THE UKRAINIAN REVOLUTION IN COMMUNIST BLINKERSLINKERS(On V. Soldatenko’s Concept)

(On V. Soldatenko’s Concept)

Abstract

The impetus for this article is the scholarly work of V. F. Soldatenko, a senior research fellow at the Kuras Institute of Political and Ethno-National Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Back in Soviet times, while working at the Institute of Party History under the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine–a branch of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee of the CPSU (renamed the Institute of Political Studies under the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine in 1990) – he researched the history of Bolshevism. On February 20, 1990, V. Sol-datenko published an article in the central party newspaper «Soviet Ukraine» about the universals of the Central Rada under the telling title «Four Steps into Despair. (The Central Rada and its Universals)». The article stated that «the Central Rada betrayed the interests of the Ukrainian people, striving to build a state foreign to their interests».
After the declaration of independence and the banning of the Communist Party of Ukraine, V. Soldatenko at once «reconsidered» his views on the Central Rada and the Ukrainian Revolution in a much more positive light. Over the past thirty years, V. Soldatenko has published more research papers on the history of the Ukrainian Revolution than any other Ukrainian author and has thus become the most renowned researcher of this topic in Ukraine. He was elected a corresponding member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. At the same time, he became a member of the Communist Party of Ukraine, which was revived in the early 1990s, and in 2008 he even worked on the commission to draft its program. During President V. Yanukovych’s tenure, he was appointed Head of the Ukrainian National Memory Institute. In 2012, «For his significant contribution to the development of cultural ties with the Russian Federation, preservation, and promotion of the Russian language and culture abroad», he was awarded the Pushkin Medal by a decree of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, and in 2019, he was presented with a commemorative medal from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation in honor of the 140th anniversary of Joseph Stalin’s birth.
In his monographs, V. F. Soldatenko advocates the thesis that the liberation process in Ukraine, starting from the spring of 1917, developed as the Ukrainian Revolution and was characterized by an organic combination of national and social factors. According to his conviction, the vector of this process was di-rected towards achieving the autonomy of Ukraine within a federative Russia and towards socialist socio-economic transformations. The present article refutes this viewpoint.