This collaborative project, funded by the National Science Center (NCN) and Austrian Science Fund (FWF), investigates one of the most crucial periods of modern Ukrainian history – the revolutionary transformation of 1917-1921. It re-examinses the diverse experiences of people who did not consider themselves or were not considered as ethnic Ukrainians. They made up approximately one quarter of the entire population. While the existing historiography has focused primarily on the state-building efforts of Ukrainian national elites, the lives and activities of non-Ukrainians have been largely overlooked. Yet, Ukraine was a multicultural space where linguistically and confessionally heterogeneous people lived side by side. We argue that no sincere history of revolutionary Ukraine can be written without incorporating the non-Ukrainians into the narrative.

Analysing the political, cultural, and socio-economic agency of non-Ukrainians in Ukraine from a transnational perspective is at the core of this project. The study focuses primarily on Poles, Jews, and Russians, the numerically and historically most relevant nationalities, but will also examine Germans, Greeks, Belarusians, Czechs, and Moldovans. The project’s research questions are structured in five larger thematic clusters: the analysis of in-group transformations among non-Ukrainians, non-Ukrainians’ interactions with state authorities, non-Ukrainians’ relations with co-nationals outside Ukraine, the interactions among non-Ukrainians themselves, and the ways in which non-Ukrainians have experienced violence.

For more information on the project, please refer to the project website.

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