Untangling the Ukrainian Revolution

Abstract

This article asks: ‘What was the Ukrainian revolution?’ It questions the nationalist narrative of an intelligentsia‐led movement in favour of independence by revealing some of the many strands that made up the revolution in Ukraine: the peasant struggle for the land and its produce, the urban and proletarian revolutions, the Ukrainian leftist intelligentsia's pursuit of national and social liberation, and the restless violence of the otamans. It also studies the fraught relationship between Eastern Galicia and Dnipro Ukraine. In this way, it seeks to counter current attempts to detach entirely the Ukrainian developments from those in Russia.