Green Ukraine and Siberia: Lost Partners of 1918
Date and Time
Location
A lecture by Susan Smith-Peter, Professor of History, College of Staten Island/City University of New York
Chaired by Serhii Plokhii, Mykhailo S. Hrushevs'kyi Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard
This event is organized by HURI as part of the Seminar in Ukrainian Studies public event series.
About the Lecture
In 1918, during the upheavals of the Russian Civil War in Siberia and the Far East, some of the nearly half million Ukrainians in the region sought to create Green Ukraine in the territory near Vladivostok. They hoped to establish their own Rada and army. Siberian regionalists were mostly Russian and were divided into two groups, one of which was federalist and supported these aspirations, as they did of other nationalities in Siberia. Because these Siberian regionalists wanted a truly federalist Siberia, they were allies with Ukrainians in the area. Their base was in the Siberian Regional Duma.
Another group within the regionalists wanted a united Russia and were hostile to these plans, however. They were better positioned in terms of power, holding key roles in the Provisional Siberian Government in Omsk. Supporters of Green Ukraine like Ivan Svit worked closely with the federalist branch of Siberian regionalists, including a collaboration between Siberian and Ukrainian authors in a Russian- and a Ukrainian-language journal at the time. Even in exile, after the Bolsheviks had ended the experiment of Green Ukraine, the two groups supported each other, including with connections to supporters in Japan. Understanding these connections and the federalist conception of the state that made them possible is important for the present.
About the Speaker
Susan Smith-Peter is professor of history and coordinator of the advanced certificate in public history at the College of Staten Island/City University of New York. She has published widely on topics related to Russian regionalism, including Imagining Russian Regions: Subnational Identity and Civil Society in Nineteenth-Century Russia, which was published with Brill. Since the full-scale invasion, she has called for Russian historians in the US to rethink how they deal with Ukraine. Her new project is a history of Siberia during the Russian Civil War that portrays Siberia as the multiethnic region that it was. Not only Ukrainians, but Koreans, Germans, Poles, Muslims, Buryats and Sakha all sought to have more autonomy, including by creating their own parliaments. In addition, the role of the British and American forces present there as part of the Intervention has not been fully told.