SUMMARY: The article reviews some of the empirical and terminological problems associated with examining the autonomous military formations active in the current war in Ukraine. The article suggests that an understanding of a historical example of such independent bands – otamanshchyna during the Russian Civil War, 1917–1922 – might offer a means of studying the current participants in the war in the Donbas. This approach shows how military men actively engage in the construction of identities to make sense of their activity. It also reveals that the current commanders have often drawn on a set of invented traditions similar to their Civil War counterparts – above all related to the early modern Cossacks. Статья посвящена обсуждению некоторых сюжетов и терминологических проблем, связанных с феноменом независимых вооруженных формирований в современной российско-украинской войне. Для лучшего понимания того, что движет участниками войны на Донбассе, автор предлагает обратиться к историческому прецеденту подобных самостоятельных банд – “отаманщине” периода гражданской войны 1917−1922 гг. Этот подход позволяет увидеть, как взявшие в руки оружие люди начинают конструировать собственную идентичность, пытаясь разобраться в смысле своих поступков. Статья также показывает, что современные полевые командиры часто опираются на “изобретенные традиции”, подобно своим предшественникам времен гражданской войны – прежде всего, выбирая себе в пример историческое казачество раннего Нового времени.
During the horrific famine of 1932-3, did Ukrainian peasants die because they were Ukrainians or because they were peasants? This blunt question is at the heart of scholarly debate on the famine: while some believe that the famine was a deliberate attempt to crush Ukrainian nationalism (and thus can be considered an act of genocide), others see it as a product of Soviet agricultural mismanagement and Bolshevik indifference to the peasants' fate. Terry Martin suggests a compromise he calls the 'national interpretation of the famine'. He argues that the famine originated in the sphere of Soviet agricultural policies. However, Moscow interpreted Soviet Ukraine's failure to meet its (impossible) grain quotas as an act of national defiance. The Bolsheviks introduced harsher measures targeting the Ukrainian Soviet Republic that transformed the widespread starvation of 1932 into the horrendous famine of 1933.(1) Anne Applebaum's new book addresses this question. As a journalist, she is a long-time commentator on Central and Eastern Europe and, as the member and founder of various thinktanks, an actor aspiring to shape it. Therefore, unusually for a historical work on Ukraine, her monograph has received wider attention, including numerous reviews in the press. Red Famine is a work of three parts. The first places the Ukrainian nation at the centre of the story. This is unsurprising, as Applebaum is well-known for her contention that nationalism is the source of the citizen's civic engagement without which democracy is impossible.(2) This carries with it the ontological assumption that nations must be, if not perennial, then at least very old, a fundamental and enduring part of what it is to be human. Accordingly, in her opening chapter on 'The Ukrainian question', Applebaum ignores the great body of scholarship that sees nations as modern creations, instead claiming that by the late Middle Ages Ukrainians had their own distinct language, food, customs and traditions. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the period in which most scholars see nations emerging, a sense of Ukrainian identity merely 'sharpened'. The leitmotif of this history she finds summed up in Voltaire's claim that 'Ukraine has always aspired to be free' (p. 5). This narrative loses all the fascinating complexity of Ukrainian nation-building. In the 19th century, intellectuals in the area we now call Ukraine did not agree on their identity. In Eastern Galicia, then ruled by the Habsburgs, they debated whether they were Ruthenians (members a nation confined to the borders of the
This article investigates whether the partisans and warlords (otamany) active in Ukraine during the Russian civil wars were 'fighters for the independence of Ukraine' as the Ukrainian laws on historical memory claim. Following Sheila Fitzpatrick, it suggests that the partisan leaders were 'tearing off the masks', that is, trying to create new identities, often via imposture, in response to the collapse of the old order. The article reconstructs this process by examining the career of the insurgent Andrei Vladimirov, the political proclamations of the otamany and the warlords' invention of their perceived Cossack heritage. In this way, it acknowledges the situative aspect of political loyalty and national identity, while also recognizing that the warlord's leaflets are useful historical sources.
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