Stephen Velychenko. State Building in Revolutionary Ukraine

Social history is a latecomer among the genres in which the revolution in Ukraine has been narrated, and it is fitting, if somewhat counterintuitive, that bureaucrats are the first social stratum to receive monographic treatment in English. The leaders of the Ukrainian Revolution, including the great Ukrainian historian and chairman of the revolutionary parliament Mykhailo Hrushevsky, claimed that their defeat at the hands of both the Whites and the Bolsheviks was due to the lack of native administrators. In his diligently researched book, Stephen Velychenko shows persuasively that this was no more than a convenient excuse. In fact, even before the revolution roughly half of the sixty thousand tsarist officials in the Ukrainian provinces declared their native language to be Ukrainian (p. 21). There was no shortage of educated administrators willing to work for independent Ukrainian governments, but they failed to create a functioning civil service, in part because of the civil war, but also because of their ideological convictions. The influential Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries in particular endorsed the concept of a decentralized authority based on a plethora of elected representative and non-government public organizations rather than on a centralized administration.

Government (linguistics) · Ideology · Parliament · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · Ukrainian · Law · Public Administration · Soviet and Russian History