The project investigates the activity, impact and identify of independent warlords in the Ukraine during the Russian Civil War, 1917-1921
Final Report Abstract
This study shows how commanders (calling themselves otamans after the leaders of the Early Modern Zaporozhian Cossacks) of autonomous peasant bands of insurgents helped shape the course of the Civil War in Ukraine, 1917–1922. The otamans (or “warlords”) repeatedly switched their loyalty between the different warring parties in the country and engaged in feuds with one another. The research provides a new perspective on the war in the country by moving the focus away from the politicians, parties and governments that have often been at the centre of narratives. It is also the first attempt to periodise the activity of the otamans. The work seeks to counter the nationalist romanticisation of the otamans as constant fighters for Ukrainian independence. At the same time, it disagrees with those Western historians who have dismissed the role of ideas in the otamans’ activity. It does this by examining how the otamans repeatedly constructed personae to accompany their repeated shifts in alliances. Impersonation and imposture were constant features of partisan warfare: the warlords donned the uniforms of opponents to infiltrate enemy-held settlements, conduct false flag operations or escape larger forces. However, the otamans also employed impersonation and imposture in other ways, for example by taking on noms de guerre, clothing, language and symbols that evoked the Zaporozhian Cossacks or proclaiming political slogans in order to mobilise support or cement alliances. In this way, they created and recreated identities to meet the demands of the current situation. As part of these personae, the warlords presented themselves as the representatives of the people against their oppressors. While their understanding of the people and oppressors might shift as they adapted their identities to the changing military alliances and situation, this populist tone was constant. This perspective makes the question of whether the political views expressed by the otamans represented their genuine beliefs a secondary issue. Instead, it views them as constitutive elements of the personae which the warlords sought to create and project and examines why the otamans chose the identities they did. This offers a new way of approaching the use of ideas by men of violence that can be adapted to other areas and epochs. It gives us a better understanding of the failure of the nationalist Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR): the sheer range of loyalties open to nationally conscious Ukrainians such as the otamans meant that the UNR did not automatically command their loyalty. It also places the activity of one of the most famous independent commanders of the period, Nestor Makhno, into a new context: rather than portraying him, as past historians have, as an anarchist, a peasant leader or an apolitical man of violence, it reveals him to be, like the other otamans, a serial “identity constructor”.
Publications
- "Makhno, Nestor Ivanovich", 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2014-10-08
Christopher Gilley
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.15463/ie1418.10117) - "Peasant Uprisings/Tambovshchina", 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2014-10- 08
Christopher Gilley
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.15463/ie1418.10127) - "The Ukrainian Anti-Bolshevik Risings in Spring and Summer 1919: Intellectual History in a Space of Violence", Revolutionary Russia, Vol. 27, 2014, No. 2, pp. 109–131
Christopher Gilley
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09546545.2014.964218) - "Ukrainskaia atamanshchina: natsionalizm i ideologiia v prostranstve nasiliia posle 1917 goda" [Ukrainian atamanshchina: nationalism and ideology in a space of violence after 1917], in K. Bruish and N. Kattser (eds.), Bol'shaia voina Rossii: Sotsial'nyi poriadok, publichnaia kommunikatsiia i nasilie na rubezhe tsarskoi i sovetskoi epoch [Russia's Great War: Social Order, Public Communication and Violence on the Boundary between the Tsarist and Soviet Epochs], Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2014, pp. 169–178
Christopher Gilley
- “Iurko Tiutiunnyk: A Ukrainian Military Career in World War, Revolution and Civil War”, The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Vol. 28, 2015, No. 2, pp. 328–352
Christopher Gilley
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13518046.2015.1030266) - “Otamanshchyna?: The Self-Formation of Ukrainian and Russian Warlords at the Beginning of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries”, Ab Imperio, 2015, No. 3, pp. 73–95
Christopher Gilley
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1353/imp.2015.0078)
