A Village in Revolutionary Ukraine - (Ukrainian Voices) by Stephen Velychenko (Paperback)

About the Book

This book explores the unique 30-year diary of Kostiantyn Sambursky, a villager from Huzhivka in Chernihiv province. His daily entries offer rare insights into rural life, local history, and revolutionary events, highlighting personal, social, and political dynamics often missing from official histories.

Book Synopsis

This book examines the diary of a "common man," Kostiantyn Sambursky, that stands out among the very few such known works. It provides a detailed account of daily events for almost 30 years in one village: Huzhivka in the Chernihiv province. The author recorded his experiences daily. Although he travelled to Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Chernihiv, his focus is Huzhivka and settlements in an approximate 35-mile radius around it. Entries provide details about his education, work, neighbors, and life in surrounding settlements, together with asides, sometimes several pages long, on the history of nearby villages. The diary describes the comings and goings of rival armies, confiscations, requisitions, the activities of the local officials, the role of the church in local affairs, personal rivalries, and how land re-allocation occurred in this settlement of approximately 3,000 people. The diary provides invaluable insight into the human element of rural revolutionary Ukraine. It dwells on topics understandably glossed over or not mentioned at all in the historiography of the revolutionary decade.

Review Quotes

A Village in Revolutionary Ukraine is a history from below par excellence. It brings together a historical source and commentary to show how one of the most tumultuous periods of the 20th-century history was experienced in the Ukrainian-Russian borderlands, while also correcting misperceptions produced by writing and reading history from the perspective of centers and elites. A unique insight into the history of Ukraine and Europe.--Serhii Plokhy, Professor of Ukrainian History, Harvard University

Velychenko's masterful use of an extraordinary diary on the Ukrainian countryside vividly illuminates the relationships between the war-revolution of 1917-1922 and Stalin's terrible revolution from above.--Andrea Graziosi, Professor of Contemporary History, University of Naples Federico II

About the Author

Stephen Velychenko (Author)
Dr. Stephen Velychenko is Senior Research Fellow at the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto. He is author of Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine (McGill-Queens UP 2022), Propaganda in Revolutionary Ukraine (Toronto UP 2019), Painting Imperialism and Nationalism Red (Toronto UP 2016), State-Building in Revolutionary Ukraine (Toronto UP 2010), Shaping Identity in Eastern Europe and Russia (St. Martin's Press 1993), and National History as Cultural Process (CIUS 1992), editor of Ukraine, the EU and Russia (Palgrave 2007), as well as co-editor of Ireland and Ukraine (ibidem Press-Verlag 2022) and Rossia et Britannia: Skhid/Zakhid (No. 4, 2001).

Yaroslav Hrytsak (Foreword by)
Dr. Yaroslav Hrytsak is Professor of History at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv.