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Ukraine under the Soviets

by
Clarence A. Manning
Associate Professor of Slavic Languages
Columbia University

The Book and the Author

Clarence Augustus Manning (1893‑1972), Ph. D. 1915 Columbia University, and professor in that University for forty years, chairman of its Slavic Department for half of that, devoted most of his life to Slavic studies, and in particular the history and literature of Slavic peoples beyond Russia, concentrating more especially on Ukraine. His Oct. 7, 1972 obituary in Svoboda, the Ukrainian weekly of North America, reads in part:

Clarence Manning had already published a general history of Ukraine — it too is onsite — and the book transcribed here covers a sharper slice of Ukrainian history, only about thirty years long when he wrote. The publisher's blurb on the book jacket (clearly written, mind you, by someone who had only skimmed thru the work, but had a decided opinion about Communism quite in keeping with the lurid design of the jacket itself) has this to say:

In 1953 when Prof. Manning's book appeared, it was hard to realize and accept that the horrors described in it might be real, and aimed at nothing less than the genocide of Ukraine, its people, and its language. In 2022 when information is immensely easier to get and to share, they are on the contrary impossible not to believe, as we see them continued before our eyes in real time, with the same Russian propaganda justification as in the times of Empress Catherine and Lenin and Stalin.

For technical details on how this site is laid out, see below, following the Table of Contents.

 (p11)  Table of Contents

Technical Details

Edition Used and Copyright

The text I transcribed is that of the first and maybe only edition, published by Bookman Associates, New York, and © 1953 "by Clarence A. Manning". It is unillustrated. The copyright was not renewed in 1980/81, however, as then required by American law to maintain it, so that the book is now in the public domain: details here on the copyright law involved.

Pagination and Local Links

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is shown in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line); p57  these are also local anchors. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.

In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the author's own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.

Proofreading

As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if success­ful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.)

My transcription has been minutely proofread. In the table of contents above, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe the text of them to be completely errorfree; a red background would mean that the page had not been proofread. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each chapter's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

The printed book was indifferently proofread. Serious mistakes have been corrected with a bullet like this;º the many other errors were trivial, and I marked them with a dotted underscore like this: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the underscored words to read what was actually printed. Similarly, glide your cursor over bullets before measurements: they provide conversions to metric, e.g., 10 miles.

Some odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, etc. have been marked <!‑‑ sic  in the sourcecode, just to confirm that they were checked.

An important note is in order. As most of us know, the correct form of speech is "Ukraine" — not "the Ukraine", which latter, here too, is the work of Russian and Soviet propaganda (see Kathryn Graber's excellent explanation at Sapiens.Org). Prof. Manning is well aware of the difference: in his earlier and more general book on the history of Ukraine, also onsite, the mistake appears only twice in the text although the third time to most unfortunate effect in the title — but in this book, which has every appearance of having been rushed into print with somewhat less care, his usage is inconsistent: he or his publisher slipped up over thirty times. I made the editorial decision to correct all instances of this significant error; each one is noted, however, in the sourcecode.

Any over­looked mistakes, please drop me a line, of course: especially if you have a copy of the printed book in front of you.

Since the printed book is unillustrated, for an icon to indicate this subsite I fell back on the official flag of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which in its baldness perfectly epitomized the book's topic: the upper half of the Ukrainian national colors (which had already been adopted before the Soviet takeover) finds itself further squeezed to the lower third of the banner, crushed from above by the Soviet red.

Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)
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