510 Slavic Review the impulse to transcend nationalistic categories, and the author’s continual return to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a common point of reference for Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Poles aims to further undermine the all-Russian school of Russian and Soviet History that has characterized much Russian thinking about Ukraine since the nineteenth century. Indeed, the author’s ecumenical idea of Ukraine and the Polish-Lithuanian heritage in some senses anticipates a discourse about Ukraine among Ukrainian historians that has only become more pronounced since the inva- sion of 2022. At the same time, though, Prymak does at various times acknowledge a boundary between Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians living in the contemporary bor- ders of Ukraine. Crimean Tatars, for example, appear as part of “The Middle East,” but the Tatar scholar Ahatanhel Krymsky, who “accepted Ukrainian national identity” fgures as a Ukrainian. Meanwhile Jan Potocki appears as a Ukrainian because he owned an estate in Ukraine, even though his family played a key role in suppress- ing the Ukrainian hajdamak uprising and Potocki identifed himself exclusively with Polish and French culture. By refusing to ofer clear limits to his subject, Prymak cre- ates the impression that a Ukrainian is any person whom he chooses. Curtis G. Murphy Nazarbayev University Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine: Living Conditions, Violence, and De- mographic Catastrophe, 1917–1923. By Stephen Velychenko. Montreal: McGill- Queen’s University Press, 2021. 314 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Tables. $95.00, hard bound. doi: 10.1017/slr.2023.192 Stephen Velychenko’s latest work falls into two genres and, for this reason, might well be divided into two distinct parts. Its frst three chapters investigate—to borrow the title of Igor Narskii’s study—zhizn΄ v katastrofe (life amid catastrophe, 2001). It opens with a general survey of public health in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russian empire, focusing on state authorities’ eforts to ameliorate its subjects’ living conditions. The author then explores the consequences of the war-driven degradation and subsequent collapse of the state for the daily life of denizens of the Ukrainian provinces, exposed to the metaphorical and literal decay of the dead empire. This tableau—replete with images of infrastructural collapse, uncontrolled epidemics of typhus, cholera and venereal diseases, recurrent famine, and, fnally, Babylonian towers of unattended waste and excrement—is best described as Stygian. The well- documented account of the breakdown of conditions and mores serves to emphasize the centrality of material existence in analyzing political, diplomatic, and military developments of “Russia’s continuum of crisis” (Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution, 2002). The second part represents an exploration of violence or, more precisely, vio- lence committed against civilians by the combatants. Chapter 4 enumerates vari- ous practices of terror under the Bolshevik government. Dealing with the Cheka, “international brigades,” and others, the chapter appears to adopt an ethnic lens, interpreting Bolshevik measures as an attempt to suppress the resistance of the Ukrainians as Ukrainians. Entitled “Violence against Civilians: Ukrainian and Polish Government,” Chapter 5 contains very little on the activities of the Poles, but dis- cusses at length the origins and meaning of modern antisemitism. Somewhat at odds with the rest of the narrative, this demarche functions to bolster the historian’s major point: namely, that ideology, including that of antisemitism, played only a secondary https://doi.org/10.1017/slr.2023.192 Published online by Cambridge University Press