Today, Remembrance Day, we look at a few books about Ukraine and the First World War.

At the time of writing, there are 23 books in iDiscover with the general subject heading World War, 1914-1918 — Ukraine.  Among these is the two-volume 2014 set Velyka viĭna 1914-1918 rr. i Ukraïna (The Great War 1914-1918 and Ukraine) edited by Oleksandr Rei︠e︡nt.  Presented as an “academic-popular” publication, which can often mean something closer to the popular than the academic, this is a significant work published under the auspices of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences’ Historical Institute.  Its first volume contains essays and its second contains primary sources in the form of documents and witness accounts.

The oldest book we have in Ukrainian about Ukraine’s experience of WW1 is a 1955 book published in the Ukrainian diaspora, in Montreal.  Ukraïnsʹki sichovi strilʹt︠s︡i, 1914-1920 provides a history of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen, who started as part of the Austro-Hungarian army but then fought for the West Ukrainian People’s Republic which came out of the break-up of Austro-Hungary and would later become part of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UPR).

On 9 February 1918, a month after declaring its independence from Soviet Russia (and a month before the latter signed its own treaty), the UPR signed a treaty with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk, formally ending any UPR involvement in the Great War.  Yet while the UPR ruled from Kyïv, the city of Kharkiv had been occupied by the Red Army in December 1917 and declared the capital of a Bolshevik Ukrainian state.  Coming out of the bloodshed of WW1, Ukraine was now entering its first of four bloody years of fighting in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution; the eventual Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic would retain Kharkiv as its capital until 1934.  The UL’s copy of the 1981 book Texts of the Ukraine “peace” with an introduction and comments by Paul R. Magocsi hasn’t got a final classmark yet, but do write to slavonic@lib.cam.ac.uk if you would like to see it before it does.  We also have Stephan M. Horak’s 1988 The first treaty of World War I : Ukraine’s treaty with the Central Powers of February 9, 1918 and H.L. Nikolʹnykov’s russophone 1981 Brestskiĭ mir i Ukraina.

Books about Ukraine and WW1 continue to be published and we continue to collect them.  Two recent acquisitions (whose covers are shown at the start of this post) are examples of studies of the effect of the Great War on a specific region or group.  Both are monographs by V.I︠U︡. Bychko-Tokovyĭ about the participation of soldiers from the Novosanz︠h︡arsʹkyĭ district of the Poltava region.  His 2022 book takes an even more localised focus than the 2021 book it accompanies.  We do not tend to buy a lot of books that have such a specific focus, but examples such as these are very useful for giving our readers access to detailed case studies.

Mel Bach