The “Missing Column”: Contemporary Editions of Vasyl’ Shakhrai’s and Serhii Mazlakh’s Works and the Significance of National Communism for Ukrainian Historiography

Abstract

This article deals with two of the earliest works by Ukrainian Bolsheviks: Revoliutsiia na Ukraine (1918) by V. Skorovstanskii (pseud. of Vasyl’ Shakhrai) and Do khvyli (Shcho diietsia na Vkraїni ta z Ukraїnoiu?) (1919) by Serhii Mazlakh and Vasyl’ Shakh-Rai (pseud. of Shakhrai). Both of them were expelled from the Bolshevik Party because they presented arguments in support of Ukraine’s independence from Soviet Russia and for the creation of a future Ukrainian Communist Party. The above works were republished in Odesa in 2017 and 2019 respectively along with additional documents and forewords and afterwords by Andrii Zdorov and Artem Klymenko, two left- wing historians living in Ukraine today. The legacy of Ukrainian national communism of the revolutionary and post- revolutionary years of 1917–21 has generally been missing from Ukrainian intellectual thought until recent times. A significant and interesting exception occurred during Perestroika in 1988, when the Soviet Ukrainian historian Iurii Hamrets’kyi promoted (without success) the political rehabilitation of the revolutionary “heretic” Shakhrai and proposed a revision of the Soviet narrative of the October Revolution and ensuing war in Ukraine. Within two to three years, along with the collapse of the Soviet regime and the USSR, the official Soviet narratives of Ukraine’s history lost their value. Shakhrai’s and Mazlakh’s works, who were simultaneously Ukrainian patriots and Bolsheviks, counter the stereotypes of Ukrainian ethnonational historiography. Their writings are a correction not only to the contemporary narrative of the “Ukrainian Revolution”, but also of the Soviet narrative of “the Great October Revolution” and the “Russian Civil War”.