Abstract
Reviewed by: Olena Palko, Birkbeck, University of London, UK
Propaganda in Revolutionary Ukraine is another book by Stephen Velychenko examining the revolutionary period of 1917–1922. Following his detailed investigation of bureaucracies in State Building in Revolutionary Ukraine: A Comparative Study of Governments and Bureaucrats, 1917–1922 (2011), the book under review examines the tools and mechanisms adopted by those rival governments and political elites to transmit their message and counter their rivals. Although some of the vying sides – such as the monarchist Whites, the anarchist movement, or the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic – have not been covered, this book still presents the fullest account to date of the propaganda efforts on Ukraine’s territory during the civil war period.
Velychenko bases his analysis on a large sample of governmental and party printed-text propaganda preserved in major Ukrainian archives and museums. The sample includes pamphlets, leaflets and cartoons issued by the Central Rada, the Ukrainian State, the Ukrainian National Republic, the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary Party, the Ukrainian Social Democratic Labour Party, the Independentists, Ukrainian Communist Party, Ukraine’s Bolshevik Party, and anti-Bolshevik warlords. Forty-six reproductions of documents and illustrations are included in this book, the remaining 357 can be viewed in an online supplement.
The first chapter shows how propaganda was understood in the context of the Great war and emerging consumer economy. It also sets the scene for the book by examining pre-revolutionary publishing, transportation and distribution networks in Russia’s Ukrainian provinces. In addition, the author evaluates the audience for governmental and party propaganda in question, assessing literacy, native languages and language proficiency. Revolutionary propaganda in Ukraine is set against similar practices around the world, thereby freeing Ukraine’s history from a restrictive Russian imperial or Soviet context. This said, the Ukrainian case proves to be far more complex than other national cases during wartime. Here, the production and distribution of propaganda materials were hindered by frequently shifting fronts; clear-cut distinctions between friends and enemies were impossible given the variety of contenders, and the intended message was often ignored or misunderstood by audiences with little or no alphabetic or civic literacy.
Chapters 2–4 investigate the propaganda efforts of rival governments and political parties. The most comprehensive is the chapter on the Bolsheviks, due to the early centralization of their propaganda activities and the number of sources preserved. Each chapter scrutinizes the medium and message of the main agents. Velychenko takes a critical look at the deceptive data available for the period to assess publishing and distribution networks in the territory controlled by each government, the resources available and people mobilized to deliver the messages. Each government faced common difficulties, with paper and ink shortages, disrupted transportation networks, low-skilled staff and ignorant and apolitical populations. Despite similar challenges, the author maintains, the most successful were those parties whose propaganda effort was the most organized. While the governments in question often claimed to control Ukraine’s entire territory, the analysis of their distribution networks suggests how limited their influence actually was. Whereas Bolshevik propaganda materials were circulated all over Ukraine, those of the Ukrainian government rarely reached the southeastern provinces. In the case of the Ukrainian State under Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky, Velychenko maintains that its propaganda materials were printed and distributed in Kyiv city only.
The messages of the propaganda materials are grouped around some main themes. Although the ideological flavours differed, the messages were quite similar. With so many changes of government, the first task each rival faced was to explain who the government was and how it differed from its predecessor, clarify its enemies, and make promises about its rule. In addition, given the low level of civic literacy, propagandists on all sides needed to engage in political education and raise important social issues.
The national theme deserves particular attention. While often choosing to avoid national issues, Ukrainian governments and Ukrainian radical socialists used the Ukrainian language as the medium for delivering their messages, and referred to the majority population as Ukrainians. They presented Russians, and in particular Russian Bolsheviks and the Russified upper classes, as enemies and foreign imperialists. The radical socialists went farthest in exploiting the national theme. In their pamphlets, they claimed that social revolution in Ukraine would concur with the national one and that only Ukrainian parties could bring about socialist revolution in Ukraine, whereas the Bolsheviks represented the Russian party of Russian workers ignorant of Ukrainian issues.
At first, the national question was largely ignored by the Bolsheviks, whose propaganda texts were distributed mostly in Russian promoting Lenin’s slogans of ‘Bread. Land. Peace’. Even those rare texts in Ukrainian, Velychenko suggests, were never seen as ‘Ukrainian’ publications because they had been translated from the Russian. The first specific reference to national issues in Bolshevik texts appeared in January 1920, and as of 1921, already 70 per cent of distributed materials were in Ukrainian and intended for the Ukrainian-speaking villages. These concessions were linked to the Polish-Ukrainian offensive of 1920, when the Bolsheviks started to exploit Ukrainian patriotism, presenting the national government as ‘Judas Petliuras’ who were selling the country to foreign exploiters. The information campaign surrounding the Polish-Soviet war evidences the importance of propaganda. While the Bolsheviks made use of their information agencies to present the offensive as an exclusively Polish invasion that would bring back Polish landlords, their Ukrainian counterparts failed to deliver the message of a joint offensive against the Bolsheviks, and this resulted in a lack of grassroots support and the campaign’s eventual failure.
By 1922, in Ukraine, the Bolsheviks had won the war of weapons, but did they also win the war of words? Velychenko maintains that in the war of words neither Ukrainian failures nor Bolshevik success should be exaggerated. Each side managed to sway opinion in its favour in specific places at specific times. Each side needed to deal with the propaganda of the other sides, since no one side controlled the production and distribution of all printed text messages on the territory it claimed to control, and could not isolate the audience from rival sources of information. These arguments take full shape in the concluding chapter that can be regarded as a stand-alone essay. While the textual analysis of the propaganda material in the main body becomes sometimes hard to follow, the conclusions present the reader with a very detailed, insightful synthesis of the principal ideas spread by rival governments, assessing their impact on Ukraine’s territory.
So how does this book differ from what we already know about Bolshevik propaganda during the civil war years? As the analysis of the sources suggests, in revolutionary Ukraine, the Bolsheviks needed to respond to unparalleled challenges and numbers of rivals, compared with other areas in the former imperial borderland. In Ukraine, the Bolsheviks not only needed to win acceptance for their urban-based revolution in predominantly agricultural regions and tackle foreign forces seeking control over the same territory, they needed also to ensure support of a nationally-alien countryside, and confront the national agenda of the Ukrainian governments and Ukraine-oriented warlords. Moreover, they also needed to fight an ideological battle against other radical socialist and Marxist parties who similarly claimed to represent the workers of Ukraine. The challenges faced defined the varied approaches of Bolshevik propagandists and ideologists, forcing them eventually to concede to national sentiments and implement them in their information campaigns.