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Re-thinking the Revolution in Ukraine: The Jewish Experience, 1917–1921

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2020

Larysa Bilous
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Abstract

This article examines how the Jewish experience can change the larger picture of revolution and war in Ukraine and conventional history of “the Russian Revolution.” The case study of Kyiv's Jewish community shows that its creation as an imagined community and development in 1917 was in fact made possible by the war, which served as a catalyst for social development. The interethnic relationships in revolutionary Ukraine were built on the legacy and foundation of prewar tensions, which were reinforced by the ethnicization of politics brought by the war. The collapse of the Russian empire, the rise of nation-states, the emergence of a new order, which was neither known nor universally welcomed, pushed people to transgress old boundaries of social behavior, leading to mass violence in 1919 and 1920.

Type
Critical Discussion Forum: Ukraine in Revolution
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 78 , Issue 4 , Winter 2019 , pp. 949 - 956
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2020

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References

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7 “Ukrainian Jewry” refers here to the Jews living in the southwestern region of the Russian Empire that would become claimed by the UNR.

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