What Jabotinsky Had to Say about Ukraine

In his chilling address on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin denied the very existence of a Ukrainian nation. The fact that there is a country called Ukraine, with a capital, a government, and ambassadors is, in his view, a tragic mistake, artificially dividing a single Russian people with arbitrary borders. The culprit, Putin explained, was Vladimir Lenin, the Soviet founding father who granted the USSR’s constituent republics the right to secede, among other elements of self-determination, and thereby sowed the seeds of the union’s downfall. “Why was it necessary to appease the nationalists?” Putin fumed. The question is rhetorical—Putin is no doubt well-versed in Lenin’s writings on the question of Russia’s “national minorities.” But he is likely unaware of the role played by another revolutionary political theorist and public intellectual in the development of Lenin’s perspective on nationalism: the novelist, journalist, and Zionist visionary Vladimir Jabotinsky.

As a native of Odessa, Jabotinsky needed no convincing that Ukrainians were a distinct nation. As a Jew, he knew firsthand the resources the Russian state devoted to the repression of the empire’s ethnic minorities. And he understood that if the tsars were able to subdue Ukrainian nationalism, no other nation would stand a chance. In 1911, an exchange between Jabotinsky and the prominent Russian intellectual Peter Struve, published in the magazine Russian Life, forced this issue to the surface of public conversation in Russia.

Lenin’s own personal notebooks show that the Struve-Jabotinsky debate was among his first readings on what was then called the nationalities question. That debate began when Jabotinsky authored a series of essays in 1909 demanding that Russian intellectuals stop trying to sweep Ukrainian nationalism under the rug. “Mr. Jabotinsky can celebrate,” one Russian politician conceded, “he has lured the bear out of his lair.”