Volume XI · 1917 — 1922
A Ukrainian settler republic in the Russian Far East. Declared three times in the chaos of the Russian Civil War, never fully consolidated, absorbed into the Soviet Union before it could be mapped by anyone who recognised it. The shortest-lived and least-known of the lost states in this library. Its name in Ukrainian — Зелений Клин, Zelenyi Klyn, the Green Wedge — derives from the cartographer's habit of colouring Ukrainian settlement zones green on ethnographic maps.
Foreword
Of all the lost states in this library, Green Ukraine is the one whose existence is most contested. There is no doubt that a substantial Ukrainian-speaking population existed in the Russian Far East at the time of the Russian Revolution — perhaps 1.6 million people, settlers and their descendants who had moved east in the great wave of agricultural colonisation under the Stolypin reforms of 1906–1914. There is no doubt that this population organised Ukrainian-speaking schools, newspapers, cultural societies, military units, and political councils between 1917 and 1922. There is some doubt, and some scholarly disagreement, about whether what was declared at the four Ukrainian Far Eastern Congresses of 1917–1918 constituted a state in any meaningful sense.
The Lost Lands volume on Green Ukraine is the shortest in the library. The country in question was small in territory, brief in duration, and uncertain in its institutional existence. It is included in the library because it represents a specific feature of the Russian Civil War period that is, in popular historical accounts of the region, substantially absent: the substantial Ukrainian-speaking diaspora populations of the Russian Empire's eastern territories, which had been planted there by the late-imperial agricultural colonisation programmes and which produced, in the chaos of 1917-1922, a self-conscious political movement for autonomy or independence that is now substantially forgotten.
The volume's chapters cover the Stolypin-era settlement of the Russian Far East by Ukrainian agricultural migrants; the political organisation of the Ukrainian Far Eastern community in 1917-1918 under the four Ukrainian Far Eastern Congresses; the wartime declarations of autonomy under the Far Eastern Republic and the various White and Bolshevik regimes; the Soviet absorption of 1922 and the subsequent suppression of Ukrainian-language institutions in the Soviet Far East; the persistence of substantial Ukrainian-speaking minorities in the contemporary Russian Far East; and the cultural memory of Green Ukraine in the modern Ukrainian diaspora and in the post-1991 Ukrainian state.
The current Russian-Ukrainian war (since 2022) has produced renewed Ukrainian historical attention to Green Ukraine as a precedent for Ukrainian political claims, including (in some Ukrainian-nationalist commentary) claims that the Russian Far East should be considered historically Ukrainian territory. The volume's editorial position on this question is that the Ukrainian Far Eastern community was real and historically substantial, but that the contemporary political claims drawn from it are weak: the community was, even at its peak, a regional minority among substantial Russian, Korean, Chinese, and indigenous Siberian populations; the institutional state-formation attempts of 1917-1922 were limited and never fully consolidated; the modern Ukrainian-speaking minority in the Russian Far East is small (perhaps a few tens of thousands of Ukrainian-language speakers) and is not the basis of any substantive contemporary territorial claim.
"There were so many of us, and the Pacific was so far from Kyiv." — Ukrainian Far Eastern settler memoir, 1919, recorded by the historian Ivan Svit
The Book — six chapters
After the book
The Guide
Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Blagoveshchensk, the small surviving Ukrainian villages of the Primorye, the Ukrainian cultural societies of the Far Eastern cities, and the post-Soviet research archives.
The Routes
The Trans-Siberian Far East segment, Khabarovsk to Vladivostok via the small Ukrainian-tradition settlement zones.
The Errors
Green Ukraine was never a fully consolidated independent state. The contemporary Russian Far East is not "ethnically Ukrainian." Eight beliefs corrected.