Historian and left-wing activist Vladyslav Starodubtsev is becoming a prominent spokesperson for Ukraine’s “left-republican tradition,” a tradition he identifies with some of the leaders of Ukraine’s national awakening in the late 1800s, and with those that led the efforts to create a social-democratic Ukrainian state in the years 1917 through about 1922 or so, a period that ended with the consolidation of Soviet control over Ukraine.
Suzi Weissman recently interviewed Starodubtsev for Jacobin Radio, and the two spent more time — almost an hour — discussing the 1917-1922 years than most people have ever spent thinking about those years at all, let alone what they looked like in Ukraine. As the web site puts it, the interview examines “the Ukrainian People’s Republic of 1917-1923, born in the revolutionary upheavals of 1905, WWI, and the February 1917 Russian Revolution. Built on grassroots power from peasants, workers, soldiers, and cooperatives, the Ukrainian People’s Republic legislated sweeping land reform, gender equality, national-personal autonomy for ethnic minorities, and a cooperative economy. It did not last.”
(To be fair, the years 1923 through 1928, when the Soviets put into practice the policy of “indigenization,” or korenizatsiia, featured some of the most vibrant and powerful cultural and educational efforts of Ukraine’s long history. That long history is by now well covered in English-language literature: see especially Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe, Magocsi’s longer and more detailed, but less up-to-date A History of Ukraine, or Dyczok’s newly published, and admirably short and breezy, Ukraine Not ‘The’ Ukraine. But the field is in desperate need of a good English-language history of the period between 1917 and 1933.)
The Jacobin interview is excellent. It can be heard here. The historical material begins at about the 24-minute mark.
Here, meanwhile, is Starodubtsev’s “Platform for a Radical Transformation of Ukrainian Society,” in which he articulates a cogent case for a “social-republican” vision of post-war Ukraine: https://samizdat2.org/plateforme-pour-une-transformation-radicale-de-la-societe-ukrainienne-par-vladyslav-starodubtsev/
And a recent piece by Starodubtsev in Liberal Currents called “Drawing on Ukrainian Republican Roots: The Egalitarian History of Ukrainian Identity” explores the connections between Ukrainian national identity and the long-running desire for self-governance and self-determination that has also guided more recent episodes of Ukrainian history (as argued, among others, by Emily Channell-Justice in Without the State: Self-Organization and Political Activism in Ukraine).
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