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This article introduces a special issue on Ukrainian statehood. Based on the conference “A Century of Ukrainian Statehoods: 1917 and Beyond” at the University of Toronto, the special issue examines the relationship between the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1920 and the Soviet Ukrainian state over the long term. The authors survey the history of the Ukrainian SSR and propose two points of emphasis: the need to study the promises of “national” and “social” liberation in tandem and the persistent presence of an “internal other” in Soviet Ukrainian history.

This article examines the attempts by left-wing Ukrainian nationalists to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable: Ukrainian nationalism and Soviet socialism. It describes how leftist Ukrainian parties active during the Revolution and Civil War in Ukraine 1917–1921 advocated a soviet form of government. Exiled members of the two major Ukrainian parties, the Social Democrats and the Socialist Revolutionaries, then took this position further, arguing in favor of reconciliation with the Bolsheviks and a return to their homeland. After the Entente recognized Polish sovereignty over Eastern Galicia and Soviet Ukraine introduced a policy of Ukrainization in 1923, many West Ukrainian intellectuals took up this call. The Great Famine of 1932–1933 and the Bolsheviks’ purge of Ukrainian Communists and intellectuals all but ended the position. However, it was more the Soviet rejection of the Sovietophiles that ended Ukrainian Sovietophilism than any rejection of the Soviet Union by leftist Ukrainian nationalists. Thus, an examination of the Ukrainian Sovietophiles calls into question the accounts of the relationship between Ukrainian nationalism and the Soviet Union that have common currency in today’s Ukraine.

This article analyzes the debate on Ukrainian statehood going on in the 1960s in Suchasnist’, the most intellectually prestigious journal among Ukrainian emigrants in the West. These intellectuals and political activists interpreted the renaissance of Ukrainian national culture in the 1960s (the so-called shistdesiatnytstvo) in various ways and proposed different political strategies to influence their original homeland and its future political and cultural developments. In the Ukrainian diaspora, two opposing factions emerged: the first, despite condemning Soviet imperialism, favorably evaluated the birth of a movement for the defense of human rights in Soviet Ukraine and was happy to exploit the rapprochement between the USSR and USA to finally have an opportunity to make contact with the motherland. The other did not consider the Ukrainian SSR as a real example of a Ukrainian state and acknowledged its existence only for tactical reasons; this faction thought that contact should be avoided and that the Soviets should be offered no opportunity to address the Western public. Eventually, at the beginning of the 1970s, even those who had opposed collaboration with any subject from Soviet Ukraine decided to embrace the cause of human rights and join the struggle led by the Ukrainian dissent.

This article looks at the rehabilitation of the early history of the Communist Party of Ukraine and the Ukrainian SSR during the Thaw. It argues that the post-Stalin political moment offered the Ukrainian Party and academic establishments the opportunity to revalorize their republic’s founding narrative. In order to popularize this narrative, they produced publications on the revolution in Ukraine and early party history, rehabilitated Ukrainian Communists from the 1920s who had fallen victim to repressions, and constructed a set of monuments that embodied the new historical paradigm. These efforts aimed to de-Stalinize the country’s history as well as promote a Soviet Ukrainian patriotism that would make Ukrainians feel more integrated into the Soviet whole. Based on archival research, newspapers, and memoirs, the article suggests that rehabilitating this narrative was a strategy for the legitimization of the party within Ukraine.

This article examines the goals and practices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ukraine in the 1970s, a Soviet institution that functioned as an ideological organ fighting against Ukrainian nationalists domestically and abroad. The central figure of this article is Heorhii Shevel who governed the Ministry from 1970 to 1980 and whose tactics, strategies, and practices reveal the existence of a distinct phenomenon in the Soviet Union—the nationally conscious political elite with double loyalties who, by action or inaction, expanded the space of nationalism in Ukraine. This research illuminates a paradox of pervasive Soviet power, which produced an institution that supported and reinforced Soviet “anti-nationalist” ideology, simultaneously creating an environment where heterodox views or sentiments were stimulated and nurtured.

In the Soviet Union theatre was an arena for cultural transformation. This article focuses on theatre director Les Kurbas’ 1929 production of playwright Mykola Kulish’s Myna Mazailo, a dark comedy about Ukrainianization, to show the construction of “Soviet Ukrainian” culture. While the Ukrainian and the Soviet are often considered in opposition, this article takes the culture of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic seriously as a category. Well before Stalin’s infamous adage “national in form and socialist in content,” artists like Kulish and Kurbas were engaged in making art that was not “Ukrainian” in a generic Soviet mold, or “Soviet” art in a generic “Ukrainian” mold, but rather art of an entirely new category: Soviet Ukrainian. Far from a mere mouthpiece for state propaganda, early Soviet theatre offered a space for creating new values, social hierarchies, and worldviews. More broadly, this article argues that Soviet nationality policy was not only imposed from above, but also worked out on the stages of the republic by artists, officials, and audiences alike. Tracing productions of Myna Mazailo into the post-Soviet period, moreover, reveals a lingering ambiguity over the content of culture in contemporary Ukraine. The state may no longer sponsor cultural construction, but theater remains a space of cultural contestation.