In Painting Imperialism and Nationalism Red, Stephen Velychenko traces the first expressions of national, anti-colonial Marxism to 1918 and the Russian Bolshevik occupation of Ukraine. Velychenko reviews the work of early twentieth-century Ukrainians who regarded Russian rule over their country as colonialism. He then discusses the rise of "national communism" in Russia and Ukraine and the Ukrainian Marxist critique of Russian imperialism and colonialism. The first extended analysis of Russian communist rule in Ukraine to focus on the Ukrainian communists, their attempted anti-Bolshevik uprising in 1919, and their exclusion from the Comintern, Painting Imperialism and Nationalism Red re-opens a long forgotten chapter of the early years of the Soviet Union and the relationship between nationalism and communism. An appendix provides a valuable selection of Ukrainian Marxist texts, all translated into English for the first time.

The contributors to this volume show that the themes of empire, colony, and national liberation movements can be addressed in a European continental as much as in Asian, Latin American, or African contexts. There is a further benefit from a within-Europe comparison: It calls into question the tendency to assume fundamental differences between "western" and "eastern" Europe, including the now largely abandoned distinction between a "western" nationalism, defined as a civil nationalism, and an "eastern" one, defined as ethnic. It also answers the question whether intra-European comparison of this kind is possible, in a context where post-Soviet scholarship is often invisible in Anglo-American scholarship. As Norman Davies reminds us, low public awareness of Europe's smaller and, in west-European minds, "more distant" nations, underlies the persistence of false generalizations about them, including assumptions like "that the whole of the west was advanced while the whole of the east was backward."

Between 1917 and 1923, Ukraine experienced an anti-colonial war for national liberation, foreign invasion, socialist revolution, and civil war simultaneously, resulting in almost unimaginable civilian casualties. In Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine Stephen Velychenko surveys the plight of civilians, details the socio-economic background to the political events that unfolded during this time, and documents the country's demographic losses. Focusing specifically on two causes of civilian death, deliberate killing and appalling living conditions, Velychenko outlines prewar improvements in living conditions and describes their decline after 1917. He examines governmental culpability in civilian death and notes that while ideologies and the inability of leaders to control subordinates were undeniably causes of violence, there were other factors at play. Velychenko mines previously unused archival sources to create a picture of the social conditions leading up to and during this catastrophic period, combining this data with stories and reports from memoirs of the period. Readers familiar with the explosion of violence against Jews at this time will find here a compelling framework for understanding the context of that violence.

Propaganda in Revolutionary Ukraine is a survey of domestic government and party printed propaganda in revolutionary Ukraine. It is the first account in English to study these materials using an illustrative sample of printed texts and to assess their impact based on secret police and agitator situation reports. The book surveys texts published by the Central Rada, the Ukrainian State, the Ukrainian National Republic, the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary Party, the Ukrainian Social Democratic and Labour Party, the Independentists, Ukrainian Communist Party (UCP), Ukraine's Bolshevik Party (CPU), and anti-Bolshevik warlords. It includes 46 reproductions and describes the infrastructure that underlay the production and dissemination of printed text propaganda. The author argues 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.