukrainian divisions and then leave.44
The Polish offensive took fifteen days to achieve its main targets;
Kyiv was occupied on 7 May 1920 by General Edward Rydz-Śmigły.
All their honorable intentions notwithstanding, the Poles, who had
been perceived by many as liberators from the recent Bolshevik atroc-
ities, were seen, instead, as occupiers not much better than the recent
White Russian or German occupiers. Piłsudski, who had expected the
Ukrainians to rally to the Polish banner upon his troops' entry into
Kyiv, was disappointed, but he also failed to curb the Polish gentry,
who had returned behind the Polish army and begun taking land that
they claimed was theirs and which had been given to the peasants by
the Soviet occupying authorities. The Polish high command issued
an order distancing itself from the activities of Polish landowners,
but the Ukrainian population soon became hostile to the Polish army,
as well as to the putative Ukrainian leader, Petliura, who was seen
as a bankrupt politician. During the brief Polish occupation, which
ended with the evacuation of 10 June, Piłsudski was not able to realize
his ambition of convening a constituent assembly in Kyiv, something
that both the Entente and his own Diet, dominated by annexationist
members of the National Democratic party, opposed in any event.45
Finally, the Polish campaigns were also infamous for the massacres
of Jews in the wake of their sweep across Galicia, Belarus, and Ukraine.
Isaac Babel, writing about the ferocity of the First Red Cavalry Division
with which he served, was a chronicler of comparative occupation
regimes and commented frequently on the atrocities committed by
the Polish troops that had recently retreated. For the Poles, as for
the White Russian soldiers and officers, Jews were Bolsheviks and
commissars to be executed on the spot; for many Bolshevik soldiers,
Jews and Poles were bourgeois capitalists and therefore their slaughter
170 VON HAGEN
was justified. As a political

a missionary of the new re
eyewitness to the gaping d
of the International and t
the atrocities against Pole
Red Cossacks. Babel recalled: "An order comes from the Southwest
Army Group: when we enter Galicia- the first time Soviet troops
cross the frontier- we are to treat the population well. We are not
entering a conquered country, the country belongs to the workers
and peasants of Galicia, and to them alone, we are going there to help
them establish Soviet rule."46 But a Red Army commander, Mikhail
Tukhachevskii, could also proclaim without any hesitation that the
Red Army was bringing the Revolution to Poland and Germany not
through agitation and persuasion- not through "hearts and minds"-
but on the bayonets of Red Army soldiers.47 That Tukhachevskii, who
was from the Russian gentry and a tsarist officer before 1917, could
have adapted the "revolutionary" message so readily to the practice
of imperial conquest that Muravev had proclaimed - equally shame-
lessly-as he bombarded Kyiv two years earlier before taking it with
violence, is evidence of how pervasive was the imperial mindset for
the new regime's military leaders.
I have highlighted the fates of the Jews and Ukrainians under these
diverse occupation regimes to suggest that there was considerable
consistency and even continuity in the colonialist attitudes of all the
Russian and Polish regimes toward these two populations during the
world war and ensuring civil war. This relative consistency with regard
to attitudes was, however, not reflected in a consistency of policies
implemented, nor their consequences. All occupation regimes expe-
rienced bureaucratic and political conflicts; all such regimes were
overwhelmed by the simultaneous tasks of establishing order and
maintaining peace while setting up minimal institutions of rule in con-
ditions of occupation and alien control. It was also during the war and
civil war that some of the most determined efforts were made to unite
Jewish and Ukrainian institutions and organizations in a joint strug-
gle against the imperialist armies and politicians who made different
claims to them. This Ukrainian-Jewish "solidarity" and insistence on a
common fate as victims of alien control was expressed in the fashion of
interethnic marriages, among the most notable of which was the union
WARTIME OCCUPATION AND PEACETIME ALIEN RULE I7I
of Volodymyr Vynnychenko and his wife Rozalia Lifshits,

in the efforts of writers, poets, and other artists to address c
themes in the lives of Ukrainians and Jews.48 It also manifest
in the relationship between Volodymyr /Ze'ev Jabotinsky and
Petliura. Jabotinsky, a Jew from Odesa, founder of Jewish self
units, and the "father" of the Likud Party, also defended the
Ukrainian nationalism against Russian liberals in the prewa
and then defended Petliura against charges of anti-Semitism a
perpetration of pogroms by his armies.49
Interwar Soviet Ukraine: From Decolonization toward a New

Soviet Colonialism and Reconsolidation of Empire
Soviet nationality policy in the 1920s, above all "indigenization," kn

in Ukraine as Ukrainization, was an effort at decolonization, w
amounted in large measure to the de-Russification of public cultu
the media, and some elites.50 After initial attempts to suppress lo
nationalist authorities under the slogan of "proletarian internatio
ism," the Bolsheviks made a radical turnaround and began co-optin
them. The Bolsheviks proclaimed themselves the world champ
of the struggle against colonialism,51 and they also "decided that
forms of national statehood were to help bring socialism to the ma
in their national tongues." The policy of nation building "rested on
torical evolutionism, according to which each stage of socioeconom
development. . .was accorded a corresponding form of population o
nization from tribe to ethnicity to a bourgeois and socialist natio
until the final postnational stage of truly universal communism."5
The new policies also helped to foster the national renaissan
of both Ukrainian53 and Yiddish-language Jewish culture. Ukr
and Belarus were the centers of the Yiddish-language "golden age.
Indeed, the Jewish Section of the Communist Party, the Foreign Af
Commissariat, and other Bolshevik bodies explored a Soviet model
Jewish agricultural colonization, which gave serious consideration I
Jewish homeland in the Crimean Tatar autonomous district, but a
considered territory in Ukraine and Belarus. This quest "culminat
eventually in the creation of the Birobidzhan Autonomous Distric
1934. This "Soviet Zion" near the Chinese border was meant to off
172 VON HAGEN
a better alternative to the

Republic and to the Zionis
Middle East, which at th
protected by Great Britain
Characteristic of those
the Red Army under the
interesting example of m
Frunze, born in Bishkek
and a Russian mother, rep
viewed as a nationalities e
sent to Tashkent during the
committed by the Social
(in a reversal from the u
commander-in-chief of the armed forces of Ukraine and the Crimea
before succeeding Leon Trotsky as the head of the Red Army for a
brief period.56
This model of national military formations resembled in many
ways that of the Habsburg Empire: "a limited number of nations with
recognized full-scale status and territorially defined political orga-
nization of their own (union republics)," but as part of an "empire of
nations," or Soviet Union, with no real option for independence or
full national self-rule.57
The editors of Ab Imperio, in their recent manifesto, called this
"postimperial colonialism" and "the Soviet attempt to enforce post-
coloniality from above," and noted that this development left colonial
intellectuals very "disillusioned."58 The limits and contradictions of
these policies also gave rise to an opposition that expressed itself in the
rhetoric of anticolonialism. Khrystiuk is one example of this. Another
better-known critic was the Tatar Mir-Said Sultan-Galiev, considered
the first victim of Stalinism, who proposed his own theory of decol-
onization, which led to his expulsion from the party and government
and to the rise of the crime of "nationalist deviationism."59
The Holodomor as the "Highest" Stage of Colonialism
This brief interlude of decolonization was followed by brutal re-Rus

fication and the reassertion of central power and Russian nationali
which was initiated by and part of Stalin's consolidation of

over the party and state elites. Collectivization and terror went
in hand with a reassertion of a great power imperialism tha
Russia's history and language priority over all others.60 Most sc
today connect the forced and disastrous collectivization drive an
famines that accompanied it with the rise of the NKVD and the
as central institutions of Stalinist rule. Despite a very excitin
historiography on the Gulag, however, historians have not "seen
empire and colonial practices there that many trace to the conc
tion camps of the Boer and Spanish- American Wars.61
Soviet collectivization was labeled as an example of "internal
nialism" in a little-read article by the left-wing sociologist Alvin
ner.62 Gouldner did not highlight the high, excess deaths that w
know were part of the brutal collectivization drives in Ukraine
Kazakhstan. Gouldner was also not concerned that the Soviet Union
had declared itself the vanguard of anti-imperialism in the world and
at home. But Gouldner's characterization has been projected back-
ward into Russian history in Aleksandr Etkind's recent book;63 Michael
Hechter applied the term "internal colonialism" to British history and
the Celtic fringe that included Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. In this
vein, I argue that the famine in Ukraine bears an uncanny resemblance
to the colonial famines of the British Empire in Ireland and India,
above all, and that famines are but one of several features of Soviet
rule that bear comparisons with colonial empires.64 Stalinist collectiv-
ization was an alternate version of this colonial view of large parts of
humanity as expendable material in the building of a greater, imperial
civilization. Ukrainians perished in the largest numbers, but we also
know of the very devastating effects on Kazakh society of the seden-
tarization campaign there, which made for a peculiar variation on the
ail-Union collectivization drives. Collectivization was waged as a war
against the peasantry and resembled a military occupation with the aid
of large numbers of Red Army soldiers and veterans, NKVD troops,
and militarized Communist Party members.65 But in addition to the
usual devastation of colonial wars, collectivization also resulted in the
"rapid and violent disruption of the basic institutions of the victim," in
this case, the household economies of Ukrainian and Kazakh peasants.
This quote comes not from the history of Soviet collectivization but
from Karl Polanyi's book on the social and political upheavals that took
174 VON HAGEN
place in England during the

of thought is developed in
connection between politica
which focuses on the Britis
ines to extend the liberal m
"the basic institutions of th
in India, China, and Afric
famine of 1845-52, and ties
ideas helped to constrain f
years historians of the Irish
common interests and themes with historians of Ukraine's famine.69
As regards a famine closer in time to those in Ukraine and Kazakhstan,
Winston Churchill's wartime British government consigned between
1.5 and 4 million Indians to their deaths in 1943 by choosing not to
send famine relief on "strategic grounds." And eerily similar to the
Stalin regime's ban on any discussion of a man-made famine- a ban
that was kept in place until 1990, so too the first book to depict the
Indian tragedy, Hungry Bengal, was banned in 1944, and 5,000 copies
were seized and destroyed.70
This sort of variation in colonial practice, by the way, was not
unusual in other historic empires, above all those about which we
know the most, the British and the French. British rule in Ireland
differed significantly from the Raj in India, and from its policies in
Australia or Canada. France's colonial rule was adapted for differences
in Indochina and Algeria, to name just two. So, too, Stalin's colonial
policies, everywhere brutal and exploitative and in most places mur-
derous, varied from region to region and over time.
Colonialism did not cause the Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932-33
any more than it did the Irish famine of 1845-52 or the Bengal famine
of 1943, but it did provide a context, an ecology, in which ruling elites
and their bureaucracies were able to achieve new, highest stages - or,
more accurately, lowest stages - of colonialism under the party-state
dictatorships of Stalin, Hitler, and later Mao in China and Pol Pot in
Cambodia.71 What we know about colonialism, however, does not
make it easy to cast blame on strictly national or ethnic markers.
Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili/Stalin was not an ethnic Rus-
sian,72 nor were the key members of his entourage who were engaged
in policy toward Ukraine. Lazar Kaganovich, Jewish by nationality,
had roots in Ukraine, but like many members of diaspora n

he identified with the metropolitan center and its culture ov
colonial provinces. The membership of the Ukrainian Comm
Party included ethnic Ukrainians, Poles, Russians, Jews, and an
sional Bulgarian, also a ruling pattern not unusual for modern em
(For that matter, the Russian imperial bureaucracy was likewise
of Russified and not-so-Russified Baltic Germans, Poles, Geo
Ukrainians, Tatars, and others.) The fact that none of these me
ethnic Russians, however that slippery concept is applied in
settings, does not mean that they were incapable of brutal colo
rule and warfare, including, in the case of the Holodomor, of w
war against the citizens of their "own" empire. And we know th
is called "hybridity" of identity by postcolonialist scholars can e
rendered as collaboration or outright treason by those in the n
struggle for liberation and those against whom they struggle.73
The liquidation of any Ukrainian resistance or opposition str
especially at the leftist critics of Soviet rule, those who shared th
of the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries and Social Democr
well as those in the Communist Party itself whose politics were
close to these "class enemies." Many of the repressed Ukrainian
critics of the Soviet regime framed their analysis in the langua
anticolonialism. Stalin denied that Soviet policies were colonialis
in his polemic with Evgenii Preobrazhenskii), while crushing
who thought they were getting closer to socialism by overc
dominant-nation oppression.74
Interwar Poland and the Ukrainian Question
A parallel and different form of colonialism shaped the fate of Ukrai-

nians who ended up in interwar Poland after the signing of the Treaty
of Riga (1921), which "resolved," albeit temporarily, the border conflicts
between the new Poland and new Soviet Union. The subjection of
Poland to the League of Nations' Minority Treaties as conditions for
its membership in the new organization suggested that the interna-
tional community was anxious about how a newly independent Poland
would treat its minorities. It also represented a transformation of the
international legal justifications for imperial intervention in Otto-
176 VON HAGEN
man affairs from the Congress

the new states of Eastern Euro
minority protection regime.75
a nation-state built out of, by
Austro-Hungarian, and Russian
called an "imperial situation." T
rio manifesto insist that "nation
hegemonic discourse just as w
The examples they give are "th
or Georgia," but interwar Polan
of this "imperial" situation.76
Unlike postwar Germany, wh
became much more ethnically
Reich had been, let alone the w
only appeared anew on the map
of absence but emerged in par
rivalries on the Eastern Front.
all promised some form of a re
very limited sovereignty and i
best - with each power offering
their enemies and to assume pro
the presumed future victors in
was not only about promises fo
the outfitting of Polish legions,
postwar leader of the newly in
Ukrainian-Lithuanian wars that
left Poland with a population t
Ukrainians, Jews, Belarusians, a
the Poles resorted to various re
"too ethnically mixed" borderla
ethnic Polish peasants whom th
the kresy, as colonists. In a f
between Warsaw and its mino
renounced its adherence to the
tions sanctions. The Polish st
minority political and cultural lif
opposition groups, some of the
violent overthrow of the constit
this discussion was the Organiz
Whether Poland can be considered to have acted toward its

minority populations like an empire does toward its colonies in this
period continues to be the subject of debate among scholars.78 Timothy
Snyder's book about the Kyiv-born Polish visual artist and politician
Henryk Józewski is a good illustration of the Utopian ideology that
emerged from this new interpretation of a multiethnic Rzeczpospo-
lita and the contradictions of colonialism that consigned it to failure.
Józewski "had been sent to the eastern province of Volhynia in 1928
to stop the spread of communism from the Soviet Union to Poland,"
and, "in 1919 and 1920 had directed intelligence operations for a Polish
paramilitary organization in Ukraine in the aftermath of the Bolshevik
revolution." The "'Volhynia Experiment' can be seen as an attempt to
hold back the tide of time; to preserve the native Ukrainian-Polish-
Jewish social order, while tolerating emerging modern, national differ-
ences. It can also be understood as a kind of alternative modernity, a
multiculturalism avant la lettre, in which state policies were designed
not to build a single nation, but rather to accommodate the inevitable
differences among several." According to Snyder, this experiment failed
because it was "overwhelmed by forces beyond Józewski's control,"
among which were the famine in Soviet Ukraine, the ethnic cleansing
of Poles in Soviet Ukraine in 1935-36, and the executions of about
100,000 Soviet citizens accused of spying for Poland in 1937-38. Also
key to the end of the experiment was Poland's move to the right and
its new hostility toward the national minorities. Józewski was forced
to resign, in which connection Snyder sees "political extremists" from
communism and nationalism taking their revenge on this voice of
moderation and tolerance.79 He concludes that the "Volhynia Experi-
ment" was just that: a single instance of alternative policy, a "colonial-
ism with a (more) human face" than what was the norm for the rest of
the Second Republic.80 Snyder has also uncovered the very entangled
history of Józewski's involvement in the Polish Military Organization
and its Second Department that "oversaw the secret re-creation of a
Ukrainian General Staff (and intelligence service) on Polish soil, and
cooperated with Ukrainian agents in missions inside Soviet Ukraine
in the 1920s and 1930s." He notes that the "designer of the Promethean
project" which aimed to "draw Ukrainians in the Soviet Union toward
Warsaw" was Tadeusz Holowko, who, "like almost everyone one of
this milieu... was a onetime socialist who was born a Russian subject."81
Out of this conjuncture in Polish history emerged a Ukrainian
178 VON HAGEN
opposition that targeted not on

cians and officials, but also Ukr
Pavlo Khrystiuk's Ukrainian Soc
imperial, liberal, Bolshevik, a
the only response to the revolu
circumstances also gave rise t
and Polish imperialism, most n
and his contributions to later
in the OUN. Dontsov devised a
against the Russian Bolsheviks,
of Bolshevism, as it did Italian
of Stepan Bandera and Iarosla
found common cause and solida
atia, Slovakia, and Italy; The O
Germans, viewing them initiall
later rejecting the brutal colo
of Ukraine and Poland.
Unlike Khrystiuk's anti-imperialism, Dontsov's version did not
come with a program of social revolution. His politics also tended
to essentialize Ukraine's enemies in a static and monolithic Russian
or Polish imperialism and advocated a Ukraine for Ukrainians only,
a stance that was also characteristic of several postwar (World War
I) and interwar nationalist movements (Croatia, Lithuania, Slovakia,
and others). The Ab Imperio authors cited earlier also warn us against
this kind of nationalism, which "essentializes and totalizes" empire.84
New Wartime Occupations; New Models of Empire and

Colonialism
For those who survived these assaults on their livelihoods, their

guage, their religion, and their elites, World War II brought
set of wars and occupations, including the forced Soviet anne
of Eastern Galicia, proclaimed as the "liberation" of western Ukr
(and western Belarus) in 1939, and the German occupation of
Soviet Ukraine, including the recently annexed and Sovietized w
regions in 1941. In these tragic years Ukraine fell under several
derous occupation regimes, again giving the inhabitants of the l
of historic Ukraine a learning experience in comparative em

Hitler's Nazi empire (and an auxiliary Romanian occupation
name of the Axis powers) and serial Soviet occupations.
The Red Army and the NKVD executed a conquest and o
pation of what had been eastern Poland which, through an o
trated referendum, became western Ukraine and Belarus. A
been true twenty years earlier, the new Red invaders pitted
and religious communities against one another, especially Jews,
Belarusians, and Ukrainians.85 Also in an eerie repetition, Metr
itan Sheptyts 'kyi was placed under house arrest, and his clergy
were deported to Stalinist camps, where most of them peris
Once again the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church went undergro
this time remaining a catacomb church until Gorbachev's re
ushered in the perestroika period in Ukraine and elsewhere
Soviet Union. Tarik Amar has called these policies of conque
occupation "Soviet socialist imperialism," which was defined "in
of a Bolshevik civilizing mission" that "ultimately remained with
conceptual limits of a persistent, if perverted enlightenment e
The practices of "deportation, repression, and discrimination
part of a mission to "save, elevate, and develop" the "backward"
ern Ukrainian "local."87
After World War I, Germany, too, had undergone a forced d
onization with regard to its still-small overseas empire in the P
Africa, and Asia, which it had acquired in the late nineteenth c
imperial land grab.88 The Germans' more recently acquired colo
Eastern Europe- that is, the lands of OberOst, Poland and Uk
were also "stripped" from the post- Versailles German state aft
capitulation of the Germans in November 1918. Likewise, Germ
ambitions in the Ottoman Empire, which had included extensiv
itary advisory support for the Ottoman army and plans to buil
Orient Express railway from Berlin to Baghdad, also foundered
defeat of the Central Powers, including the Turks.89 In the wake
Fischer controversy over Germany's war aims in World War I,90
German historians and historians of Germany have explored th
between the two world wars.91 Despite considerable disagreeme
the continuities of Wilhelminę and Nazi rule, it has become com
for historians of the Nazi period to refer to occupation pol
evidence of empire and colonialism. Nazi Germany viewed Ukra
l80 VON HAGEN
as Untermenschen and trea

of-war camps, concentrati
treatment of the Poles was
the Jews were concerned,
and populations that had
World War I, the civil wa
of the bloodiest sites of th
Jews, Ukrainians, Poles, a
entangled in brutal, fatal,
The Evolution of Empire and Anticolonialist Thought in Post-

Stalin Ukraine
World War II and early postwar relaxation of Stalinist propagan

censorship, and ideology allowed for a brief revival of anticolo
writing in Soviet Ukraine, a resurgence in the 1960s under Commun
Party First Secretary Petro Shelest.94 During the Ukrainian "thaw
Ivan Dziuba wrote Internationalism or Russification ?95 in which h
criticized Soviet policies in Ukraine in the 1960s as a legacy of Rus
colonialism. Dziuba also saw the fates of Jews and Ukrainians linke
in the Soviet context when he called Babyn Yar "our mutual traged
a tragedy first of all of the Jewish and the Ukrainian people." He w
on to remind his readers that even though it was fascism that brou
the tragedy to "our people," that fascism did not start with Ba
Yar "and does not end with it." In the language of the generation o
the 1960s ( shistdesiatnyky ), Dziuba issued this accusation: "It seem
that Lenin's instructions on the struggle with anti-Semitism are bei
forgotten Just as Lenin's instructions on the national development
Ukraine are being forgotten." As in Internationalism or Russificat
Dziuba traces the historic ties between the Ukrainians and Jew
Taras Shevchenko, Lesia Ukrainka, Ivan Franko, Sholom Aleich
Yitskhok Peretz, and Volodymyr Zhabotyns'kyi.96
Once again, Dziuba and other like-minded critics were repressed
while the Soviet and party leadership proclaimed their leadership o
the anti-imperialist world against the United States and its imperial
allies and in support of national liberation and anticolonial struggl
WARTIME OCCUPATION AND PEACETIME ALIEN RULE l8l
The purge of Ukrainian intellectuals that accompanied the ta

Kyiv by Volodymyr Shcherbyts 'kyi silenced once again any d
of the colonialist aspects of Soviet rule in Ukraine.97 A somew
but parallel and related, response to the "imperial situatio
post-Stalin era was the coalition of Petro Hryhorenko (Gr
and the movement of the Crimean Tatars, who, like the Ukr
were a doubly oppressed minority in Soviet Ukraine. Hryhor
distinguished himself as an officer of the Soviet army, occu
niche that had a long-standing imperial heritage, an ethnic U
serving the all-Russian fatherland.
Finally, at the very end of this latest chapter of Sovie
Ukraine, Ukrainians were called up to fight in another colon
the Soviet war in Afghanistan. What started as a war with a
still shaped by the legacy of victory in World War II evolve
Soviet army's last colonial war and, together with the Soviet
itself, was "nationalized" in ways resembling the 1917 fall of t
Empire, when the decolonization of the USSR had begun
Ironically, another war helped to provide the context and co
for the reemergence of an independent Ukraine and Russ
as the beginnings of a new chapter in decolonization, both
and in Ukraine's and Russia's relations with other post-Sovie
The other event that helped bring about the end of th
Union was the Chornobyl nuclear disaster, which devasta
parts of Ukraine and Belarus and left known and unknow
graphic, genetic, radiological, and other legacies. The link
Chornobyl and the Holodomor have been made by many arti
intellectuals, but none perhaps as poignantly as Lina Kostenko
links these two tragedies is the colonialist attitude of the Sovi
in Moscow toward the lives and even the natural environments of
its subject peoples. Chornobyl, too, with its continuing health and
environmental fallout from the explosion and meltdown, is a legacy
of colonialism that contemporary Ukraine must add to a very long list
of challenges. And so we are reminded again that shedding imperial
habits and colonial identities has never been easy and might, in fact,
be an endless process.
I82 VON HAGEN
Notes
1. Zamitky i materiały do istoriï ukraïns'koï revoliutsiï (Vienna, 192

See my article, "Pavlo Khrystiuk's History and the Politics of Ukrainia
Anti-Colonialism," in Ukraine on the Historiographie Map oflnterwar
Europe (Kyiv, 2014).
2. Stephen Velychenko, "Ukrainian Anti-Colonialist Thought in Compar
ative Perspective: A Preliminary Overview," Ab Imperio , no. 4 (2012):
339-71; idem, "Ukrainian Anti- Colonialist Marxism (1919-1923): A
Forgotten Legacy in a Forgotten Country," Skhid-Zakhid , nos. 12-13
(2013): 396-419.
3. On Ukrainian "Sovietophiles," see Christopher Gilley, "The 'Changin
Signposts Movement' in the Ukrainian Emigrations: Mykhailo Hru
shevs 'kyi and the Foreign Delegation of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist
Revolutionaries," Jahrbücher fir Geschichte Osteuropas 54, no. 3, (2006):
345-74. See also Gilley 's larger study, The "Change of Signposts" in th
Ukrainian Emigration: A Contribution to the History of Sovietophilism
in the 1920s (Stuttgart, 2009).
4. Iurii Shapoval, "Pysar revoliutsiï," Den', no. 135, 12 August 2006, ha
reconstructed Khrystiuk's life under the Soviets from his dossier in the
files of the Ukrainian secret police. Because Khrystiuk's work, like tha
of Hrushevs'kyi and his fellow repatriates, was proscribed during Soviet
times, there are very few Ukrainian-language materials about him; the
one study I have located, thanks to Hennadii Onishchenko, is that by
V. Kucher and D. Mukha, Sotsialist-revoliutsioner na tli doby : Pavl
Khrystiuk pro sotsial' no-politychni protsesy chasiv TsentraV noi Rady
(Kyiv, 2008).
5. On the politics of the Ukrainian diasporas in North America, see Vi
Satzewich, The Ukrainian Diaspora (London and New York, 2002);
Myron B. Kuropas, The Ukrainian-Americans: Roots and Aspirations ,
1884-1954 (Toronto, 1991); Wsevolod W. Isajiw, Yury Boshyk, and
Roman Senkus, eds., The Refugee Experience: Ukrainian Displaced
Persons after World War II (Edmonton, 1992). For an example of how
diaspora Ukrainians of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations "identified"
with the anticolonial struggles of Soviet Ukrainian political prisoners,
see Slava Stetsko, ed., Revolutionary Voices : Ukrainian Political Prison-
ers Condemn Russian Colonialism (Munich, 1969).
6. This essay was also shaped by the latest manifesto of the editors of
Imperio . See Ilya Gerasimov, Sergey Glebov, and Marina Mogilner, "The
Postimperial Meets the Postcolonial: Russian Historical Experience and
the Postcolonial Moment," Ab Imperio , no. 2 (2013): 97-135.
7. For some intriguing comparative reflections on wartime occupations as
a form of alien rule, see Michael Hechter, Alien Rule (Cambridge, 2014).
8. Marko Pavlyshyn, from whom I first learned about Yurii Andrukhovych
and Lina Kostenko; Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, from whom I learned
about Moisei Fishbein; Ivan Dziuba, Alexander Etkind, and Rory Finnin;
and my colleagues and former graduate students at Columbia University,
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and the late Edward Said, as well as Michael
Stanislawski, my first teacher in Jewish history; Adriana Helbig and
Maria Sonevytsky in ethnomusicology and Peter Holquist and Amir
Weiner in history; my friends at Ab Imperio and Kritika ; and Roman
Serbyn, who led me to Raphael Lemkin, who, it appears, knew all of
this long before most of us did. Many more sources of inspiration are
mentioned in the endnotes. In the tradition of the usual caveat, I am
responsible for the interpretations of the work of my colleagues, some
of whom might not recognize themselves in my versions, although I
hope such cases are rare.
9. Teodor Shanin, Russia , 1905-07 : Revolution as a Moment of Truth, vol.
2, The Roots of Otherness: Russia's Turn of Century (New Haven, Conn.,
1986), 64-67, 95, 114; Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905: Russia
in Disarray (Stanford, 1988), 330-36.
10. Peter Holquist, "Violent Russia, Deadly Marxism? Russia in the Epoch of
Violence, 1905-21," Kritika: Explorations in Russian & Eurasian History
4, no. 3 (Winter 2003): 627-52.
11. Alexander Victor Prusin, "A 'Zone of Violence': The Anti-Jewish
Pogroms in Eastern Galicia in 1914-1915 and 1941," in Shatterzone of
Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German , Habsburg, Russian ,
and Ottoman Borderlands , ed. Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz (Bloom-
ington, Ind., 2013), esp. 369, 370; idem, Nationalizing a Borderland:
War, Ethnicity, and Anti-Jewish Violence in East Galicia, 1914-1920
(Tuscaloosa, Ala., 2005).
12. S. An-sky, The Enemy at His Pleasure : A Journey through the Jewish Pale
of Settlement during World War I, ed. and trans. Joachim Neugroschel
(New York, 2002).
13. Nathaniel Deutsch, The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the
Russian Pale of Settlement (Cambridge, Mass., 2011), 6-15; also on
I84 VON HAGEN
Rapoport, see Gabriella Safran,

S. An-sky (Cambridge, Mass., 20
14. Andriy Zhuk Collection, Na
15. Zhuk cited an ukase issued
forbidding the functioning of a
rubles or a three-month prison
16. Andriy Zhuk Collection, vol.
siis'koiu okupatsiieiu. See also
Rossiis' koï okupatsiï (serpen
Stepankowsky, The Russian Plot
17. Andriy Zhuk Collection, vol.
18. On Sheptyts'kyi's arrest an
Christian Social Ethics in Ukrai
(Edmonton, 1997), 68-93; Bohd
Ukrainian National Movement af
Life and Times of Metropolitan A
(Edmonton, 1989), 47-71.
19. Serhii Plokhy, Unmaking Imp
Writing of Ukrainian History (
20. Bohdan Janusz, Dokumenty u
1916); idem, 293 dni rządów ros
Lwów po inwazyi rosyjskiej : wr
Feliks Przysiecki, Rządy rosyjsk
Stanisław Rossowski, Lwów p
Chlamtacz, Lembergs politische
Invasion (Vienna, 1916).
21. For more on this, see Mark v
Occupations and Occupation P
(Seattle, 2007), chap. 2.
22. Ibid., 59-67.
23. Ibid., 72-79. On the Russian military authorities' learning from prior
and enemy occupations and on the importance of personality, see Peter
Holquist, "The Role of Personality in the First (1914-1915) Russian Occu-
pation of Galicia and Bukovina," in Anti-Jewish Violence : Rethinking the
Pogrom in European History, ed. Jonathan Dekel-Chen (Bloomington,
Ind., 2010), 52-73.
24. I thank Josh Sanborn for spurring me to think about the Revolution and
Civil War as partly about struggles over decolonization. See his "War of
Decolonization: The Russian Empire and the Great War," in The Empire
and Nationalism at War , ed. Eric Lohr, Vera Tölz, Alexander Semyonov,
and Mark von Hagen (Columbus, Ohio, 2014), 49-71.
25. The documents from this congress were published in S. M. Diman-
shtein, ed., Revoliutsiia i nastionaVnyi vopros: Dokumenty i materiały
po istorii nastional nogo voprosa v Rossii i SSSR v XX veke, vol. 3, 1917
(fevral '-oktiabr ') (Moscow, 1930), 443-50. For a more recent study, see
O. P. Reient and B. I. Andrusyshyn, Z'ïzd ponevolenykh narodiv (21-28
veresnia n. st.) (Kyiv, 1994).
26. Henry Abramson, A Prayer for the Government : Ukrainians and Jews
in Revolutionary Times , 1917-1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1999).
27. See Mark von Hagen, "The Russian Imperial Army and the Ukrainian
National Movement in 1917 in the Period of the Ukrainian Central Rada,"
The Ukrainian Quarterly 54, nos. 3-4 (Fall- Winter 1998); and an earlier
essay by Lew Shankowsky, "Disintegration of the Imperial Russian Army
in 1917," The Ukrainian Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1957): 305-28. For the
best accounts of the soldiers' movement in 1917, see Mikhail Frenkin,
Russkaia armiia i revoliutsiia (Munich, 1978) and Allan Wildman, The
End of the Russian Imperial Army , 2 vols. (Princeton, 1980 and 1987).
Frenkin, in particular, highlights the Ukrainian soldiers' movement in
his work. On Oberuchev, see Mark von Hagen, "A Socialist Army Offi-
cer Confronts War and Nationalist Politics: Konstantin Oberuchev in
Revolutionary Kyiv," in "Tentorium honorum," special issu e, Journal of

Ukrainian Studies 33-34 (2008-2009): 191-97.
28. Metropolitan Volodymyr of Kyiv was dragged from his residence and
brutally murdered, as were approximately 2,500 Russian officers. See
A. A. Gol'denveizer, "Iz kievskikh vospominanii," in Revoliutsiia na
Ukrainet ed. S. A. Alekseev (Moscow and Leningrad, 1930), 24-26; S.
Sumskii, "Odinnadtsiať perevorotov," in ibid., 98-105.
29. Khrystiuk, Zamitky i materiały , vol. 2, chap. 4, section 14, p. 136. Mikhail
Muravev was a Russian Left Socialist Revolutionary who was later exe-
cuted for leading a mutiny of his Red troops in Simbirsk on the Volga.
Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (Boston, 1987), 56-57.
30. Khrystiuk, Zamitky i materiały , chap. 7a.
31. See von Hagen, War in a European Borderland, 87-114. For recent
Austrian publications dealing with many aspects of the occupation,
see Wolfram Dornik and Stefan Karner, eds., Die Besatzung der Ukraine
1918: Historischer Kontext, Forschungsstand, wirtschaftliche und sozi -
l86 VON HAGEN
ale Folgen (Graz, 2008); W

Selbstbestimmung und Fr
also Timothy Snyder, The R
Archduke (New York, 200
32. Soviet and Western his
the Allied interventions,
the United States, and Fra
But the impact of the Cen
vastly more ambitious tha
fact, Evan Mawdsley argues
Powers from February to
intervention in the Civil W
another story of the Germ
Gabriel Liulevicius, War La
Identity and German Occ
33. For Skoropads'kyi's per
Spohady : kinets ' 1917-hru
Philadelphia, 1995); Mark
Ukraine,' or How a Russi
Ukrainian State," in Synops
E, Kohut , ed. Frank E. Sys
2005), 115-48. For the view
in charge of the occupatio
Freiherr Hiller von Gaertr
diaries are published in Win
schen Novemberrevolution
Groener und die deutsch
Geschichte in Wissenschaf
34. Erez Maneia, The Wilson
national Origins of Antic
On East Central Europe, se
East Central Europe , 1914
Propaganda (Princeton, 1
35. On the second Bolshevik
Ukraine: The Second Cam
Jurij Borys, The Sovietizat
Doctrine and Practice of N
John S. Reshetar, The Uk
Nationalism (Princeton, 1942); Taras Hunczak, ed., Ukraine , 1917-1921 :

A Study in Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1977).
36. See a translated excerpt from the circular in Peter Holquist, Making War,
Forging Revolution: Russia's Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921 (Cambridge,
Mass., 2002), 180-81.
37. Anna Procyk, Russian Nationalism and Ukraine : The Nationality Policy
of the Volunteer Army during the Civil War (Edmonton and Toronto,
1995).
38. Peter Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 1919-1920 (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 1977). Parenthetical numbers in the following two paragraphs
are page references to this work.
39. For Shul 'gin's own account of these years, see V. V. Shul 'gin, Tri stolitsy
(Moscow, 1991).
40. Kenez cites N. I. Shtif, Pogromy na Ukraine (Period Dobrovol' cheskoi
armii) (Berlin, 1922). See also Peter Kenez, "Pogroms and White Ide-
ology in the Russian Civil War," in Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in
Modern Russian History , ed. John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza (Cam-
bridge, 1992), 293-313.
41. A. I. Denikin, Ocherki russkoi smuty, 5 vols. (Paris and Berlin, 1921-
1925), 5:142-45. For other accounts of Denikin's views, see Dmitry V.
Lehovich, White against Red: The Life of General Anton Denikin (New
York, 1974). Denikin's appeal to the people of "Little Russia" was pub-
lished in Kievlianin on 21 August 1919, p. 1.
42. Two books that convey a Polish perspective on these wars are: Wiktor
Sukiennicki, East Central Europe during World War 1, 2 vols. (Boulder,
Colo., 1984); Titus Komarnicki, Rebirth of the Polish Republic: A Study
in the Diplomatic History of Europe, 1914-1920 (Melbourne, London,
and Toronto, 1957).
43. Vasyl Kuchabsky, Western Ukraine in Conflict with Poland and Bol-
shevism, 1918-1920 (Toronto, 2009). See also Michael Palij, The
Ukrainian-Polish Defensive Alliance, 1919-1921: An Aspect of the
Ukrainian Revolution (Edmonton, 1995).
44. Norman Davies, White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War, 1919-
1920 (London, 1972), 100-129; Józef Piłsudski, Year 1920 and Its Climax
Battle of Warsaw (New York, 1924); Titus Komarnicki, The Birth of the
Polish Republic (London, 1957), 572-74.
45. Andrzej Garlicki, Józef Piłsudski, 1867-1935, ed. and trans. John Cou-
tovidis ([London], 1995), 99-101.
l88 VON HAGEN
46. Davies, White Eagle , Red

Avins, trans, by H. T. Will
47. "Order of the Day, 2 July
Western Front," cited in D
48. For a fascinating study o
with the Ukrainian langu
Petrovsky-Shtern, The A
Ukrainian Jew (New Have
49. Taras Hunczak, A Reappr
Relations, 1917-1921"; Zosa
and Ukrainian-Jewish Rela
Studies 31, no, 3 (July 1969
civil war contexts of Ukrain
ping the Nation: War, Rev
Eastern Europe, 1914-1923,
Perspective , ed. Peter J. P
205-46, and other essays in
50. In her groundbreaking b
Nations : Ethnographic Kn
(Ithaca, N.Y., 2005), argue
shape nationality policies a
a "socialist" or enlightened
imperial Russia or Britain.
51. One institutional expre
regime was the founding o
East in 1921, followed by t
was designed to prepare re
52. The best account of this
Empire: Nations and Nat
(Ithaca, N.Y., 2001). See a
National Conflict in the US
221-65; George Liber, Sovie
Identity Change in the U
53. On the Ukrainian "rena
Marxists and the Nation: T
1920s (Edmonton, 1993); J
of National Liberation: Nat
1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1
in the Soviet Ukraine , 1917-1934 (New York, 1956); Mykola Khvyl 'ovyi,
The Cultural Renaissance in Ukraine : Polemical Pamphlets , 1925-1926 ,
trans, and ed. Myroslav Shkandrij (Edmonton, 1986).
54. David Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture
1918-1930 (Cambridge, 2004); Myroslav Shkandrij, "National Mod-
ernism in Post-Revolutionary Society: The Ukrainian Renaissance and
Jewish Revival, 1917-1930," in Shatterzone of Empires, 438-48; Elissa
Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk
(Bloomington, Ind., 2013).
55. Allan Laine Kagedan, Soviet Zion : The Quest for a Russian Jewish Home-
land (New York, 1994); Jonathan L. DeKel-Chen, Farming the Red Land :
Jewish Agricultural Colonization and Local Soviet Power, 1924-1941
(New Haven, Conn., 2005). Although Aleksandr Etkind, Internal Colo-
nization: Russia's Imperial Experience (Cambridge, 2011), 136, does not
mention the Birobidzhan experiment, it has an uncanny resemblance to
an earlier experiment that he does discuss, namely, the militarý colonies
of Aleksei Arakcheev under Emperor Nicholas I; Arakcheev's agricul-
tural-military colonies were planted in New Russia, today's southern
Ukraine, and served as an inspiration for Jeremy Bentham's writings
about the Panopticon.
56. On Frunze's military reforms in Ukraine, see Mark von Hagen, Soldiers
in the Proletarian Dictatorship : The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist
State, 1917-1930 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990); and the documents in Reforma v
Krasnoi Armii: Dokumenty i materiały, 1923-1928 gg., 2 vols. (Moscow,
2006), vol. 1, nos. 70, 134, 136, 173, 217. Document no. 70 is "Doklad
zam. Predsedatelia RVS SSSR M. V. Frunze v TsK RKP(b) o piatiletnei
programme natsional'nogo stroitel'stva v RKKA," 29 December 1924,
306-10.
57. On the connections between Leninist nationality policy and earlier

Habsburg practice, see Aviel Roshwald, Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall
of Empires: Central Europe, Russia, and the Middle East (London and
New York, 2001). See also Yuri Slezkine, "The USSR as a Communal
Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,"
Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (1994): 414-52.
58. Gerasimov, Glebov, and Mogilner, "Postimperial Meets the Postcolonial,"
118-19.
59. Bulat Sultanbekov, Pervaia zhertva Genseka: Mir-Said Sultan-Galiev:
Sud'ba, liudi, vremia (Kazan, 1991); B. F. Sultanbekov and D. R. Shara-
190 VON HAGEN
futdinov, Neizvestnyi Sul

materiały (Kazan, 2002).
60. Lowell Tillett, The Great
Non-Russian Nationalities
61. Steve Barnes, Death an
Soviet Society (Princeton, 2
camps of the Boer War and
and the Stalinist USSR wa
Origins of Totalitarianism
62. Alvin W. Gouldner, "Stali
(1977-78): 5-48; the editor's
as a much better response t
Archipelago than "a few ha
such as Althusser." Gouldne
Stalinism as the "degenerat
63. Etkind, Internal Coloniza
64. Here, too, I cannot claim
Action Empire: The Soviet U
A State of Nations: Empire
ed. Ronald Grigor Suny and
67-90; Yuri Slezkine, "Imp
Russian Review 59, no. 2 (
manifesto on these issues,
Eindeutigkeit: Kolonialismu
reich und in der Sowjetunio
Jahrbücher für Geschicht
65. Nonna Tarkhova, Krasnai
1933 gg. (Moscow, 2010); A
mata Rossa e la collettivizza
raccolta di documenti dai Fondi delTArchivio militare di Stato Russo
(Naples, 1996).
66. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York and Toronto, 1944),
10.
67. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making
of the Third World (London and New York, 2001), 280.
68. Ibid., 32, 46, 306.
69. Christian Noack, Lindsay Janssen, and Vincent Comerford, eds.,
Holodomor and Gorta M6r: Histories , Memories and Representations
of Famine in Ukraine and Ireland (London, 2012).
70. Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of War : World War II and the
Food (New York, 2012), 141-54.
71. Yuri Slezkine, "Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Socialism
Review 59 (April 2000): 227-34.
72. For some interesting reflections on Stalin's imperial identity, s
J. Rieber, "Stalin, Man of the Borderlands," American Historica
2001 (106): 1651-91. But the biography and career of Mikhail
mentioned earlier, offers a counterexample of another "man of t
derlands" who took a decidedly "softer," more accommodationis
on not only nationality issues, but also cultural and political issu
broadly.
73. The self-critical reflections of Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the
Colonized (Boston, 1991), await their Ukrainian interpretation.
74. Stephen Velychenko, "Ukrainian Anti-Colonialist Thought," and idem,
"Ukrainian Anti-Colonialist Marxism (1919-1923)." See also Velychen-
ko's larger study of this topic, Painting Imperialism and Nationalism Red :
The Ukrainian Marxist Critique of Russian Colonial Rule , 1918-1925
(Toronto, 2015).
75. Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews,
and International Minority Protection, 1878-1938 (Cambridge, 2004).
76. Gerasimov, Glebov, and Mogilner, "Postimperial Meets the Postcolo-
nial," 119. The authors define the "imperial situation" as a "shorthand to
designate the vision of empire as an irregular assortment of coexisting
different regimes of domination, based on incompatible principles
of groupness and hierarchies of status, with unequal mutual 'rates
of exchange."' This original definition (2004) is now supplemented.
"'Empire' is a meaningful analytical concept as a context-setting cat-
egory that frames the historical reconstruction of a historical context,
and creates a critical perspective on boundaries and thematization of
historical experience, thus ensuring that scholars do not fall prey to the
discursive power of totalizing and one-dimensional categories of the
modern mindset." (129, reference to Alexander Semyonov, "Empire as
a Context-Setting Category," Ab Imperio, no. 1 (2008): 199.
77. Jerzy Tomaszewski, Rzeczpospolita wielu narodow (Warsaw, 1985).
78. A fascinating, recent exchange between Roman Szporluk and Andrzej
Nowak in Ab Imperio focused mostly on interpretations of the Rzeczpo-
spolita during the era of the Grand Duchy of Poland and Lithuania, but
did not touch on twentieth-century history. See "Conversation: Andrzej
192 VON HAGEN
Nowak and Roman Szporluk,

1 (2007): 23-42.
79. Timothy Snyder, Sketches
to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (N
80. Cornelia Schenke, Natio
Ukrainer 1921-1939 (Hambur
der Zweiten Polnischen Repu
in einer Minderheitenregion
"The Making of Soviet Lviv,
University, 2006) also puts J
was "equipped with special p
assimilation, modernization,
the influence of both Polish
create an example of Ukrain
the Soviet border and thus a
offensively, against Soviet n
81. Snyder, Sketches from a S
82. Ryszard Torzecki, Kwesti
ed. (Cracow, 1989).
83. See Alexander J. Motyl, Th
and Development of Ukraini
1980); and a forthcoming dis
at the University of North
84. In a word of caution to whi
simov, Glebov, and Mogilner
postcolonial thinking from t
very hegemonic and monolo
through deconstruction." Thi
as the 'imperial situation' is
for as long as we cannot see
interplay of regular social act
omnipotent 'empire' (whethe
(128).
85. Jan Gross, Revolution from Abroad : The Soviet Conquest of Poland's
Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton, 2002); Amar, "The
Making of Soviet Lviv." For discussion of Vinnytsia under German rule
and during the Soviet "liberation," see Amir Weiner, Making Sense
of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Révolu -
tion (Princeton, 2001). On the fate of Jews under Soviet rule, see
Levin, The Lesser of Two Evils : Eastern European Jewry under S
Rule , 1939-1941 (Philadelphia and Jerusalem, 1995/5755). For
"imperial" comparisons, see Christoph Mick, Kriegserfahrungen in
multiethnischen Stadt : Lemberg 1914-1947 (Wiesbaden, 2010).
86. Bohdan R. Bociurkiw, The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the
Soviet State, 1939-1950 (Edmonton, 1996).
87. See Tarik Amar, The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: A Borderland City
between Stalinists , Nazis, and Nationalists (Ithaca, N.Y., 2015).
88. Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sarah Lennox, and Susanna Zantop, eds., The
Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacies (Ann
Arbor, 1998); Sebastian Conrad, Deutsche Kolonialgeschichte (Munich,
2008).
89. Eric Weitz, "Germany and the Ottoman Borderlands: The Entwining of
Imperial Aspirations, Revolution, and Ethnic Violence," in Shatterzone of
Empires, 152-71. Weitz insists that Germany's real colonial mission was
in the Middle East. "Notably, the centrality of the Ottoman borderlands
(and later, republican Turkey) to German imperial ambitions prevailed
through all the various regime and territorial changes that both coun-
tries experienced: Imperial, Weimar, and Nazi Germany" (154).
90. In his explosively revisionist 1962 book, Hamburg historian Fritz Fischer
explored Germany's war aims in World War I and returned German
historians' attention to the question of German war guilt and the contin-
uum of German imperialist aims through Hitler's Third Reich. See Fritz
Fischer, Germany's Aims in the First World War (New York, 1967); this
English-language translation is already a significant tone less strident
than the German original: Griff nach der Weltmacht : Die Kriegszielpo-
litik des Kaiserlichen Deutschland (Düsseldorf, 1962).
91. See Peter Borowsky, Deutsche Ukrainepolitik 1918: Unter besonderer
Berücksichtigung der Wirtschaftsfragen (Lübeck and Hamburg, 1970);
Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction : Military Culture and the Practices
of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, N.Y., 2005).
92. For authors who refer explicitly to the Nazi empire and its colonial
policies, see Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust
in Ukraine (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2005); Mark Mazower, Hitler's Empire:
Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (London, 2008). For two classic studies
that predate the "imperial turn," see Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occu-
pied Europe (New York, 1944) and Alexander Dallin, German Rule in
194 VON HAGEN
Russia , 1941-1945 : A Stud

On starvation under Nazi ru
of Despair: Life and Death
2004).
93. Jan Gross, Polish Societ
gouvernement, 1939-1944 (
occupation in former Sovie
Jeffrey S. Gurock, eds., The
Sources on the Destruction o
of the USSR, 1941-1945 (Arm
94. Bohdan Nahaylo, The Uk
95. Ivan Dziuba, Internationali
(Munich, 1968).
96. Ivan Dziuba, " Vystuplenie
Internatsionalizm ili Rusif
97. The conservative Ukrain
Bloc of Nations took up the
Ukraine and understood the
nialism. See Slava Stets 'ko, e
Prisoners Condemn Russian
98. Lina Kostenko, Zapysky
see also Catherine Wanner, B
Post-Soviet Ukraine (Univers

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Wartime Occupation and Peacetime Alien Rule: "Notes and Materials" toward a(n) (Anti-)

(Post-) Colonial History of Ukraine

Wartime Occupation and Peacetime Alien Rule:

Mark von Hagen

with other suppressed "Ukr

Wartime Occupations and Colonialism: Russia's First Campaigns

As a European empire, Russia pursued colonial policies during

identical: a charge of some "tre

I start with the fate of the Jew

along class and ethnic ones. Although the attitudes of the Ru

and cultural message of "reuniti

The Central Powers' and Second Russian Occupations

The Central Powers launched a counteroffensive, returned to Gali

The Provisional Government and Ukraine: Reluctant and

But we also see a new st

armed forces exhibiting much of the same anti-Ukrainian animu

Bolshevik Occupation and Colonialism: War between Soviet

In February 1918 Bolshevik Red Guards units shelled Kyiv for el

no influence on military eve

Brest-Litovsk: German-Austrian Occupation and

The Ukrainian Rada fled the devastation wrought by the Bolsheviks

and Belarusians. (They also sup

zations, whose aims, of course, were diametrically opposed to those

War, Revolution and the Articulation of an Anticolonial

Pavlo Khrystiuk experienced all these stages of the Ukrainian revolu-

their brutal and open host

near-genocidal campaign to "liquidate" the Cossacks in early 1919.

White Russian Occupation and Colonial Rule

pogroms were accompanied

The Soviet-Polish-Ukrainian War and Its Occupations

The newly independent Polish state, which confronted the leg

April 1920: a political agreement and a military convention. Poland

was justified. As a political

of Volodymyr Vynnychenko and his wife Rozalia Lifshits,

Interwar Soviet Ukraine: From Decolonization toward a New

Soviet nationality policy in the 1920s, above all "indigenization," kn

a better alternative to the

The Holodomor as the "Highest" Stage of Colonialism

This brief interlude of decolonization was followed by brutal re-Rus

which was initiated by and part of Stalin's consolidation of

place in England during the

had roots in Ukraine, but like many members of diaspora n

Interwar Poland and the Ukrainian Question

A parallel and different form of colonialism shaped the fate of Ukrai-

man affairs from the Congress

Whether Poland can be considered to have acted toward its

opposition that targeted not on

New Wartime Occupations; New Models of Empire and

For those who survived these assaults on their livelihoods, their

of historic Ukraine a learning experience in comparative em

as Untermenschen and trea

The Evolution of Empire and Anticolonialist Thought in Post-

World War II and early postwar relaxation of Stalinist propagan

The purge of Ukrainian intellectuals that accompanied the ta

1. Zamitky i materiały do istoriï ukraïns'koï revoliutsiï (Vienna, 192

Rapoport, see Gabriella Safran,

Revolutionary Kyiv," in "Tentorium honorum," special issu e, Journal of

ale Folgen (Graz, 2008); W

Nationalism (Princeton, 1942); Taras Hunczak, ed., Ukraine , 1917-1921 :

46. Davies, White Eagle , Red

57. On the connections between Leninist nationality policy and earlier

futdinov, Neizvestnyi Sul