Ivan Maistrenko's Borotbism is more than just a historical document. The debates during and after the'Ukrainian revolution'of 1917 still have a contemporary relevance - and Ukrainian debate was especially rich because if extended beyond the ranks of the Bolsheviks to the'national communist'parties, the Borotbisty and Ukapisty. Ukrainian'national communism'proved ephemeral when reborn in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but arguably because it failed to reconnect with earlier polemics, being, as Maistrenko predicted in the 1950s, little more than a cover story for the nomenklatura to pursue its self-enrichment.
The debate about the relative importance of national and/or social liberation is still of great importance, however, especially as Ukrainians arguably now have the former without the latter. In Putin's Russia, market capitalism has to struggle with the state, and the left has often been prisoner to imperial nostalgia. The popular hatred of'oligarchs'is as visceral in Ukraine as it is in Russia, but these sentiments are currently better tapped by opposition politicians like Yuliia Tymoshenko and Yuri Lutsenko. Both are often dismissed as'populists', but building a non-communist Ukrainian left remains as important a task today as it was in 1917 or 1954. -
Andrew Wilson, Senior Lecturer in Ukrainian Studies at the School of Slavonic&East European Studies, University College London
Much has been written on the 1917-20 revolution in Ukrainian, on the national movement, the Makhnovists and the struggle of the Bolsheviks. Yet there were others with a mass following whose role has faded from history. One such party was the Borotbisty, an independent party of Ukrainian revolutionary socialists seeking to achieve national liberation and social emancipation. Though widely known in revolutionary Europe in their day, the Borotbisty were decimated during the Stalinist holocaust in Ukraine. Out of print for over half a century this lost text by Ivan Maistrenko, the last survivor of this party provides a unique account. Part memoir and part history this is a thought provoking study which challenges previous approaches to the revolution and shows how events in Ukraine decided the fate not only of the Russian Revolution but the upheavals in Europe at the time.

Autorentext
Ivan Maistrenko (1899-1984) was a veteran member of the Ukrainian socialist movement, part of the generation that participated in the revolutionary struggle between 1917 - 1920. A Borotbist partisan in 1918-20 he was a journalist and opponent of Stalin in the 1920s becoming deputy director of the All-Ukrainian Communist Institute of Journalism in 1931. A survivor of the gulag he lived as a post-war refugee in Germany becoming editor of the Ukrainian workers paper Vpered, author of History of the Communist Party of Ukraine and The History of My Generation: Memoirs of a Participant in the Revolutionary Events of Ukraine he wrote numerous works on Soviet politics, the national question, Ukrainian history and socialist theory.