In this period there were half a dozen state or quasi-state bodies that succeeded one another.
By Dr. Georgiy Kasianov
Professor
Institute of the History of Ukraine
Harvard University
Introduction
In terminological discussions among Ukrainian historians since the end of the 1980s, the academic community has agreed that the concept of the “Ukrainian Revolution” comprises all events on Ukrainian territory between 1917 and 1920. Although the issue is not settled for good, the debate is now essentially about the precise time frame. Some experts suggest that this time frame should be extended to 1921 or 1922 to include the insurgent movement of 1921 and the peasant uprisings in Soviet Ukraine in 1922. Others consider the revolution to have finally ended with the loss of Eastern Galicia to Poland in 1923.1 One should also mention the approach that sees the Ukrainian Revolution as lasting from 1914 to 1921. This would include the period of the First World War as the time in which the Ukrainian national movement mobilized and would take in the movement outside the Russian-ruled part of Ukraine. In the present article, we hold to the view that sees the Ukrainian Revolution as lasting from March 1917 (the creation of the Central Rada) to 21 November 1920, when Ukrainian troops engaged in the Soviet-Polish war retreated to Galicia.
In this period there were half a dozen state or quasi-state bodies2 that succeeded one another, existed side by side, and were proclaimed or dissolved. These included the Ukrainian People’s Republic, first as part of Russia and then independent (7 November 1917 to 28 April 1918); the Ukrainian State (29 April to 15 November 1918); the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic (18 October 1918 to 21 January 1919); the Ukrainian People’s Republic (26 December 1918 to 21 January 1919 and 16 July 1919 to 20 November 1920); the Ukrainian Soviet Republic (12 December 1917 to July 1918) and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (6 January 1919 to December 1919 and February to May 1920). We could also include in this list a number of local bodies, for example, the Soviet Republic of Donetsk and Kryvyi Rih, which was formally part of the Russian Socialist Soviet Republic (27 December 1917 to 19 March 1918); the Soviet Republic of Odesa (3 January to 13 March 1918); the Socialist Soviet Republic of Tavria (19 March to 30 April 1918), and the Galician Socialist Soviet Republic (15 July to 21 September 1920). Ukrainian territory was occupied by German, Austro-Hungarian, Romanian, Polish, French, and Russian troops and was a theater of war between the White and Red armies. There were also large insurgent peasant armies (Nestor Makhno, Nykyfor Hryhoriiv, Zeleny [Danylo Terpylo], Yevhen Anhel), as well as hundreds and thousands of smaller units of partisans, deserters, or plain bandits.
From the Fall of Tsarist Russia to the Hetmanate (February 1917 to April 1918)
In the events of the Ukrainian Revolution between February 1917 and April 1918, there are a number of different strands of action: the fall of the autocracy and the establishment of the Provisional Government’s rule on Ukrainian territory; the consolidation of the Ukrainian national movement as a political force and its evolution from a demand for political autonomy to a program for Ukrainian political sovereignty (independence); the political conflicts within the Ukrainian movement and its conflicts with other political forces, especially the Provisional Government and the Bolsheviks; the revolution of October 1917 in St. Petersburg and the subsequent political and military confrontation between the Central Rada and the Bolsheviks; the development of the peasant movement and the spontaneous “black repartition”;3 the attempts to create a state (the Ukrainian People’s Republic); the peace of Brest-Litovsk and the occupation of Ukraine by German and Austro-Hungarian troops; the overthrow of the Central Rada and the establishment of the Hetmanate in April 1918.
In March 1917, almost immediately after the fall of the tsarist autocracy, parties that had long been forbidden resumed their activity, among them Ukrainian parties. The number of parties in Ukraine at this time is usually given as more than twenty, but this number includes the Russian as well as the newly formed or readmitted Ukrainian parties and other national parties (Jewish, Polish, etc.).4
Ukrainian historians have traditionally argued that, from the beginning, there were two competing currents in the Ukrainian national movement in 1917, autonomists and supporters of an immediate declaration of independence. The most recent documents, however, offer no evidence for this standpoint. In its first public declaration of 8 March 1917, the Society of Ukrainian Progressives (TUP)5 spoke of the implementation of Ukrainian national cultural rights through the principle of autonomy. On 25–27 March 1917, at the founding congress of the Union of Ukrainian Autonomists and Federalists, formed on the basis of the TUP, the slogan produced was “autonomy of Ukraine,”6 by which they understood political or national and territorial autonomy. This was also the position of the Ukrainian People’s Socialist Party, the Ukrainian Party of Labor, the Ukrainian Social Democratic Party, and the party with the largest membership, the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries.7 The autonomy solution was also supported initially, perhaps for tactical reasons, by the Ukrainian parties and associations that stood for the idea of independence, the Ukrainian People’s Party and the Union for Ukrainian Statehood.8 Immediately after the fall of the autocracy, therefore, in spite of numerous differences of opinion, there was at least a declared unity on the question of strategy, namely the achievement of national territorial autonomy within a federal democratic Russia. This relatively moderate position was supported not only by the parties but also by a variety of other organizations and movements, such as teachers’ organizations, soldiers’ and peasants’ congresses, cooperatives, and Ukrainian military formations.9
At the same time, practically all the national Ukrainian parties and organizations declared their support for the Provisional Government. In spite of this, the Provisional Government did not welcome and indeed resisted the rapid and initially successful organizational and institutional development of the Ukrainian movement, especially its demand for autonomy. Between the spring and autumn of 1917, the struggle between the Central Rada and the Provisional Government over the division of powers and responsibilities was a constant feature of politics in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian Central Rada was established in Kyiv at the beginning of March 1917.10 It was originally an attempt to create an all-Ukrainian political coordinating body under the leadership of the TUP but, under pressure from the Ukrainian Social Democrats, the “older” representatives of the Ukrainian movement had to recognize the equal rights of the other Ukrainian organizations. The conflict between the older political generation, represented by the TUP, and the younger generation, represented especially by the Social Democrats, was clear from the very founding of the Central Rada. The older generation attempted to restrict the Rada to the traditional functions of a national cultural movement, while the younger generation demanded, first of all, that more attention be paid to social and economic issues and, secondly, that the Rada have a stronger representation of non-Ukrainian organizations. In the first official announcement of the formation of the Central Rada and its leading bodies, it was said to have representatives of student, educational, scientific, and cooperative organizations, as well as the army and the Social Democrats.11 Its tactical and ideologically conditioned desire to have the widest possible representation resulted in the number of delegates expanding initially from 15 to 118 (April 1917), and then to 798 (August 1917). At its height, the Rada had 822 delegates, according to participants (Dmytro Doroshenko and Pavlo Khrystiuk). This rapid growth was the result of the collective entrance of whole organizations into the Rada, for instance, workers’, soldiers’, and peasants’ councils. There were delegates from the National Congress (elected at the beginning of April 1917), representatives of the above-mentioned councils (the most numerous), members of Ukrainian military committees, representatives of gubernia, district, and city organizations, Russian and national parties,12 as well as from organizations of ethnic minorities, professional, economic, and educational organizations.13 The Little Rada, a kind of executive committee, was established to manage the day-to-day affairs of the Central Rada. At the end of March 1917 the Central Rada called for an All-Ukrainian National Congress, which met in Kyiv from 6 to 8 April. More than a thousand delegates from a great variety of Ukrainian organizations attended.
It was the general opinion of contemporaries and later historians that this was the first and most impressive demonstration of the unity and influence of the Ukrainian movement. As things turned out, it was also the last. The congress unanimously accepted the slogan of Ukrainian national territorial autonomy within a “federal and democratic Russian republic.” There were similar national congresses throughout April at the gubernia level, as well as peasant congresses in the gubernias and districts, and the topic everywhere was national territorial autonomy. All this strengthened the arguments of the Central Rada in its discussions with the Provisional Government about the redistribution of power.
The Provisional Government reacted negatively to the relatively cautious demands for national territorial autonomy14 from the Ukrainian delegation when it arrived in St. Petersburg on 15 May 1917. At this time the minister of war in the Provisional Government, Aleksandr Kerensky, was in Kyiv. He met with the leaders of the Central Rada, discussed their demands, and requested that they “wait a little.” On 1 June the Provisional Government rejected the Central Rada’s demands for a nationally autonomous Ukrainian administration, claiming that, as a provisional government, it did not have the authority to make such a decision before the convocation of an all-Russian constituent assembly; moreover, the Central Rada was not a legitimate representative of the whole Ukrainian people. In the course of the negotiations, the Provisional Government expressed its concern that the territorial borders of the proposed autonomy were unclear, and this could create an extremely delicate situation.
The reaction of the Ukrainian Central Rada was predictable. At the beginning of June 1917 the All-Ukrainian Peasant Congress, led by the Socialist Revolutionaries, supported the demands of the Central Rada and instructed the All-Ukrainian Council of Peasant Deputies, present in full strength in the Central Rada, to draft a statute of autonomy for Ukraine.15 On 10 June 1917, at the second All-Ukrainian Military Congress, which had been prohibited by Kerensky, the Central Rada issued its Universal (proclamation) to the Ukrainian people, declaring that “from this day forth we shall build our own life” and calling on all Ukrainian organizations and local government bodies to establish “the closest organizational ties with the Central Rada.” It called on them to raise, on 1 July, a special tax “for our native cause” and to pay this tax to the treasury of the Central Rada.16 The Universal was unanimously supported by the Ukrainians but rejected by all the all-Russian parties and movements in Ukraine except the Bolsheviks, who became a kind of ally in this conflict with the Provisional Government.
On 15 June the Central Rada established an executive body, the General Secretariat. This was de facto a proto-government with responsibilities for land, finance, food supplies, the peasantry, relations among nationalities, and the maintenance of public order. The majority of the Secretariat was made up of Ukrainian Social Democrats. Its leader was Volodymyr Vynnychenko. The other Social Democrats were Borys Martos, Symon Petliura, Valentyn Sadovsky, and Ivan Steshenko. The Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries were represented by Pavlo Khrystiuk and the Socialist Federalists by Serhii Yefremov. There were also two non-party socialists, Mykola Stasiuk and Khrystofor Baranovsky.
The next two weeks were taken up with informal negotiations between St. Petersburg and Kyiv aimed at clarifying the positions of both sides. The contacts in Kyiv, members of the Constitutional Democrats and Mensheviks, argued that more attention should be paid to the demands of the Ukrainians.17 The Provisional Government itself, mired in a permanent political crisis, did not have the leverage to control the situation in Ukraine.
On 27 June the General Secretariat issued a declaration summarizing in broad terms, not very clearly for the most part, what it saw as its principal tasks and the main focus of its activity: reorganization of local authorities and administration (its nebulous sentences could be interpreted to mean that they were to be subordinate to the Central Rada); Ukrainization of the educational system, the army, and financial organizations; preparation of a land law; normalization of the situation in the villages, and so on. On 29 June 1917 there was a meeting between a delegation of the Provisional Government (Irakli Tsereteli, Mykhailo Tereshchenko, Nikolai Nekrasov, Aleksandr Kerensky) and the Committee and General Secretariat of the Central Rada. The Ukrainians demanded that the Provisional Government recognize the Central Rada as the supreme power in the region, that it accept a document regulating the autonomy of Ukraine until such time as it could be regulated by a constituent assembly, and that it prepare a document containing the principles of land reform. The Russian delegation demanded that the Central Rada accept representatives of non-Ukrainian nationalities and insisted that the General Secretariat required the approval of the ministerial cabinet of the Provisional Government.
The results of the negotiations were made public in the Second Universal of the Central Rada on 3 July 1917. This included the promise that it would accept “representatives of the revolutionary organizations of the other peoples who live in Ukraine,” prepare legislation for Ukraine’s autonomous structure to be submitted for confirmation to the Constituent Assembly, and support the Provisional Government in the Ukrainization of the army (formation of separate units composed exclusively of Ukrainians).18 One month later, on 4 August 1917, there came the “Provisional Instructions of the Provisional Government to the General Secretariat,” in which the General Secretariat, appointed by the Provisional Government on the basis of recommendations from the Central Rada, was designated the supreme organ of the Provisional Government in Ukraine. According to this document, the authority of the General Secretariat extended to the gubernias of Kyiv, Volhynia, Poltava, Chernihiv, and Podilia, encompassing internal affairs, finance, agriculture, education, trade and industry, labor law, and nationalities.19 It was only from this point that the General Secretariat really began its activity.
Negotiations, appeals, conflicts over the division of responsibilities between St. Petersburg and Kyiv, plans and declarations about the organization of administration—all these had increasingly symbolic and little practical significance. In both St. Petersburg and Kyiv, the powers of the central organs became increasingly volatile. Between the spring and autumn of 1917 there was a constant fragmentation of power, both horizontally across the territory and vertically among the different political forces. From the center, the Provisional Government attempted to establish a vertical order appropriate to the administrative territorial structure of the empire (gubernia and district commissars as executive authorities, with zemstvos and city dumas as organs of local self-administration). The Central Rada, on the other hand, with its executive and provisional organs (General Secretariat, Committee for the Defense of the Revolution), was also very quickly attempting to establish its own division of powers within the framework of national autonomy. The workers’ councils (soon followed by soldiers’ and peasants’ councils) were a third actor. And, finally, there were the factory committees in the enterprises and the garrisons and logistic units, whose role in the summer of 1917 was becoming increasingly volatile, given the growing revolutionary mood and the disintegration of the army.20
The horizontal fragmentation of power was expressed by the fact that orders from the central authorities were ignored, sabotaged, or even disobeyed and by the increasing de facto independence of local authorities. In the case of cities, this might be the city duma, the district commissar, or the local soviet; in the countryside, it might be the village assembly or the leaders of the local self-defense units.
By the autumn of 1917, the already difficult social and economic situation had deteriorated sharply. The weakness of the bodies responsible for law and order, the expropriation propaganda of the left-wing parties, especially the Bolsheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, the weakness of the central government, the constant decline in living standards (rising prices, lack of basic food and industrial commodities, speculation), the disintegration of the army—all these factors were leading to chaos. There was an increase in criminality in the cities, especially in the district centers and larger market towns. Shops and houses were plundered, wine cellars and factories were laid waste, and various forms of street crime were a daily occurrence. Not just criminal elements but increasingly soldiers and “ordinary citizens” were engaging in robbery and theft.21
The relatively peaceful summer of 1917 in the countryside was followed in the autumn by a flare-up of peasant expropriations. A growing sense of impunity, of “everything-is-permitted,” was increased by Socialist Revolutionary agitation for the redistribution of land. A contemporary observer recalls the ferment among the peasants caused by demobilized soldiers, deserters, and amnestied criminals: “They poisoned the village,” wrote Volodymyr Leontovych, “with their rage, their disrespect, yes even their hatred of law, morality, and justice, their hatred of everything that could restrict or rein them in. They incited the peasants to arbitrariness, destruction, and murder.”22 Another contemporary and chronicler of the events of 1917–20, Dmytro Doroshenko, writes that by the end of the summer of 1917, “all appeals from the center to maintain peace and order and to await the decisions of the constituent assembly had lost all force. There were disturbances everywhere: theft of cattle and property from the estate owners, unauthorized expropriation of land, chopping down trees, arson, and the plundering of distilleries.”23 According to official data, there were as many as 525 such incidents perpetrated by dissatisfied peasants in the Ukrainian gubernias between July and the first half of October 1917.24
Between August and October 1917, there was an evident radicalization of the Ukrainian movement. The Social Democratic and Socialist Revolutionary congresses, the meeting of the All-Ukrainian Soviet of Peasant Deputies, and the congress of the “enslaved nations of Russia,” which took place in September and October, all demanded an extension of the powers of the Central Rada and the General Secretariat (both politically and territorially) up to the creation of an autonomous republic. At the initiative of the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries, the Third All-Ukrainian Military Congress passed a resolution on 20 October 1917 on the independent creation of a “Ukrainian democratic republic.” On 25 October the Bolsheviks seized power in St. Petersburg. The Provisional Government fell. Relations with the central authorities changed radically. The Provisional Government was replaced by a power that saw extreme forms of demagogy and the use of force as the solution to political and social problems. On the nationality issue, the Bolsheviks supported the principle of self-determination for tactical reasons but, in the concrete instance of Ukraine, this was subordinate to “class” and to “revolutionary necessity.”
Subsequent to the events in St. Petersburg, the Ukrainian Bolsheviks attempted to repeat the 25 October scenario in Kyiv. The uprising led to armed clashes with troops of the Kyiv military district. The Central Rada later resumed power peacefully. It did not approve of the coup in St. Petersburg but did nothing to support the Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks, who had left the Central Rada immediately after the coup, initially took a loyal attitude to the developments.
On 1 and 3 November 1917 the Ukrainian Central Rada declared that it was taking all military installations in Ukraine under its control except the detachments at the front.25 Posts were created in the General Secretariat for ministers of military affairs (Petliura), food, justice, post and telegraph, and transport. The Central Rada also declared the extension of its rule to the gubernias of Kherson, Kharkiv, Katerynoslav, and Tavria (not including the Crimea).
The Third Universal was proclaimed on 7 November. This Universal declared the founding of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR) while remaining in federation with the Russian Republic. It proclaimed that all power in Ukraine (the nine gubernias) now rested with the Central Rada and the General Secretariat. The Universal also announced the abolition of estates and other forms of land “not worked directly by the proprietors,” which would now become the “property of the toiling people” without compensation. Until such time as the constituent assembly met, the administration of all matters pertaining to land would be in the hands of the General Secretariat and the land committees.26 It proclaimed the eight-hour day, the abolition of the death penalty, freedom of the press, religion, and association, and the inviolability of person and domicile. It also proclaimed the principle of national-personal autonomy for non-Ukrainian national minorities living in Ukraine and demanded immediate peace negotiations.27
When the Central Rada and the General Secretariat published their principles and slogans, they obviously did so with the intention of continuing to act within a legal framework. All local organs that had previously functioned under the Provisional Government would continue to operate until the constituent assembly, to be elected on 27 December 1917 and convoked on 9 January 1918, had made its decisions. According to decisions and orders of the Central Rada and the General Secretariat, decisions of the Provisional Government would remain in force on the territory of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, except where they had already been overruled by the Ukrainian authorities. Instructions were given to local authorities prohibiting unauthorized appropriation of land or property and deforestation. Attempts were made (unsuccessfully) to reunite the southwestern and Romanian front into one Ukrainian front. At the level of intentions, resolutions, and declarations, everything was directed toward the maintenance of law and order and a certain status quo until the convocation of the constitutional assembly.
In most cases, these intentions, resolutions, and declarations had little effect. The Ukrainian authorities had practically no real leverage to make them a reality. There was a colossal shortage of human resources, and the Ukrainian movement itself was not united in its intentions or actions. The social base of the movement was small and unreliable. At the time of the Third Universal, the leaders of the Central Rada and the General Secretariat had the support of the Ukrainian intelligentsia28 (the social base of the new rule), the politicized elements of the Ukrainian peasantry, the Ukrainized troops, and representatives of the Ukrainian zemstvos and the Ukrainian cooperative movement. The overwhelming majority of the Russian intelligentsia, the urban middle stratum, the industrial workers, representatives of urban government, officials, and the officer corps all opposed the Ukrainian movement or were neutral at best.
The potentially strongest support for the Ukrainian Revolution, the peasantry, rapidly lost all interest in politics with the advent of the “black repartition.”29 The prospect of a redistribution or appropriation of land that entailed no sanctions and was not controlled by anyone was far more attractive than waiting for the solution to the land question promised by the Central Rada. In any case, the relevant sections of the Third Universal could be interpreted as a call for a “black repartition,” and there were many who saw it that way.
In such a situation, the villages sank very quickly into anarchy. The “organization of national life,” previously seen as the pathway to “owning our land,” lost all relevance. District commissars reported in November that “there is no longer any authority in the village.” According to these reports, “the government attempted to implement the Central Rada’s Universal, but local people just plundered and did not recognize the authority of the Central Rada,” and “everyone just does as he wishes.”30
In November and early December 1917 the General Secretariat, now the government of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, established the Ukrainian Central Bank, recognized the Council of People’s Commissars that had been created in St. Petersburg on 27 October 1917 as a regional government, and established the General Court. Initial talks were begun with Germany about a truce. At the same time, attempts were made to reach an understanding with the Entente. All this was happening against the background of drastically worsening relations with Bolshevik organizations in Ukraine and with the Bolshevik government in St. Petersburg. On 17 November 1917, in telephone negotiations between Mykola Porsh and Joseph Stalin, a member of the Council of People’s Commissars, it became clear that the government in St. Petersburg recognized only the Ukrainian Congress of Workers’, Peasants’, and Soldiers’ Deputies as the supreme power in Ukraine. Some workers’ and soldiers’ councils in Ukraine, influenced by the Bolsheviks, had already passed resolutions in support of this idea in November.
Elections to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly took place at the end of November 1917. The results alarmed the Bolsheviks. They received only 10 percent of the popular vote in Ukraine, while the Ukrainian parties received 77 percent. They were also worried by resolutions passed by councils in the larger cities of Ukraine (Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, Poltava, Katerynoslav), which, while supporting the Council of People’s Commissars in St. Petersburg, also recognized the Ukrainian Central Rada as the authority in Ukraine.31 The Ukrainian Bolsheviks pursued their traditional methods. While they took part in relatively legitimate forms of political struggle, such as preparing the All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets, they also made preparations for an armed coup and carried out intensive agitation against the Central Rada. In mid-November the Kyiv Revolutionary Committee, led by the Bolsheviks, declared the Central Rada to be counterrevolutionary and began preparations for an armed uprising.
For the Central Rada and the General Secretariat, the moment had now come in which the use of military force was necessary. The leaders of the Ukrainian Revolution, however, were not prepared for this development. Practically all the fighting units that could have been deployed to protect the Ukrainian People’s Republic were either independent of the Ukrainian leaders or had actually been trained in opposition to their principles and ideals. The representatives of the Ukrainian Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries, who dominated in the Central Rada, were opposed to the formation of a regular national army. In a time of war, they were satisfied with the Ukrainization of units in the Russian army.
Ukrainian units had already begun to emerge spontaneously in the army in March 1917. Ukrainian conscript clubs were formed. Vicha32 were convened at which demands were made for the formation of Ukrainian units. Although in April 1917 the Central Rada supported an initiative of Ukrainian recruits to form a volunteer regiment named after Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the Rada played no role in its organization (the regiment had 3,500 soldiers and was sent to the front in July 1917). At the first All-Ukrainian Military Congress, in May 1917, a Ukrainian General Military Committee was formed under the leadership of Petliura. This committee was subordinate to the Central Rada and was in charge of the organization of Ukrainian units in the army. In reality, the Ukrainization of troop units depended on individual commanders. The First Ukrainian Corps (about sixty thousand soldiers and officers)33 was formed on the southwestern front in the summer of 1917 under the command of Pavlo Skoropadsky. This fact is often given as an example of the successful Ukrainization of the army. Vynnychenko gave an account of the general situation: “The military units themselves began to reform. Regiments arose under the leadership of various hetmans and other Ukrainian individuals: the Sahaidachny Regiment, the Gonta Regiment, the Doroshenko Regiment, and so on. Once those regiments came into existence on their own initiative and had been officially recognized, they considered themselves somewhat independent, not subject to the general order. They only wanted to be part of the Ukrainian Corps at the front. But the famous ‘three corps’ did not really exist. The Russian command was frightened into giving approval for their formation but had no intention of doing anything about it. So these regiments could not be sent anywhere. This created confusion and chaos in troop movements and groupings. The commanders were angry and blamed the General Committee for disorganizing the army and interfering in its affairs. The regiments and soldiers were angry and accused the General Committee of inaction and inability to carry out its tasks. The General Committee was also angry and made superhuman efforts to put an end to the confusion.”34
The truly scandalous and tragic fate of the Hetman Pavlo Polubotok Regiment was indicative of relations between the Central Rada and the General Secretariat on the question of military organization. The leaders of the Central Rada not only distanced themselves from this initiative but thwarted it.35 The Free Cossacks,36 with a strength estimated to have been around sixty thousand men, was another armed force formed on an initiative from below but was ignored by the Central Rada and the General Secretariat alike. The statute of the Free Cossacks was not confirmed until November 1917, but even afterwards its sections were basically civilian organizations without any real status. It was not until January 1918, when armed conflict with the Bolsheviks had already broken out, that small units of Free Cossacks were formed in Kyiv. They then took part in the conflict, but without any noteworthy success. The creation of battle-ready Ukrainian units took place literally en passant, always lagging behind events. At the initiative of Petliura and the commander of the Kyiv military district, Viktor Pavlenko, two Serdiuk (Cossack) divisions were started in November that then defeated an attempted Bolshevik uprising in Kyiv on 30 November 1917.
As the winter of 1917–18 began and the Ukrainian People’s Republic feared for its existence, it lacked a serious military force. Its overall strength was a little over 25,000 bayonets, 1,680 swords, and 44 guns, around 16,000 of which were concentrated in Kyiv and the surrounding area.37 These would need to be strengthened by the Ukrainized units on the southwestern and Romanian fronts (at least 50,000 soldiers).38 However, when fighting began between the troops of the Petrograd Council of People’s Commissars, the Ukrainian Bolsheviks, and the military units of the Central Rada, these units existed only on paper.
On 3 December the All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets opened in Kyiv. The Ukrainian Bolsheviks were in a minority (they represented 86 of the 300 soviets). On 4 December the Petrograd Council of People’s Commissars sent a manifesto to Kyiv signed by Lenin and Trotsky. This was the “Manifesto to the Ukrainian People with an Ultimatum to the Ukrainian Rada.” In this document, which recognized the right of the Ukrainian People’s Republic to independence, there was a protest against the actions of the Central Rada, which was allegedly trying to disorganize the common front (this refers to the movement of Ukrainian units on the northern and northwestern front to the Ukrainian front, formed from the merging of the southwestern and Romanian fronts in November 1917). The manifesto demanded that the disarming of Soviet troops and Red Guards in Ukraine cease, that transit be refused to military units heading for the Don and the Kuban to join Aleksei Kaledin (who was fighting against the Council of People’s Commissars), and that armed units of the Council of People’s Commissars be allowed free passage to the front to fight Kaledin. In case the Ukrainian People’s Republic did not give a satisfactory reply within forty-eight hours, the Council of People’s Commissars “would deem the Rada to be in a state of open war with Soviet power in Russia and Ukraine.”
The majority of delegates rejected the ultimatum. The Bolshevik delegates,39 having assessed the situation, moved to Kharkiv, which was already in the hands of Bolshevik forces.40 In Kharkiv, they met with the delegates of the Third Congress of Soviets from the Donbas and Kryvyi Rih, which declared itself the All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets. The congress elected a Central Executive Committee which, in turn, formed a government, the People’s Secretariat, under the leadership of Evgeniia Bosh. The Ukrainian Soviet Republic was proclaimed. There were now two governments in Ukraine that would soon enter into armed conflict with each other. On 17 December 1917 the Executive Committee in Kharkiv proclaimed the Ukrainian Central Rada a “counterrevolutionary force” and declared war against it.41
At the end of 1917, the general situation in Ukraine was as follows. The administrative organs of the Provisional Government (gubernia and district commissars) were still formally in charge in the towns, gubernias, and districts, as were the city dumas. The Central Rada and the General Secretariat were formally the government in Kyiv and in the nine Ukrainian gubernias. These were in confrontation with the Central Executive Committee and the People’s Secretariat in Kharkiv. Bolshevik Revolutionary Committees were also active in the big cities. This list would be incomplete without the land committees, the zemstvos, and the local workers’, soldiers’, and peasants’ councils, which were controlled in some cases by the Bolsheviks, in other cases by the Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, Ukrainian Social Democrats, and Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries. Finally, there were the command headquarters at the front and the administrative bodies in the rear. The country teemed with armed men over whom there was little or no control. In the towns, there were the army garrisons and army units with their command headquarters (at this time the army was rapidly disintegrating), Red Guard units, armed formations of Russian Bolsheviks, the armed forces of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, officers in training in military training centers and schools, and Red Cossacks. In the countryside there were the self-defense units, the Free Cossacks, groups of army deserters, and criminal elements.
It was against this background of chaos that armed conflict broke out between the Ukrainian People’s Republic and the Bolsheviks. In December 1917 the Bolsheviks had established control over Kharkiv and then captured Poltava, Chernihiv, and Katerynoslav. The General Secretariat was active in reorganizing the military forces of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and, at the same time, commenced negotiations with representatives of the Central Powers in Brest-Litovsk.42
To forestall a Bolshevik uprising in Kyiv, on the night of 17–18 January 191843 military units of the Central Rada took control of thirty sites in the city from which an uprising could be launched or that could be attacked (factories, workshops, the administration of the southwestern railway). On the day before, the Revolutionary Committee in Kyiv had called for an uprising against the Central Rada. In this dramatic situation, on the night of 24–25 January, as an armed uprising hung in the air in Kyiv and the troops of the Ukrainian Soviet government (whose strongest units had come from Soviet Russia) were successfully advancing against Kyiv from the east, the Ukrainian Central Rada proclaimed its Fourth (and last) Universal.
The Universal declared the Ukrainian People’s Republic to be “independent, subject to no one, a free sovereign state of the Ukrainian people.” The Council of People’s Ministers (the former General Secretariat) was given the task of making peace with the Central Powers. Once peace had been achieved, the army would be dissolved and replaced by a “people’s militia.” All the democratic rights proclaimed in the previous Universal were confirmed, as was the law passed the day before on national-personal autonomy. Elections to regional and district councils and city dumas were set for the time when the demobilized soldiers would return from the front. The previous decision to transfer land to the “toiling people” without compensation was also confirmed. A state monopoly of land was introduced, as was control of the banks “by the state and the people.” The Universal called for a struggle against the Bolsheviks.44 This Universal, which most scholars regard as a final declaration of independence, was the result of tense discussions between the two leading parties in the Rada, the Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries, and between these and the non-Ukrainian parties (the Russian Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bund were against declaring independence). What is clear is that the leaders of the major Ukrainian parties saw this action as something forced on them, since they continued to speak of a federation of “democratic nations.” This declaration of independence was, on the one hand, a response to Bolshevik aggression and, on the other hand, an important step in the context of the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk.
The Bolshevik-led uprising in Kyiv began on 29 January 1918. At the same time, Bolshevik forces advanced on Kyiv from Poltava and Chernihiv.45 The strongest forces of the Central Rada were concentrated in Kyiv to suppress the uprising, which is why the Bolsheviks were able to advance on Kyiv without too much difficulty. (Recent estimates suggest that the ratio of forces between the Bolsheviks and the Central Rada was seven to one;46 other sources suggest three to one.) On 5 February 1918, the commander of the military forces under the People’s Secretariat of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic gave the order to storm Kyiv, where the uprising was still in progress. On 8 February Soviet forces occupied the city, and the Central Rada abandoned it. It might be thought ironic that during those same days, with cannons thundering all around, the Central Rada was discussing the draft law on workers’ control of enterprises and the eight-hour day.47 The city was subjected to the most brutal terror. The Bolshevik commander, Mikhail Muraviev, ordered that officers, haidamakas, monarchists, and “all enemies of the revolution” be killed in the streets. These “enemies” also included residents who spoke Ukrainian and individuals with a cultivated appearance.48 On 12 February the Ukrainian Soviet government moved from Kharkiv to Kyiv, where it remained until 28 February. It then fled before the advancing German army toward Poltava, Katerynoslav, Taganrog and beyond.
In the situation at the time, it was only assistance from the Central Powers that could have rescued the Central Rada and its government. On the night of 8–9 February, a peace treaty was signed between the Ukrainian People’s Republic and the Central Powers. On 18 February, after a formal request for military assistance from the UNR, German troops began to advance into Ukrainian territory. They were followed ten days later by Austro-Hungarian units. On 8 May 1918 German troops occupied Rostov on the Don, having crossed the Ukrainian border and driven the Bolsheviks from Ukrainian territory. Earlier, on 28 March 1918, an agreement was signed on establishing the “zones of influence” of the “occupying powers.”49 All this was portrayed as military assistance for an ally. In the initial period the occupying troops were forbidden to take military action against the local population in the event of “unfriendly actions” (which rarely occurred then). They would have to seek redress from the UNR authorities.50
When the Central Rada and the UNR Council of People’s Ministers returned to Kyiv on 5 March, they found themselves in an extremely difficult situation. The whole vertical power structure had to be reestablished. At the same time, however, they had to pay attention to the obligations to their new allies (especially the deliveries of food), which in turn required an effective power structure. But this power structure was lacking. The Central Rada passed laws, made regulations, and took decisions in many areas, from the organization of the army to the introduction of Ukrainian as the official language of the state, from the minting of money to the creation of national holidays (for instance, 9 March, the birthday of Taras Shevchenko), from the establishment of a state sugar monopoly to the founding of a Ukrainian national university. At the beginning of March 1918, the national currency (the hryvnia), the state coat of arms (the trident of Volodymyr the Great), and the citizenship law of the Ukrainian People’s Republic were introduced. The main problem was that most of these decisions were never actually implemented, whether because of the lack of an effective administrative apparatus, the continued failure of the government to implement them owing to personnel changes caused by differences of opinion among the various parties, or because of an elementary lack of organizational ability and political will on the part of the state’s leaders. One need only realize that the Council of People’s Ministers spent the whole month of March on its own reorganization. According to a communication from the German Foreign Office, “It is completely out of the question that the Rada, with its own officials, could manage to carry out the delivery and transport of food, since it has no regular and functioning organization. And that cannot be changed quickly, for the Rada lacks both money and an effective executive apparatus (army, gendarmerie, courts, police).”51
The Central Rada and the Council of People’s Ministers held only nominal power, maintained by the bayonets of the German and Austro-Hungarian armies.52 In the towns and at railway junctions, order was maintained by garrisons of the “allies.” There was practically no control over the villages, where anarchy ruled. The peasantry recognized no power, while spontaneous land redistribution and plundering of estates continued as before. This was often accompanied by conflicts among the peasants themselves, and there were open battles between individual villages. As the journalist Colin Ross reported to German headquarters on the Eastern Front, “There is no central power in the state capable of occupying an area of reasonable size. The whole country is divided into individual areas that sometimes do not extend beyond the borders of a district, a town, or even a village. In these areas, power is in the hands of political parties, individual political adventurers, robbers, and dictators. One finds villages surrounded by trenches, in conflict with each other over estate land. Some areas are ruled over by otamans who enforce their rule with the help of stewards and mercenaries. They have machine guns, artillery, and tanks, just as the population itself has acquired a host of weapons.”53
In April, the commanders of the German and Austro-Hungarian military forces themselves began to “maintain order,” especially in the villages. On 6 April the commander of German troops in Ukraine, Field Marshal Hermann von Eichhorn, issued his cultivation order at the start of the spring sowing.54 The Central Rada overruled his order and issued one of its own, thereby entering into open conflict with its allies. By this time, the latter were searching intensively for an alternative to the Rada. Its dissolution was made easier by the fact that it had no noticeable influence on the situation in the country, as well as by the presence of an active opposition in the form of large and middle landowners, from estate owners to wealthier peasants. They were the principal victims of the “black repartition,” which they attributed equally to Bolshevik demagogy, spontaneous land division, and the laws passed by the Central Rada that had the effect of practically legalizing it. A number of congresses and assemblies of representative organizations and political parties of the large and middle landowners stated openly, in March and April 1918, that a change of power was necessary and that the German and Austro-Hungarian military should be asked for help “in restoring order.” Similar attitudes prevailed in an influential part of the Ukrainian movement that stood in sometimes hidden and sometimes open opposition to the leaders of the Central Rada and the government controlled by the Socialist Revolutionaries and Social Democrats. In early April 1918 Yevhen Chykalenko, a leading representative of the Ukrainian movement, made a note about conversations in this milieu: “Everyone is waiting for the Germans to take everything into their own hands and appoint ministers, as our own people will not manage to establish order and bring peace to our young state.”55
A large part of the Russian-speaking urban population, as well as the overwhelming majority of the urban bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, were passive allies of the opposition. By April 1918 the Central Rada had no serious social base. The Ukrainian peasants, having themselves divided up the land, had “forgotten” about national self-determination, while the intelligentsia was too weak. Nor did the Rada have an adequate battle-ready army (the consequence of ideological experiments) or external allies. Under such circumstances, a change of regime was a mere “technicality.”
The initiative was taken by the German military commander in Ukraine and the German ambassador in Kyiv, Philipp Alfons Mumm von Schwarzenstein. In mid-April contact was established with Pavlo Skoropadsky, founder of the Ukrainian People’s Hromada (Community), the core of which consisted of ex-military and personally loyal officers. The informal negotiations resulted in the assumption of certain formal obligations. Skoropadsky was confronted with concrete demands whose implementation would guarantee him the “friendly neutrality” of the German military leaders.56 The same demands were presented to the Council of People’s Ministers of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, where they were certain to be rejected.
The circumstances of the overthrow are generally known. On 23–24 April, a meeting took place between the military commanders of the occupation and the ambassadors of Germany and Austria-Hungary. The decision was taken at this meeting for a change of regime in Ukraine (at the same time, negotiations were being held and documents signed for an “economic agreement” with the government of the Ukrainian People’s Republic).57 On 26–27 April, German units in Kyiv disarmed the units of the First Ukrainian Division (the so-called Syn’ozhupannyky) and the Ukrainian artillery regiments. On 28 April a German military group entered the chamber of the Pedagogical Museum, where the Little Rada was meeting, broke up the meeting, and arrested some of those present (the pretext for this was the kidnapping of the banker Adam Dobry). On 29 April there took place what turned out to be the final session of the Ukrainian Central Rada (Little Rada), at which the constitution of the Ukrainian People’s Republic was approved (titled “Statute Concerning the State Structure, Rights and Freedoms of the Ukrainian People’s Republic”). The Congress of the All-Ukrainian Union of Landowners, called by the Ukrainian Democratic Agrarian Party, met on the same day in the Kyiv circus. This congress not only announced the overthrow of the Central Rada and of the government of the Ukrainian People’s Republic but also proclaimed a new ruler, Hetman Skoropadsky. In a parallel move, forces of the Ukrainian People’s Hromada took all the essential junctions and centers in Kyiv under their control, while the Germans maintained their “neutrality.” The overthrow took place with little bloodshed. Three Ukrainian Sich Riflemen who were guarding the Pedagogical Museum lost their lives when the building was stormed.
The Hetman’s first act as legislator, his “Manifesto to the Whole Ukrainian People,” announced the formation of the Ukrainian State, annulled all the laws and decrees of the Central Rada and the Provisional Government, dissolved the land committees, and restored private ownership of land.58 The Ukrainian People’s Republic and the Ukrainian Central Rada de facto ceased to exist.
Skoropadsky’s Ukrainian State
The regime that came to power following the coup of 29 April 1918 differed little from its predecessor from the point of view of legitimacy and representativeness. It was supported by the large landowners, prosperous peasants, industrialists, and the financial bourgeoisie. The parties and organizations that supported Skoropadsky included the very small Ukrainian Democratic Agrarian Party, the Union of Landowners (a grouping of large landowners), and the Union of Industry, Commerce, Finance, and Agriculture (Protofis), a conglomerate of branch organizations from trade, industry, and finance. Finally, there was the Constitutional Democratic Party, which formed the government for just about the whole period of Skoropadsky’s rule.
In conditions of revolution, civil war, general anarchy, and economic collapse, the political strength and capacity of these social strata, parties, and organizations to influence events were very limited. The only real force that could be relied on to maintain law and order were the German and Austro-Hungarian troops. But their actual task in the country was a very narrow one—that of maintaining the structures necessary for the “exchange of goods” between Ukraine and the Central Powers. The ranks of Skoropadsky’s allies and supporters were also disunited when it came to his policies. The Democratic Agrarian Party soon went into opposition over his choice of Russian-speaking officials from the tsarist period to fill the posts in the bureaucracy, army, and police. Influential members of the Union of Landowners disagreed with Skoropadsky’s plans for land reform, the basic idea of which was to create a broad stratum of small and medium landowners. Representatives of the Union who were members of the Committee on the Land Question, which was meant to prepare the reform, blocked the committee’s work and delayed the implementation of the reform. Similarly, representatives of the Protofis forced the Hetman to take extremely unpopular measures against the workers (abolition of the eight-hour day, repression of trade unions) and hindered, where possible, the Ukrainization of the state. The same could be said of the representatives of the dominant Constitutional Democrats in Skoropadsky’s government who, in their majority, were opposed to an independent Ukrainian state from the outset.
In present-day studies, one finds quite different assessments of the political nature of Skoropadsky’s state. Some claim that “the Hetmanate of 1918 was an authoritarian bureaucratic regime in which the head of state had almost dictatorial powers. It lacked a representative body, had no separation of executive and legislative functions in government, and clearly restricted basic democratic freedoms. It had a small social base, and the exercise of government had a very makeshift character.”59 Others describe the Hetmanate as a “military-bureaucratic dictatorship.”60 The Hetmanate is also often described in the traditional manner as a “puppet regime.”61 It is a commonplace of apologetic historical writing that Skoropadsky restored the state-building tradition of the Cossacks. In any case, no one questions the small social base of the state or its critical dependence on an external force.
It should not be overlooked that for all its attributes of dictatorial power (the Hetman personally appointed and dismissed the government, was commander in chief, and exercised the functions of the highest court), this regime was politically very weak. Although censorship and various prohibitions and restrictions on the freedom of speech and assembly were imposed in the first few days, political forces and individuals continued to act legally or semi-legally in the Ukrainian state, often opposing the Hetman, holding congresses, and publishing newspapers prohibited by the government. It was typical of this period that in May 1918 the opposition parties organized their congresses in the environs of Kyiv “in the underground” after they had been banned in the city or even broken up by force. This was a symbolic demonstration of the limits of the ruler’s influence.
The brief imprisonment of some representatives of the Ukrainian People’s Republic was the sharpest form of repression of the political opposition.62 Vynnychenko’s imprisonment, on 10 July 1918, was typical. He was arrested under suspicion of having organized an uprising. His imprisonment lasted less than twenty-four hours and ended with the Hetman personally apologizing to the “injured party” through his chief of staff.63 This also indicates the difference between the Hetman and the German commanders, who were demanding that Vynnychenko be handed over to them. The arrest of Petliura, the head of the All-Ukrainian Union of Zemstvos, in July 1918 is another example, except this time it was the Germans who were demanding proper treatment of the arrested person because the German command was then trying to create a broader base for the political spectrum represented in the Hetman government. Skoropadsky was also inclined toward cooperation with the Ukrainian socialists.
The best-known instance of “severe” repression against representatives of the Ukrainian People’s Republic is that of the trial of members of the Central Rada by a military court. Vsevolod Holubovych, Oleksandr Zhukovsky, and four government officials were arrested in connection with the kidnapping of the banker Dobry. All the accused received short prison sentences. What is also remarkable is that preparations by the Ukrainian parties for an uprising against the Hetman were made in an almost legal manner through cultural and educational organizations.
The weakness of Skoropadsky’s government was particularly evident in its attempts to “maintain order” in the villages. The armed units of the Hetmanate (the Hetman Guards) were unable to gain control because the situation in the villages had been radicalized by the government’s attempts at normalization. They were unable to achieve their goal without the assistance of the occupation troops. The efforts of the occupying troops and the Hetman’s security forces to restore order also demonstrated a lack of understanding of local conditions. They underestimated the ability of the villages to organize themselves and offer military resistance, notwithstanding all the available information about massive arsenals of weaponry that existed after the collapse of the front and about the fighting ability of soldiers just recently returned from the war. The punitive expeditions and executions carried out by those in power just poured more oil on the flames and provoked the peasants into actions that in many cases grew into organized uprisings.
The first encounters with the occupying troops took place at the beginning of March in Podilia in the Austro-Hungarian zone. The conflict here was provoked by Polish volunteer formations whose members were often owners of businesses and estates that had been plundered. Revenge was frequently a motive in such conflicts and often led to extreme cruelty.64 Peasant uprisings began in mid-May 1918. Sometimes they were provoked by attempts to confiscate weapons owned by the peasants, sometimes by the requisitioning of grain, and sometimes by attempts on the part of landowners to reclaim expropriated land. News that the Hetman intended to implement a land reform, in which the peasants would have to pay compensation for the land they had acquired, was a cause of unrest, as were the instructions on the distribution of the harvest issued in late May and early June 1918.65 Unrest was further increased by measures to confiscate harvests, collect compensation, and reclaim the property of the returning landowners, as well as by attempts to use force to compel the peasants to harvest grain.66
The actions of the peasantry varied in scale. There were local rebellions that involved armed attacks and murders (sometimes of whole families) of landowners who had returned to their estates. Prosperous peasants were also sometimes the object of such attacks. There were also organized actions that sometimes extended over whole districts. One such uprising was that organized by the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries in the districts of Tarashcha and Zvenyhorod, in the Kyiv gubernia, between May and August 1918, in which, according to various sources, between twenty and forty thousand people were involved. The uprising was suppressed only with the help of the German military.
By the end of July, the uprisings had spread to the gubernias of Kyiv, Chernihiv, Katerynoslav, and Poltava. According to the estimates of Field Marshal Eichhorn, 10 to 12 percent of the peasants had taken part in “agrarian unrest,” in other words, 2.5 million people.67 According to calculations of the modern historian Viktor Savchenko, in the period up to the autumn of 1918 the occupying troops in Ukraine lost 22,000 officers and men, the forces of the Hetman more than 30,000. The number of insurgents between May and September 1918 is estimated to have been around 80,000.68 With the assistance of the occupying troops, the situation in the villages was stabilized by the autumn of 1918.
During this period, government institutions took reasonable steps to resolve the agrarian problem in a civilized manner. In June 1918 the government passed a law permitting the state land bank to purchase land for the purpose of selling it to the peasants (the maximum area of each land parcel purchased was limited to 27 hectares) and allowing the private sale of land without limitation. But the estate owners were in no hurry to sell their “surplus” parcels of land, while the peasants, like the land bank that was meant to provide the loans for this purchase, lacked the necessary funds. So the Hetman’s intention to create a broad social stratum of small agricultural enterprises as the social foundation of the state came to nothing. It was also a project that everyone opposed: the peasants who had appropriated land without payment; the large landowners, who wanted to maintain their monopoly; the left-wing Ukrainian parties, which favored the socialization of land; and the occupying troops, which wanted the kind of large-scale economy that would guarantee them the deliveries of grain they required. So the Hetman’s plans, not infrequently sabotaged in small ways by the governing institutions themselves, remained hanging in the air, with the result that the Hetman had to do without the broad social support he had hoped for. Even as a project, it took a long time for the agrarian reform to get off the ground. It was only at the end of October that documents became available with concrete instructions about the implementation of the reform.
In the meantime, the situation in the towns was becoming critical. Speculation flourished in both food and industrial commodities, and food deliveries sometimes were not carried out. The Hetman’s policies toward labor (the removal of restrictions on working hours, the expansion of the rights of employers, the restriction of trade-union activities) led to a growing number of strikes, in which the Bolsheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries played an active role. Here as well, the Ukrainian State was not master of the situation, and the occupying troops had to intervene. The most telling example was the railworkers’ strike of July 1918.69 The strike ended only when the German and Austro-Hungarian troops took control of a number of railway junctions and carried out reprisals70 against the organizers and participants in the strike.71 But it should be noted that in this case as well the Hetman government looked for a civilized solution to the problem. A number of the strikers’ economic demands were met (payment of wages and provision of food).
In spite of all these problems that resulted from the consequences of war and revolution, with their destruction and disorganization of social life, Skoropadsky’s Ukrainian State was an area of relative peace and order, especially when compared with Bolshevik Russia, where a bitter civil war was raging. The period from May to September 1918 was a period in which, to some extent, systematic and thoughtful efforts were made to create the structures and infrastructure of Ukrainian statehood. It was a very impressive period when seen against the background of the chaotic experiments and organizational incompetence of the Central Rada.
The first months of Skoropadsky’s rule saw the creation of a central state administration, a government (Council of Ministers), and a centralized system of justice (courts, Senate). Under the Hetman, a more or less stable network of financial institutions was reestablished, and the work of local organs of self-administration was resumed (gubernia and district starostas). Where problems had arisen with organs of local self-administration (city dumas, zemstvos),72 they had been resolved by the autumn of 1918. Skoropadsky established an organization with police powers to maintain public order, the Hetman Guard. He took concrete steps to establish an army, one of his major achievements. He persuaded the Central Powers to give him what remained of the Black Sea fleet. Preparations for the organization of a future army were begun in May and June 1918. A general staff was created and a system of service grades and ranks established, as was the army structure. A law was passed on general conscription, and the leading personnel of the army were named. Most of Skoropadsky’s army (eight army corps, four cavalry divisions) was of course made up of these military leaders. Training and demonstration units were also established in the autumn (once again made up mostly of leading personnel). By November 1918 the armed forces of the Ukrainian State included the cadre units already mentioned, a Zaporozhian Division (Kharkiv gubernia), the Zaporozhian and Black Sea Cossacks (Zaporoz’kyi kozats’kyi kish, Chornomors’kyi kozats’kyi kish) stationed in Koziatyn and Berdychiv, the Serdiuk Division in Kyiv, the Sich Riflemen (Bila Tserkva), and the hundreds of the Guard. In October, a beginning was made to create a special volunteer corps consisting of officers from the tsarist army.73 The total strength of the army and other armed formations in the Ukrainian State was sixty-five thousand.74
Ukrainization had a special place in Skoropadsky’s domestic policies. A network of Ukrainian primary schools was initiated in May and June 1918. The Hetman began a systematic process of Ukrainizing the state apparatus, the army, and the universities, although this caused some conflicts. Skoropadsky was the founder of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. His attempt to create a state apparatus represented the only systematic effort to do so during the whole course of the Ukrainian Revolution. In these attempts, he relied on the support of the occupying troops (an essential factor of political stability) and on a relatively small stratum of large landowners, as well as members of the old bureaucracy and officialdom. One could say that Skoropadsky was successful in creating a state infrastructure, but his system-building plans were clearly in contradiction with reality and met with resistance, both open (from the workers and peasants) and covert (from his “allies” in the country).
The situation of the Hetman and of the state he had created became less and less secure as the influence of the occupying troops waned. The German and Austro-Hungarian defeats on the Western Front and in the Balkans in the second half of 1918, as well as the partial withdrawal of troops from Ukraine, reduced their physical support for the regime. The Hetman became more active in probing the possibility of an alliance with the Whites, not least because of pressure from the Russians in his entourage. Whether because of the weakness of Skoropadsky’s regime or as a result of its being not harsh enough, a well-organized opposition covering a broad political spectrum had emerged by November 1918. A circular of 31 October from the Ministry of the Interior listed the clandestine and illegally active organizations that were hostile to the state and had to be combated. It included the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik), the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine, anarchist parties and circles, the left-wing Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries, and the right-wing Russian Socialist Revolutionaries.75 It is remarkable that in their agitation against the government in Ukraine76 all the organizations listed, to the extent that they did not seek open conflict, met with no special problems. It suffices to note that local revolutionary committees carried out quite successful agitation against the government in the spring and autumn of 1918. The Bolsheviks in the neutral zone were practically unhindered as they prepared partisan groups for an uprising against the Hetman. The left-wing Ukrainian parties likewise had no special problems in their oppositional activity, which went as far as participating in the organization of peasant uprisings and strikes. The Ukrainian National Union was formed in August 1918, a coalition of left-wing Ukrainian parties and the social and professional organizations that they controlled.
There were other opposition forces not mentioned in the ministry’s circular. These included the All-Ukrainian Peasant Union, influenced by the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries; the All-Ukrainian Union of Zemstvos, led by the Ukrainian Social Democrat Symon Petliura; and organizations such as the Kyiv National Center, which brought together Russian nationalists and monarchists dissatisfied with the Hetman’s Ukrainization efforts. As already mentioned, the Hetman’s allies completely rejected Ukrainian statehood. The Constitutional Democrats, who were dominant in the government, accepted the need for a Ukrainian state only as a transition to the restoration of Russian unity. The big bourgeoisie and the industrialists saw the Ukrainian state merely as a tactical ruse. The “restoration and reunification of the fatherland” was a major theme in the speeches of delegates to the last congress of Protofis at the end of October 1918.77 On 17 October 1918 a declaration of nine members of the Council of Ministers spoke of the necessity of establishing a federation with a non-Bolshevik Russia.
At the same time, the declarations and actions of the Ukrainian National Union became increasingly radical. They demanded the neutralization of “anti-Ukrainian elements” in the government and the promotion of patriotic forces. Its leaders (Vynnychenko and Mykyta Shapoval) negotiated with Skoropadsky on the formation of a coalition government and the calling of a national congress (planned for 17 November), while simultaneously planning an uprising against him. At the beginning of November they secured the support of the commanders of the Sich Riflemen, the Black Sea Cossacks, and the Zaporozhian Division,78 all of which were units of the Ukrainian State army. The military aspects of the plan were prepared by Yevhen Konovalets and Andrii Melnyk, commanders of the Sich Riflemen. Skoropadsky had been informed of the preparations for an uprising but undertook no serious countermeasures. What is more, on 9 November 1918 he secured the release of Petliura, Porsh, and Yurii Kapkan from prison, individuals who would certainly join the uprising. On the night of 13–14 November there was an illegal meeting, in the building of the Ministry of Transport, of representatives of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, the Ukrainian Social Democratic Labor Party, the Ukrainian Socialist Federalist Party, the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Independentists, and representatives of the army (Sich Riflemen). The decision was made to mount an uprising against the Hetman. A Directory79 under the leadership of Vynnychenko was elected at the same meeting.
The international situation prompted the search for strong new allies. The Bolshevik government was preparing a military intervention.80 The capitulation of Turkey and Bulgaria in October had accelerated the military as well as the political collapse of Austria-Hungary and the German Empire. The withdrawal of their troops had begun at the end of October and continued until the beginning of 1919. The Whites on the eastern border of Ukraine were becoming increasingly stronger, and secret negotiations were being carried out with some of their representatives. Skoropadsky was looking for a compromise or a temporary resolution of the conflicting pressures from the Ukrainian movement and from those who supported the restoration of a “united and indivisible Russia.” Having lost his main supporters, Austria-Hungary and Germany, he needed to turn to another external power that could deal with the elemental violence of the peasant war. The Entente states were then negotiating over future zones of influence, and “southern Russia,” in other words, the territory of the Ukrainian State, was being mentioned.
On 14 November 1918 the Hetman signed an “edict” that has been described in later literature as “federalist,”81 in which he declared that “Ukraine must take the lead in the establishment of an all-Russian federation, the final goal of which will be the restoration of Great Russia.” The edict was a signal to the Entente and to the anti-Bolshevik forces allied with the Entente, as well as to the Hetman’s own allies in Ukraine who wanted Ukraine to be reunified with Russia. It was published on 15 November. The uprising, led by the Directory, began on the same day. Troops that had gone over to the Directory advanced on Kyiv from Bila Tserkva, Berdychiv, and Kharkiv. As they approached Kyiv, they were joined by increasing numbers of insurgent peasants. The Ukrainian National Union occupied government offices, driving out representatives of the Hetman administration. The counteroffensive of troops loyal to the Hetman had little effect. In some cases (the Serdiuk Division), they joined the uprising. On 19 November the troops of the Directory and the insurgent groups were outside Kyiv but decided not to storm it because the German command had abandoned its neutrality and placed its units at the entrances to the city. This move was forced on them, as an entrance of insurgents into the city would have hindered the withdrawal of German troops. In addition, the Entente had demanded that the German command allow no insurgents to enter Kyiv because, at this time, they were negotiating with Skoropadsky. The army of the Directory withdrew to Vinnytsia and Fastiv.
The Hetman declared a general mobilization, but it was only the large number of tsarist officers in Kyiv that responded. The Directory countered on 27 November by declaring its own general mobilization. Petliura, in charge of the Directory’s troops, issued an order in which he promised an extra parcel of land to those peasants who joined the Directory’s troops “on time.”82 By the end of November, the Directory’s troops and the insurgents had taken control of most of the district centers of Left- and Right-Bank Ukraine. In the first half of December they captured Odesa and Mykolaiv, only to give them up under pressure from the Entente, which had a large military presence there.
On 14 December the troops of the Directory took Kyiv, having broken the resistance of a small number of officer groups. The Hetman’s military formations in the city went over to the insurgents. On the same day, Skoropadsky published his instrument of abdication and, some days later, left the city and the country in a German sealed train. The Directory entered the city in triumph on 19 December 1918.
The Directory and the “Second” Ukrainian People’s Republic
On 26 December 1918, the Declaration of the Directory of the Ukrainian People’s Republic was published. This document proclaimed the rule of the workers and peasants in Ukraine. The Directory abolished all the laws of the Hetmanate and reintroduced the eight-hour day and the right to strike. The land of the “small and laboring peasantry” was declared to be their inalienable property. The remaining land would be given to peasants who had little or no land “to be worked,” first of all to those who had taken part in the uprising. The “overall administration” of all land was in the hands of the Directory and would be carried out by the National Land Administration. This decision applied not only to estates but also to lands owned by monasteries, the church, and the state. The definitive decision on the exercise of power would be taken by a Labor Congress. The “exploiting classes” would lose their right to participate in government institutions (the expropriation of their property was not mentioned in the declaration).
On the same day, the Directory named the government of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Council of People’s Ministers, under the leadership of the Social Democrat Volodymyr Chekhivsky. The government would consist of representatives of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Labor Party, the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries, the Socialist Independentists, and the Ukrainian Socialist Federalists.83 A representative of the Poalei Zion Party also joined the government as minister for Jewish affairs. There were no representatives of Russian or Polish parties. As events would later show, this government was really more of a technical body of the Directory, with the latter making all important decisions itself. The task of the government was to implement those decisions. But this turned out to be highly problematic. From the very first days of the second Ukrainian People’s Republic, the country experienced a kind of déjà-vu: extreme weakness of the central authority, disorganization and anarchy in the provinces, political and personal intrigue and conflict at the top, organizational inability of the leaders, and local power structures that were either lacking or weak. All this was painfully reminiscent of the experience of the Central Rada and General Secretariat. Added to this was a whole series of difficult internal and external circumstances.
The support of the masses during the month of the uprising against the Hetman disappeared as soon as the Directory entered Kyiv. The soldiers in the Directory’s army, estimated to have been between 150,000 and 250,000 men, returned to the villages to take part in the distribution of land. By January 1919, the army had only around 50,000 men.84 In reality, it was the units established under the Hetman that formed the core of the army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. The army established following Petliura’s mobilization of 27 November 1918, after the fall of the Hetman, when masses of volunteers joined, required significant organizational effort for which resources were not available. Among the population, especially among the peasantry, there were very few who wanted to be “mobilized.”
On 8 January 1918, the Directory passed a law that would give recruits an extra five dessiatines (one dessiatine = 2.7 acres) of land and a loan for the purchase of equipment. But this measure made little difference, as the peasants had already appropriated both in the course of the “black repartition.” The size of the army was increased at the last minute, when fighting was already under way. Recruits were generally regarded as unreliable, and desertion was a mass phenomenon. In contemporary memoirs, one finds examples of recruits who disappeared the day after receiving their uniform and weapon. The fighting ability of the reliable units was decreased by this mobilization. For example, a unit of Sich Riflemen that had begun the uprising against Skoropadsky, most of whose senior and junior officers came from Galicia, was expanded during the uprising to a division and later to a corps. According to one observer, “Nobody asked—and, under the circumstances, this was not possible anyway—who was joining the ranks of the Riflemen, who this or that volunteer was: the most important thing was to reach full strength; the main thing was a first, a second, a third company.85 It is no wonder that many unreliable elements joined the corps, of little military value and even less moral worth.” The same observer writes that in the corps, following the capture of Kyiv, there were ten to fifteen desertions daily.86
Building the army was also hindered by the already mentioned disputes among the leading politicians of the Ukrainian People’s Republic.87 Leading individuals in the parties represented in the Directory and in the government competed for influence over the military, each one championing his own ideas about state-building. The sharpest conflict was the one between the two most influential members of the Directory, Petliura and Vynnychenko, over the organization of the army.88 In the selection of leading personnel, the differences were often not about professional suitability, experience, or competence but about ethnic origin and commitment to “the Ukrainian cause.” Moreover, in order to secure influence over and gain real support from the military, these various leaders of the Directory sought to ingratiate themselves with the otamans. Petliura, for instance, regularly gave large sums of money to individual otamans for “the organization of the army.”89
During the period of Skoropadsky’s rule, the leadership had been expanded and a general staff had been created. In the assessment of specialists, this leadership personnel of fifteen thousand men was adequate, with a competently organized mobilization, to establish an operational army. The left-wing leadership of the Directory, however, had no trust in those officers who had served under the ancien régime. This created confusion and disorganization in the building of the army, angered the officers, and had a negative effect on the fighting morale of the army’s leading personnel. The career soldiers were also unhappy with the way in which the army was increased by incorporating whole groups of insurgents.
This form of mobilization, incorporating already existing insurgent units commanded by otamans into the army, was forced on the UNR by the circumstances of war, which made normal mobilization very difficult. The active army that was created was therefore made up not just of regular soldiers trained according to military rules but also of insurgents whose leaders, although they formally recognized the authority of the Directory and its military commanders and acted in their name, actually brought in armed detachments that were under no one’s control, used partisan methods of warfare, and were not suited for regular military engagements. Such units operated under the official aegis of the Directory. Units under Otaman Zeleny (Danylo Terpylo) were active in the Kyiv gubernia, those under Yevhen Anhel in the Chernihiv gubernia, those under Yukhym Bozhko in the Kherson and Mykolaiv gubernias, and units under Matvii Hryhoriiv in part of the Katerynoslav gubernia. Dozens of smaller insurgent groups had become part of the UNR army. According to contemporary estimates, the total strength of these insurgent units and “armies” in mid-1919 was between 15,000 and 200,000.90
Hundreds of these insurgent units and peasant “armies” had leaders whose political orientation was unclear and changed according to the situation and the leaders’ interests. Some of the insurgents were influenced by the Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries, and many supported the Bolsheviks or went over to their troops as they approached. One of the largest insurgent armies, that of the anarchist Nestor Makhno, controlled a large part of the Katerynoslav gubernia and was fundamentally opposed to rule of any kind (although it used Bolshevik slogans and allied itself with them for certain periods). The leaders of the smaller units were mainly interested in the defense of their own villages or local areas under their control. Otamans in the provinces sometimes proclaimed their own republics91 or declared their personal rule over a certain territory. There were about 120 different “peasant republics” during the Ukrainian Revolution.92 These otamans frequently fought not only against the Directory, the Bolsheviks, the Whites, and the intervening foreign troops, but also against one another. The leadership of the Directory was unable to deal with this elemental form of violence. Having to fight a war on many fronts, it failed not only to establish a stable leadership over the insurgents but also to maintain stable lines of communication and information.
The otamans were autonomous to such an extent that at critical moments they changed sides. At the height of the struggle against the Bolsheviks in January 1919, Otaman Zeleny left his position outside Kyiv and withdrew with his units to the forest. The gap that this created in the front made it significantly easier for the Bolsheviks to take the city. In the battle against the Bolsheviks at Bila Tserkva in June of that year, it was only after a gala dinner in his honor and the promise of a share in the war booty that Zeleny agreed to join the UNR army and work with Yurii Tiutiunnyk. After the successful defense of Bila Tserkva against the Bolsheviks in August 1919, Zeleny and his “army” again left the Directory.
At the beginning of February 1919 Hryhoriiv, who had fought on the side of the Directory, went over to the Bolsheviks. The occasion for this was a secret agreement between the Directory and the Entente (French commanders) to withdraw Directory troops behind the Tiraspol–Voznesensk–Kherson line. First of all, Hryhoriiv, against Petliura’s orders, fought the Entente troops that had begun to occupy the area. Then, on 2 February, he joined the Bolsheviks.93 In the midst of fighting the Bolsheviks, in August 1919, Otaman Bozhko also refused to obey orders from supreme command. He commanded the Second Division of the UNR, made up of insurgents who had chosen their own commander.
These examples give some idea of the extent of the chaos that existed in the army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic as a consequence of “otamanship” and the narrow scope that the leaders of the UNR had in their direction of the war. Added to this was the situation within the leadership, which did not exactly promote efficiency. Following the successful overthrow of the Hetman, there was acute political and personal competition among the leaders, which had to do not only with ideological differences but also with personal ambition.
Attempts to move forward with the creation of state structures remained fragmentary and unsystematic, proceeding against the background of a war on many fronts, anarchy, peasant warfare, and economic disorganization. The Labor Congress, called by the Directory to resolve issues of state power, failed to do so because of differences of opinion among the delegates and disputes within the Directory itself, where the alternatives of soviets or dictatorship were debated endlessly. At the final session of the congress, total power was given to the Directory until the next congress. This, alongside the Act of Union with the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic on 22 January 1918, was the most important decision of the congress and the most significant for the state-building of the second Ukrainian People’s Republic.94 Events at the front made it impossible to create functioning institutions, rebuild the economy, or resolve social problems. The Directory, which had come to power thanks to the uprisings of the peasant masses, very quickly lost the support of this largest sector of society because it had nothing to offer them. The peasants had already divided up the land. The land law of 8 January 1918, which allowed fifteen dessiatines of land to “working” peasant households and five dessiatines to the poorest peasants, did not arouse any great enthusiasm among the peasantry.95
The law had practically no influence in the towns. Among the politically active population, the workers supported the Bolsheviks, while the Russian-speaking bourgeoisie, officials, and the petty bourgeoisie supported the Whites. The Directory’s inability to keep its own people under control also made it unpopular. Although the Directory had restored civil liberties, commanders of regular troop units and insurgent detachments acted according to their own discretion. For instance, the commander of the Sich Riflemen, Yevhen Konovalets, prohibited the activities of a number of trade-union organizations in Kyiv on 22 December 1918, justifying this by the need to fight the Bolsheviks. Otaman Petro Bolbochan, commander of the Directory’s troops in Left-Bank Ukraine, closed down a workers’ congress in Kharkiv (controlled by the Mensheviks) and a peasant congress in Poltava. This led to arrests and public executions, which understandably undermined support for the Directory, as it was identified with this assault in public opinion and in oppositional propaganda. Most of the urban population was mainly interested in survival and would accept any government that could ensure stability.
The attack by Bolshevik troops96 against Left-Bank Ukraine and the Donbas began from the area around Kursk toward the end of December 1918. A response to the four notes sent by the Directory to the Russian government arrived on 6 January. The Russian government rejected the “unjustified assumption” of the Directory that Russian troops were responsible for the fighting and maintained, as it had done in 1918, that it was a conflict between the Directory and the Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government of Ukraine, established by the Bolsheviks in November 1918. The Directory declared war on Soviet Russia on 16 January 1919, when Bolshevik troops had already pushed deep into Ukrainian territory and captured Kharkiv and Chernihiv. To the very end, Vynnychenko had hoped for an agreement with the Bolsheviks and had even offered the Moscow government various forms of treaty and proposed a united effort against the Whites and the Entente. However, the military (Petliura, Bolbochan) put pressure on Vynnychenko. One of their arguments was that a declaration of war against Soviet Russia would increase the chances of support from the Entente. On the same day the Directory, the Ukrainian parties, and the Peasant Union had a meeting with the UNR military command to discuss the question of power. Some of those present (the military) argued for a military dictatorship, others for a “dictatorship of the working peasantry.” The demand was also raised to establish a Soviet republic. In the end, they decided to leave things as they were.97
In the southern gubernias, the few operational army units of the UNR98 withdrew to the southwestern gubernias after some brief successes in January in Katerynoslav, Kherson, and Mykolaiv. The insurgent units either declared themselves neutral or went over to the Bolsheviks and fought against the Directory. The south of the country sank into total chaos. Simultaneously active in this region were the troops of the Directory, volunteer officer units, Bolshevik units, military revolutionary committees, large insurgent groups (Makhno, Hryhoriiv), as well as dozens and hundreds of small groupings of peasants, bands of deserters, self-defense units created by German settlers, Entente troops, and the remaining German and Austro-Hungarian garrisons that were waiting to be evacuated.
The situation was similar in Left-Bank Ukraine and parts of the Right Bank that were controlled by the Directory. The great mass of the population, the peasantry, were waiting for the Bolsheviks because they expected to benefit from their definitive resolution of the land question. A communication from the information bureau of the UNR army in February stated: “It is the opinion among the peasantry that they will be given the land in the winter, but in the summer it will be the pany99 who control the land…. The people want the Bolsheviks to come as soon as possible because they will crush the pany and give their possessions to the people.”100
In the towns and around the major railway junctions, the scenario of 1918 was repeated. As Bolshevik troops approached, the local revolutionary committees established by the Ukrainian Bolsheviks would start an uprising. Southern Ukraine and the Crimea became a theater of war between the Bolsheviks, the Whites, and the troops of the Entente.
At the beginning of February 1919, the Directory101 and the government were forced to move to Vinnytsia, then on 6 March to Proskuriv, and on 18 March to Kamianets-Podilskyi. In April and May, the greater part of the Directory was in Rivne, with some in Stanyslaviv. The government was scattered between Stanyslaviv, Rivne, and Odesa. Negotiations with the French occupying troops had been taking place in Odesa since January.102 Although the Directory restructured the government a number of times, and the government made laws and regulations, its rule was often restricted to its location at the time. Authority at the front, in the best of cases, was in the hands of the army command (Petliura and the general staff); at worst, it was in the hands of the otamans. In the towns and villages formally under the control of the Directory, power was effectively exercised either by the military stationed there or by no one.
In March 1919, the Directory lost its last hope of international support. Under pressure from Hryhoriiv’s troops, who were fighting on the side of the Bolsheviks, the Entente troops and the volunteer officer units left Kherson and Mykolaiv and, in April, left Odesa. The UNR’s few forces in the south were forced to withdraw to the Romanian border. The situation was brought to a head by the action of Otaman Omelian Volokh, who, on 21 March, formed a “military revolutionary committee” and began separate negotiations with the Bolsheviks. The latter knew how to take advantage of the situation and defeated the disorganized Ukrainian troops under Volokh’s command. Under pressure from the Bolsheviks (eight thousand men), the Zaporozhian Corps, which was loyal to the Ukrainian People’s Republic, withdrew to Romanian territory, where they were interned. At the same time, the Directory’s troops began an offensive from Volhynia that reached the outskirts of Kyiv but then lacked the forces to continue.
In April and May 1919, the leaders of the Directory managed to reorganize their remaining troops and expand their numbers by mobilization. At this time, the Directory’s rule extended over a narrow stretch of land in Podilia and Volhynia, along a line from Lutsk through Sarny and Rivne to Kremianets. Bolshevik advances separated the Directory’s three military groups. There were disputes among members of the Directory and, on 29 April, there was an attempted uprising behind the lines when Otaman Volodymyr Oskilko, dissatisfied with being dropped as leader of the forces in Volhynia, made an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow Petliura. It was at this time that the disintegration of the state apparatus reached its lowest point: corruption, abuse of office, and embezzlement of public funds had become part of daily life.
On 1 May Petliura ordered the evacuation of the army from Volhynia to Galicia. On 5 May the Directory and the UNR government occupied some railway cars at the Radyvyliv border station. On 18 May they rode to Zolochiv in their railway cars, and on 25 May to Ternopil. Their rule now extended over a few kilometers of railway track and the town of Brody. The situation was a catastrophe. On 25 May, having taken Rivne, the Bolsheviks declared the liquidation of the “Petliura front.” They could not decide whether to continue their advance into Galicia, as it was formally part of another state. The Poles were advancing from the west against the troops of the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic, which, since 22 January, had formally been part of the UNR army. Trains with troops, munitions, officials of the UNR and their families had now gathered on a narrow strip of land along the railway line. In this hopeless situation, a decision was made to gather the remaining troops of the UNR and, according to a plan of Tiutiunnyk ’s, to advance toward Proskuriv. Thus began the summer offensive of the UNR army. In the truest sense of the word, it had nothing to lose. In mid-July 1919, after difficult battles with varying degrees of success, they were caught in a vise on a small strip of land between Kamianets-Podilskyi and the Zbruch and Dnister Rivers. The situation was saved by the Ukrainian Galician Army of the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic, which crossed the Zbruch and attacked the Bolsheviks.103
On 1 August Petliura issued his Kyiv Directive, and a month later, on 30 August, troops of the Ukrainian People’s Republic entered Kyiv. This success was due to the fact that the Bolsheviks had to fight on three fronts: against the UNR, against the White army advancing from the south and east, and against uprisings in the rear that were the result of their “war communism” and requisitioning of grain. At practically the same time, units of the White army from the east entered Kyiv, and the UNR army again withdrew. The attitude of the White leaders to the UNR and to the “Ukrainian question” was uncompromising. They refused to recognize the right of the Ukrainians to an independent state. On 17 September, in a message on behalf of the UNR to the “people of united (soborna) Ukraine,” Petliura announced his government’s program: independence for the Ukrainian People’s Republic, recognition of the peasants’ right to land without compensation, introduction of the eight-hour day, and direct elections to the Great State Council (parliament).104 On 24 September the UNR declared war against Denikin. The People’s Revolutionary Army of Makhno, the anarchist peasant leader, allied itself with the army of the UNR.
The war against the Whites in Left-Bank Ukraine went on, with varying degrees of success, until October 1919. It was temporarily quiet on the Ukrainian-Bolshevik front and, in September, there were even negotiations with Trotsky over a common military front against the Whites. In the meantime, the policies of the Whites in Ukraine,105 especially their plan to hand the land back to the estate owners, had led to mass resistance. In the southern gubernias, Makhno’s army disrupted the Whites’ areas of retreat, while insurgents in Left-Bank Ukraine did the same, with the support of the Bolsheviks and the left-wing faction of the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries (the Borotbists). Nonetheless, by the end of October 1919 the situation on the front against the Whites was critical. The most competent military unit, the Ukrainian Galician Army, had lost members to a typhus epidemic. On 6 November 1919 a truce was signed between the Whites and the Galician Army.
To make matters worse, differences of opinion with the leadership of the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic, which was formally the western region of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, gave rise to military as well as political friction and disorganization. There were disagreements in particular with Yevhen Petrushevych and with the UNR over the lack of clarity with regard to its attitude to Poland. At that time, Kost Levytsky was in Warsaw, where he was holding negotiations with Poland on behalf of the UNR. There was a meeting of the State Council in Kamianets-Podilskyi on 25 October, with representatives of the UNR government, the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic, as well as the Ukrainian and Jewish political parties, but it made no decisions. In November, fighting flared up again with the Bolsheviks, who were successfully advancing against the Whites. The army of the UNR was no longer capable of carrying on a serious war on three fronts—against the Bolsheviks attacking from the north, against the Whites from the south and east, and against the Poles advancing from the west. On 14 November two members of the Directory, Andrii Makarenko and Fedir Shvets, went on an “official journey” to the peace conference in Paris. On 16 November the UNR government withdrew from Kamianets-Podilskyi, which was in the process of being occupied by the Poles. It moved first to Proskuriv, then to Starokostiantyniv, and was finally “stranded” in Chortoryia. Symon Petliura was now effectively the sole ruler of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, which then had something more than ten thousand exhausted soldiers. The UNR army found itself in a “triangle of death” in Chortoryia, surrounded by Denikin’s troops, who were retreating from the Bolsheviks, the Red Army, and the Poles.
On 28–29 November, there were meetings in Lviv between representatives of the Directory and the government at which it was agreed to submit to the demands of the Poles (the UNR-Polish border to be established along the Zbruch, i.e., loss of the western region) in return for military assistance. On 2 December, the military command and the leaders of the Directory decided to shift to partisan warfare behind the lines of the Bolsheviks and Denikin’s army.106 On 5 December, following a decision by the UNR government, Petliura left for Warsaw (although Isaak Mazepa, the head of the government, later wrote that no one knew the purpose of Petliura’s journey). At this time, both the Directory and the government of the UNR had in fact collapsed. Things had gone so far that after an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow Petliura, a group of otamans of the UNR army (Omelian Volokh, Yukhym Bozhko, and Oleksandr Danchenko) took the government coffers that had been stored at some railway station and divided the money among themselves107 (one of the conspirators, Bozhko, lost his life under dubious circumstances). Part of the UNR army crossed into Poland and was interned there. Another part (about ten thousand men), led by the new commander in chief, Mykhailo Omelianovych-Pavlenko, managed to carry on a five-month “winter campaign” behind the Bolshevik lines that has been described among apologetic historians as a “successful attempt to preserve the army.”
On 25 December 1919 the Socialist Revolutionaries in Khmilnyk, in the Podilia gubernia, established a “Council of the Republic” that, in their view, was to take over from the Directory. On the following day, a party conference of Socialist Revolutionaries, Social Democrats, and Galicians decided to convene a “pre-parliament” that would dismiss the Directory. These events took place in an area controlled by the army as it advanced in its “winter campaign” along a line from Vinnytsia to Uman. These plans to reorganize the government of the UNR were given a boost at the beginning of 1920 as negotiations were under way with Poland. In February, the UNR government under Mazepa returned to Kamianets-Podilskyi. It was there that the essential decisions were made concerning the pre-parliament (the People’s Council of State) and the sharing of power between the government and the Directory (decisions that remained on paper).
On 22 April 1920, a treaty was signed in Warsaw between the Ukrainian People’s Republic and Poland in which the UNR relinquished its claim to the Western Region of the UNR. Two days later a joint offensive of the UNR army, formed anew on Polish territory, and the Polish army was undertaken against Bolshevik-occupied Ukraine. Kyiv was captured on 6 May. This final phase of the existence of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (May to November 1920) was characterized by an intensive effort to rebuild the state and by the usual “organizational chaos” resulting from the critical shortage of professional experts and the inability of politicians to agree. But the obvious instability on the military front against the Red Army made any kind of stable policy impossible. The successful Soviet counteroffensive began in June. Before the final onslaught, the UNR government retreated along the familiar route to Zhmerynka, then to Proskuriv, and finally to Kamianets-Podilskyi. In mid-July 1920 the UNR army and government crossed the Zbruch to Polish territory. Bolshevik troops advanced as far as Warsaw, where they suffered defeat in August. By the end of September, a kind of border had begun to exist between the UNR and Soviet Ukraine along the line from Korosten through Zhytomyr to Berdychiv. On 18 October, a truce was signed between Poland and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), as a result of which the UNR army lost its Polish ally. The balance of forces was too unequal. The UNR government withdrew for the last time to Kamianets-Podilskyi, but on 16 November it was forced to flee to Tarnów. Toward the end of the year, the last fighting troops of the UNR followed it across the Polish border. On 21 May 1921, a peace treaty was signed in Riga between Poland and the RSFSR that buried any last hopes of support for the Ukrainian People’s Republic.
The Bolsheviks and Soviet Power in Ukraine
Like all the other regimes that succeeded one another in Ukraine between 1917 and 1920, the Soviets never controlled the whole of Ukrainian territory (the nine gubernias) before the end of 1920. Their efforts to build state structures, like those of all the others, were affected by extreme circumstances: large-scale political and military conflicts with “external forces” (foreign intervention troops, White Guards, Ukrainian parties and state structures) and “internal” enemies, i.e., dissidents of every kind.108 The most important slogan with regard to building the new state was “All power to the soviets,” which initially referred to the soviets (councils) of workers’ deputies, later to the soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies, and eventually included the peasant soviets. The main actors in establishing such a soviet system in Ukraine were to be the Ukrainian and all-Russian left-wing parties, although, during the civil war, other more mobile forms of the organization of power also played a role, such as revolutionary or military revolutionary committees.
As was the case with all other regimes at the time of the Ukrainian Revolution, the social base of Soviet power was very small, essentially the industrial proletariat in eastern Ukraine and a section of the poorest peasantry, some of whom had sunk to the level of lumpenproletariat. The zealously nurtured social demagogy and the programmatic calls for expropriation made allies of a large section of the landless peasantry, depending on the situation. In Bolshevik theory, property-owing peasants were regarded as part of the petty-bourgeois class.
On 18 April 1918 the Central Executive Committee of Ukrainian Soviets, having fled from the occupying armies to Taganrog, created (practically as a substitute for itself) the “All-Ukrainian Bureau to Lead the Insurgent Struggle against the German Occupiers.” This included Ukrainian Bolsheviks, Russian left-wing Socialist Revolutionaries, and a Ukrainian Social Democrat. At a meeting of representatives of Bolshevik organizations of Ukraine, which were still illegal, it was decided to establish a Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine or CP(B)U.109 It was a very small party, with just 4,364 members in early June 1918.
On 4 May 1918, the supreme commander of the armed forces of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic,110 Volodymyr Antonov-Ovsiienko, informed the Council of People’s Commissars in a memorandum that the units assigned to him had ceased all activity. They were to be disarmed on the territory of the RSFSR.111 The All-Ukrainian Bureau then began to redeploy some of these “disarmed troops” in the neutral zone that separated the Ukrainian State from the RSFSR. By the autumn of 1918, it had put together two divisions with a total of six thousand men.
The First Party Congress of the CP(B)U, meeting in Moscow at the beginning of July 1918, decided that the main task of the All-Ukrainian Bureau, now renamed the All-Ukrainian Central Military Revolutionary Committee, was to prepare an uprising against Hetman Skoropadsky and the occupying troops. On 28 November this body ceased to exist. Some of its members joined the Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government of Ukraine,112 formed in Kursk under the leadership of Georgii Piatakov. This government issued a manifesto on 29 November 1918 in which it proclaimed the overthrow of the Hetman and called for a struggle against the Directory. Military operations against the Directory now began, involving the two above-mentioned insurgent divisions and units of the Red Army, with a deployment of 22,000 soldiers.113
On 4 January 1919, following a decision of the Military Revolutionary Committee of the RSFSR, a Ukrainian front was created. By 6 February, its troops had taken the Donbas and the whole of Left-Bank Ukraine, including Kyiv. With the assistance of Makhno’s Revolutionary People’s Army and Hryhoriiv’s units, “Soviet power”114 was established in most of the southern gubernias of Ukraine (the troops of the Entente had hastily withdrawn from Odesa, Kherson, Mykolaiv, and the Crimea). On 6 January 1919, the Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government in Kharkiv proclaimed the establishment of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The new state was formally legitimized by the Third All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets at the beginning of March.
The establishment of the “second Soviet power” in Ukraine met certain strategic needs. First of all, the large war effort and the maintenance of the army depended on the industrial resources of the Donbas and on the grain and food resources of the Dnipro region. Second, Ukraine was a staging area for the offensive against Europe where, the Bolshevik leaders believed, the world revolution would take place. Bolshevik policy in Ukraine pursued both these goals and demanded a rapid mobilization of resources. Under wartime conditions, this required extraordinary measures whose radical nature was only deepened by the Bolsheviks’ ideological postulates—the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” the abolition of private property, and the end of money-commodity relations.
Where the Bolsheviks were in control in Ukraine, they applied the same methods as in the RSFSR: requisitioning of grain and food directly from the peasants by means of armed “food detachments,” a centralized system for the distribution of food and industrial commodities with the use of ration cards, prohibition of private commerce, and the establishment of agricultural communes and state farms (sovkhozy) to replace the estates and large private agriculture.
In January 1919, the government of Soviet Ukraine began to nationalize large industry, mining, and sugar factories and introduced a state monopoly on grain and food. In February 1919, the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party passed a resolution on forced deliveries of food in Ukraine. The plan was to requisition 139 million poods of grain (1 pood = 16.38 kg), practically half the entire supply. In April 1919, there was a decree on the forced delivery of “surplus grain” from 1918. Special detachments were posted at railway and marine stations to prevent the transport of flour, grain, sugar, oil, and other types of food. Food detachments made up of armed communist workers raided villages.
The reaction was predictable: there were widespread uprisings in the villages. According to official statistics, there were 93 actions by the peasants against the Bolsheviks in April 1919; by July of the same year, the number had increased to 207. In Left-Bank Ukraine alone, there were 57 insurgent groups numbering altogether 22,000 men.115 The leaders of the large peasant insurgent armies that had been allied with the Bolsheviks shortly before—Hryhoriiv, Otaman Zeleny, and even Makhno—now turned their arms against the Bolsheviks. At this time, Bolshevik power in the areas they controlled existed only in the towns (mainly gubernia and district centers). The countryside was dominated by anti-Bolshevik uprisings. To fight this “Ukrainian jacquerie,” the Bolsheviks had to create a so-called “internal front” in April 1919 that mobilized 21,000 fighters, artillery, cavalry, and even an inland fleet.116
The disintegration of the armies of the Ukrainian front reached a critical point in May and June. Upon hearing reports of the excesses of the food detachments and the Special Commission (Cheka), soldiers and lower-ranking officers refused to carry out orders, convened assemblies, discharged their superiors, or deserted. Not infrequently, a unit sent to suppress a peasant rebellion actually joined it. The uprisings behind the lines and the unrest at the front helped the Whites win. At the end of June, the Bolsheviks, under pressure from Denikin’s troops, withdrew from Kharkiv and Katerynoslav, and the Whites took over all of Left-Bank Ukraine. In June 1919, in view of the economic and military situation, the state administrative bodies of Soviet Ukraine and the RSFSR were consolidated. At the end of August, the government of Soviet Ukraine fled from Kyiv. The government established by the Whites, from the viewpoint of the mass of the population, especially the peasantry, was no less foreign than that of the Bolsheviks. Denikin’s restorationist policy,117 his complete ignorance of the real situation in the villages, and his Great Russian chauvinism led to mass spontaneous as well as organized actions by the peasantry behind the lines of Denikin’s army by the autumn of that year. The activity of Makhno’s army, with a force that varied between 50,000 and 100,000 men, soon became the main problem for the Whites.
On 10 July 1919 the Central Committee of the CP(B)U, under the leadership of Stanislav Kosior, established the “Bureau behind the Lines,” whose task was to organize underground activity and uprisings in the rear of Denikin’s army and coordinate the activities of the 108 CP(B)U committees working in the underground.118 In October 1919, the bureau began to establish revolutionary committees that were to organize local uprisings and diversions. In Moscow, in December 1919, the Ukrainian government created an extraordinary administrative organ in Ukraine, the All-Ukrainian Revolutionary Committee, under the leadership of Hryhorii Petrovsky. In the meantime, the situation at the front had changed radically. A mobilization of resources that had been accompanied by the most brutal terror and a reorganization of the army had made it possible for the Bolsheviks to mount a successful counterattack. In the course of December 1919 they took the Donbas and, on 16 December, the Red Army entered Kyiv. Following the wishes of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party, they chose “proletarian” Kharkiv as the capital city, which was also the location of the All-Ukrainian Revolutionary Committee. At the end of December 1919, the White armies were concentrated in the Crimea. By the end of January 1920, most of the Ukrainian gubernias were under Bolshevik rule.
In January 1920 the All-Ukrainian Revolutionary Committee, according to previous agreements concerning the military and political union of both republics, decided that all decrees and orders issued by the Council of People’s Commissars of the RSFSR were also valid on Ukrainian territory. The armed forces of both countries were finally merged under Moscow’s control. In mid-February 1920, the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee decided to end the activity of the All-Ukrainian Revolutionary Committee and reinstate the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR. In March and April there were elections to the village and county soviets. Based on the results of those elections, the congresses of soviets at the district and gubernia levels were elected. When the competing left-wing parties (Mensheviks, Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries) had been suppressed, the CP(B)U managed to obtain a decisive majority in the executive committees of the soviets at all levels, from 70 percent at district level to 85 percent at the level of the gubernias. Communist Party policies were implemented in the villages mainly by the Committees of Poor Peasants (komnezamy), which had begun to be formed in March 1920. By November 1920 there were about ten thousand of these committees, which actively supported the communists in their requisitioning of food.
It seemed at first that the “third Soviet power” had learned the lessons of the recent past. In a resolution of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party “On Soviet Power in Ukraine” that was personally prepared by Lenin himself, the errors made with regard to the nationality question, land, and food would not be repeated. The resolution recognized the independence of Ukraine and contained a clause on the need for free development of Ukrainian culture (language, education) in order, as the resolution said, “to be able to explain, in a comradely manner, the common interests of the working people of Ukraine and Russia.” With regard to land, the plan was for the complete elimination of estates. The policy on food suggested that “surplus grain” would be appropriated mainly from the kulaks.
Representatives of Ukrainian left-wing parties would be allowed to share power. In December 1919, an agreement on collaboration was reached between the CP(B)U and the Ukrainian Communist Party (the left wing of the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries, the Borot’bisty). One of the Borotbists, Hryhorii Hrynko, became a member of the All-Ukrainian Revolutionary Committee, and representatives of his and other left-wing parties were accepted as members of local revolutionary committees.119
On 5 February 1920, the All-Ukrainian Revolutionary Committee confirmed the land law, which dealt with the distribution of land and imposed limits on the size of land parcels that could be made available to state farms. The establishment of agricultural communes would be voluntary. All the land that had previously belonged to estate owners, the state, the tsar’s family, or the monasteries was declared to be the “property of the working people” (the confiscation of estate land continued to the end of 1920). Further events demonstrated, however, that these intentions were no more than declarations. Soviet power found itself in the midst of a real and anticipated war, and its actions corresponded to the laws of war and to the Bolsheviks’ ideological principles, which formally aspired to a dictatorship of the proletariat but, in practice, strove to maintain a one-party dictatorship of professional revolutionaries.
The Bolsheviks themselves considered the situation to be just a “peaceful breather.” Petr Wrangel still controlled the Crimea (a problem that was not resolved until the end of 1920) and, between April and November 1920, the country was at war with Poland. In the countryside, the peasant war that the Bolsheviks had ignited continued to rage. Forced deliveries of food continued in spite of the directive on surplus grain and led to large-scale requisitioning of grain supplies. The size of the surplus, according to the Ukrainian government, was estimated to be 160 million poods, less than what had been demanded by the previous Soviet rulers, but the harvest in the autumn of 1919 was only 25 percent of what it had been the previous year.120 The attempt to obtain grain at “fixed prices” was unsuccessful, first because the peasants had no confidence in the currency (there were ten different types of currency at that time, from the tsarist to that of the Provisional Government to that of the Ukrainian People’s Republic) and, second, because the term “fixed prices” meant that the grain would be acquired gratis, since the government was not in a position to offer even the most elementary industrial goods in exchange.
The end result was that Ukrainian grain was, to a large extent, once again “pumped out” (the Bolshevik expression) by force. The food detachments began their work again and succeeded in “pumping out” 70 million poods (4.3 million tons) of grain, a result that was achieved by means of massive force and repression against the unwilling peasants. In the spring and summer, food policy in the countryside took on an explicit class character. Those who resisted the delivery of grain were declared to be kulaks (this category included all the well-off peasants, and often middle peasants as well). In the autumn of 1920, the “campaign for bread” and the “campaign against the kulaks” were one and the same in official rhetoric.
In addition to the food detachments, Red Army units were deployed in the confiscation of grain “surpluses” and agricultural products.121 We can get some idea of the scale of the forces engaged from the fact that the staffs of the special food committees in the gubernias, regions, and districts comprised about sixty thousand people. In the autumn of 1920, the army became involved in food collection.122 The best-known (and most extreme) example of this was the Red Cavalry of Semen Budenny, which was involved in forced deliveries in the Poltava gubernia in the late summer of 1920.
The result was a new outbreak of civil war. Once again the peasants reached for their weapons. The struggle against the insurgents was made difficult by the particular partisan tactics that the peasants had mastered during the years of the civil war after 1917. As a rule, there was just a small stable core (the otaman and his staff) around whom, depending on the situation, dozens or hundreds of peasants came together and constituted the mass of fighters. They attacked the activists and representatives of Soviet power, food detachments, or army units, mainly by night. By day, these insurgents became ordinary peasants. These groups generally avoided open conflict with the Red Army units deployed against them.123
By the autumn of 1920, the Bolsheviks had again lost control over large parts of rural Ukraine. Outside the towns, it was hundreds of small peasant detachments that set the tone. They melted away as the regular army approached, only to reappear when it left. In late 1920 and early 1921, according to official statistics, there were as many as one hundred thousand men in the larger insurgent units in Ukraine.124 By the late spring of 1920, Nestor Makhno’s army had been organized again and advanced during the summer far into Left-Bank Ukraine, which was then behind the lines of the southwestern front in the war against Poland. All military efforts to localize, encircle, or destroy Makhno’s army in 1920 failed.125
The response of Soviet power was total terror. In April 1920, kidnapping and family liability were introduced in the villages. Following the capture of the Crimea, the end of the Polish-Soviet war, and the final defeat of the UNR army, Soviet power had massive resources available to defeat the peasants, but neither military operations nor punitive expeditions achieved the desired effect. On the contrary, peasant uprisings spread even farther, to the gubernias of Tambov and Voronezh, to western Siberia and the Volga region. By the spring of 1921, Soviet power had put an end to the uprisings in Ukraine, but there was no guarantee that they would not break out again at the first relaxation of military pressure.
In the meantime, the situation had become critical in the towns, traditionally considered the strongholds of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” The policy of “war communism” reached its high point in 1920. The complete nationalization of all strategically important branches, even the militarization of coal and iron production, the introduction of universal compulsory labor, the rejection of money-commodity relations,126 the abolition of private property, and the extremely centralized direction of industry all led to economic collapse. The Soviets attempted to overcome the crisis by force: the creation of a “labor army,” persecution (imprisonment in camps) of “labor deserters,” and brutal repression of speculators and anyone described as such. By the spring of 1921, production in the metal industry was 5 percent of its prewar level, coal production was 22 percent, and the sugar factories produced 4 million tons of sugar, down from 85 million tons before the war.
Economic decline undermined the position of the sector of the population declared by the Bolsheviks to be the social base of the regime, the industrial working class. The daily bread ration available with the ration card fell to 100 grams daily in the industrial centers. The market, which continued to exist in spite of all efforts to wipe it out, went over to bartering. The most sought-after “currencies” were salt, matches, sugar, flour, and fuel. The shortage economy and widespread hunger forced many workers to rescue themselves by leaving the city and returning to the land or engaging in some kind of small enterprise not approved by the state.
By the spring of 1921, Soviet power in Ukraine (as in the RSFSR generally) had reached an extremely dangerous point. The economic collapse threatened to become a political one. In view of this situation, the Bolsheviks, on Lenin’s initiative, were prepared to make concessions. The Tenth Party Conference of the Russian Communist Party introduced the New Economic Policy. Forced deliveries were replaced by a food tax, and the peasants were now able to sell their remaining grain on the market. Nonstrategic branches were denationalized, and private enterprise was permitted, as was private capital and free trade. These and other measures eased the social situation and made possible the political consolidation of the Bolshevik regime. This, however, meant the end of the Ukrainian Revolution.127
Endnotes
- Originally, this term signified the events associated with the Ukrainian struggle for independence and national statehood. In the 1990s the concept of the “Liberation Struggle” (Vyzvol’ni zmahannia), adopted from the historiography of the emigration/diaspora, was also frequently used. Some historians use the phrase “Ukrainian National-Democratic Revolution.” Some Russian historians are critical of the term “Ukrainian Revolution,” seeing the events on Ukrainian territory, even if characterized by specific national features, as part of the Russian Revolution and Civil War.
- D. Ianevs’kyi, Politychni systemy Ukraïny 1917–1920 rokiv: sproby tvorennia i prychyny porazky (Kyiv, 2003), 428–30.
- The spontaneous redistribution of land and the expropriation of property by the peasants.
- Olena Liubovets’, “Ideino-politychni protsesy v ukraïns’kykh partiiakh u konteksti al’ternatyv revoliutsiinoï doby (1917–1920 rr.)” (Ph.D. diss., Кyiv, 2006).
- Nova Rada, 25 March 1917.
- Ibid., 2 March 1917.
- O. M. Liubovets’, “Problema ukraïns’koï derzhavnosti v prohramakh i diial’nosti ukraïns’kykh politychnykh partii (berezen’-lystopad 1917),” Ukraïns’kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, 2003, no. 4: 22–25.
- V. F. Verstiuk, “Ukraïns’kyi natsional’no-vyzvol’nyi rukh(berezen’-lystopad 1917),” Ukraïns’kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, 2003, no. 3: 65 – 67.
- The First Ukrainian Military Congress (5–8 May 1917), the All-Ukrainian Peasant Congress (28 May–2 June 1917), and the Congress of Free Cossacks (16–20 October 1917) were among those that supported Ukrainian autonomy within a democratic Russia.
- There is no agreement among historians or direct participants about the exact date of this event. The following dates are proposed: 3 March (a meeting of Ukrainian public figures at which the words “Central Rada” were first used), 4 March (a meeting of leaders of the TUP and the Ukrainian Social Democrats at which it was decided to establish a body to coordinate and direct the work of Ukrainian organizations), 7 March (election of leading bodies; this date was first celebrated in 1918 as the founding date of the Central Rada), 9 March (the first minutes of a session of the Central Rada). See V. Verstiuk, “Ukraïns’ka Tsentral’na Rada. Period stanovlennia,” Ukraïns’kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, 2007, no. 2: 33–34; Ianevs’kyi, Politychni systemy Ukraïny 1917–1920, 67–71.
- Ukraïns’ka Tsentral’na Rada. Dokumenty i materialy u dvokh tomakh, vol. 1 (Kyiv, 1996), 44–45.
- According to estimates by historians, there were altogether nineteen parties represented in the Rada.
- Ukraïns’ka Tsentral’na Rada, 1: 233–41.
- Initially, the issues were the creation of the post of Commissar for Ukrainian Affairs in the Provisional Government and the post of Government Commissar for Ukraine in Kyiv, elected by the Central Rada, limited financial autonomy, and public recognition of Ukraine’s right to autonomy.
- Ukraïns’kyi natsional’no-vyzvol’nyi rukh. Berezen’-lystopad 1917 r. Dokumenty i materialy (Kyiv, 2003), 347. The peasant enthusiasm for autonomy was easily explained: this was seen as the quickest way to resolve the land question.
- Ukraïns’ka Tsentral’na Rada, 1: 105.
- O. B. Kudlai, “Perehovory Tsentral’noï Rady i predstavnykiv Tymchasovoho uriadu. 28–30 chervnia 1917 r.,” Ukraïns’kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, 1999, no. 6: 46–47.
- The publication of the Universal coincided with the events of 3 and 4 July in St. Petersburg, where there was mass unrest and military encounters between government troops and revolutionary soldiers and sailors.
- Konstytutsiini akty Ukraïny, 1917–1920. Nevidomi konstytutsiï Ukraïny (Kyiv, 1992). The document is also available in English in The Russian Provisional Government, 1917: Documents, ed. Robert Paul Browder and Alexander Kerensky, vol. 1 (Stanford, 1961), 396.
- The advance of the Russian army on the southwestern front collapsed completely because of the disintegration of the advancing units between 16 and 20 June 1917. Soldiers discussed their orders and refused to carry them out. Whole lower-level detachments left the front line.
- V. Boiko, T. Demchenko, and O. Onyshchenko, 1917 rik na Chernihivshchyni (Chernihiv, 2003), 44–50.
- National Archives of the Czech Republic, F. Ukrainian Museum. Kart. 57, inv. c. 784 (Leontovych V.) “Spohady i vrazhennia z chasiv ahrarnoï reform,” typescript 5.
- D. Doroshenko, Istoriia Ukraïny 1917–1923 rr. Doba Tsentral’noï Rady, vol. 1 (Uzhhorod, 1932; repr. New York, 1954), 75.
- V. Verstiuk, Selians’ka problema v politytsi ukraïns’kykh politychnykh syl ta uriadiv 1917–1920 rr. Istoriia ukraïns’koho selianstva, vol. 1 (Kyiv, 2006), 535.
- The entire staff of the Kyiv military district left the city on 31 October at the time of the truce negotiations between the Central Rada, the various parties, and the workers’ and soldiers’ councils.
- In the Ukrainian gubernias there were 9 gubernia, 94 regional, and 1,528 district land committees that had been created by the Provisional Government.
- Ukraïns’ka Tsentral’na Rada, 1: 399–401.
- In the census of 1897, under the heading “nature of activity,” the possible answers were: social and public service, private legal practice, teaching and educational activity, science, literature and art, and therapeutic and medical activity. The total number of Ukrainians engaged in these activities was 27,900, two-thirds of whom lived in rural areas. Figures from Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis’ naseleniia Rossiiskoi imperii 1897 g., in 89 volumes (St. Petersburg, 1887–1905), vol. 8: 172ff., 176, 180ff., 184; vol. 13: 152ff., 156, 158ff., 162; vol. 16: 178ff., 182; vol. 18: 212–14, 216, 218, 220, 222; vol. 32: 178–83, 185; vol. 33: 192, 194, 196, 198, 200, 202; vol. 47: 200–2, 204; vol. 48: 208, 211, 214, 216, 218; vol. 51: 198–200, 204–7, 210. The criterion for nationality was language. A Ukrainian was anyone who selected “Little Russian” as his mother tongue. Among the working population, 90 percent of the Ukrainians were peasants.
- This land decree was issued on 26 October 1917 at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets at the initiative of the Bolsheviks, who had made use of the Socialist Revolutionary slogan of “socialization of the land.”
- V. V. Sokal’s’kyi, Guberns’ki selians’ki z’ïzdy iak skladovi ukraïns’koï revoliutsiï 1917–1921 rr. (Kyiv, 2009), 107.
- O. Boiko, “Politychne protystoiannia Ukraïns’koï Tsentral’noï Rady i bil’shovykiv (zhovten’–hruden’ 1917),” Ukraïns’kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, 2003, no. 4: 18.
- Viche (Ukr., pl. vicha; Russ. veche) was the name for a traditional old Slavic democratic “assembly” and was revived by contemporaries.
- This is the number usually quoted, but other sources suggest that the number was no more than 25,000 to 30,000. See I. Ie. Petrenko, “Diial’nist’ P. Skoropads’koho shchodo ukraïnizatsiï chastyn rosiis’koï armiï u 1917 r.,” in Problemy istoriï Ukraïny ХІХ – poch. ХХ st., vyp. ХV.SС (Kyiv, 2008), 136.
- V. Vynnychenko, Vidrodzhennia natsiï, 3 vols. (Kyiv and Vienna, 1920), 1: 197ff.
- The regiment was formed in May 1917 at the initiative of recruits from the village of Hrushky near Kyiv. Many writers have pointed out that the Ukrainization of regiments and stationing them in Kyiv to protect the Central Rada only served eventually to prevent their movement to the front. Between 5 and 7 July, the soldiers (about five thousand men), reduced to despair by the shortage of food and lack of support from the Central Rada, stormed Kyiv, appropriated weapons, blockaded a number of establishments (bank, telegraph office), and occupied the headquarters of the militia and the arsenal. The disturbance was brought to an end through the mediation of the Central Rada, but the Rada refused official recognition to the regiment. See V. F. Soldatenko, Vynnychenko i Petliura. Politychni portrety revoliutsiinoï doby (Kyiv, 2007), 128–46.
- The Free Cossacks began to organize themselves in March 1917 from local self-defense units for the maintenance of public order.
- Ia. Tynchenko, Persha ukraïns’ko-bil’shovyts’ka viina (hruden’ 1917–berezen’ 1918) (Kyiv and Lviv, 1996), 40–41. The data concerning strength and location of troops are given in tables.
- Ibid., 66.
- This move by the Council of People’s Commissars in St. Petersburg came as a surprise to the Ukrainian Bolsheviks. According to one contemporary observer, “the Central Committee of the party had not forewarned the Ukrainian organizations and had not attempted to discuss the advisability of such a major step. The ultimatum, right at the beginning of the All-Ukrainian Soviet Congress, put the Ukrainian Bolsheviks in an extremely difficult position because there was an explosion of chauvinism at this congress that bound all nationally inclined elements even more strongly to the Rada.” See S. K. Shreiber, “K protokolam pervogo vseukrainskogo soveshchaniia bol’shevikov,” Letopis’ revoliutsii, 1926, no. 5: 61.
- Kharkiv was taken by units from the Siversk region.
- Military operations took place mainly in the cities of Kharkiv, Katerynoslav, and Kyiv. The Soviet government in Kharkiv at this time had neither military forces of its own nor any real lever of power. It was basically an appendage of the Bolshevik military forces.
- These negotiations, which had begun in early December, were initially private. The delegation of the Central Powers regarded the Council of People’s Commissars in St. Petersburg, which was now trying to arrange a separate peace, as the only representative of political power. Following the publication on 11 December 1917 of the General Secretariat’s note to all warring and neutral states, the delegation began official negotiations with the representatives of the Ukrainian People’s Republic on 22 December.
- Here and in the remainder of the text, dates are given according to the new Gregorian calendar.
- Doroshenko, Istoriia Ukraïny 1917–23 rr., 1: 264–68.
- Battles were fought mainly over control of railway junctions and towns capable of offering supplies to the warring sides. Control was often achieved without the use of force, as when units formally under the control of the Rada declared themselves “neutral” or went over to the Bolsheviks. There were also instances of conflict not with the troops of the Ukrainian People’s Republic but with troops in transit to the Don or Kuban or with garrison units that would not allow transit to “foreigners.” It should also be remembered that in Ukraine, when Bolshevik troops approached a town, events tended to follow a standard schema in which there would be an outbreak of workers’ uprisings and strikes led by local revolutionary committees assisted by Red Guards.
- V. Holubko, Armiia Ukraïns’koï Narodnoï Respubliky (Lviv, 1997), 168.
- Ukraïnа. Khronikа ХХ stolittia. Rik 1918 (Kyiv, 2005), 64.
- Volodymyr Zatonsky, a member of both the Ukrainian and the Russian Soviet governments, reported in his memoirs that he was almost shot by a patrol. An official Ukrainian identity paper made him suspect, but he was saved by a document signed by Lenin showing him to be a member of the Council of People’s Commissars. See V. P. Zatons’kyi, “Iz spohadiv pro ukraïns’ku revoliutsiiu,” Litopys revoliutsiï, 1929, nos. 5–6: 116–17. The total number of victims was about three thousand.
- See chapters 3a and 3b in the present volume.
- Peter Lieb, “Pryborkannia povstans’koho rukhu — stratehichna dylema. Nimets’ka okupatsiia Ukraïny 1918 roku,” in Okupatsiia Ukraïny 1918 roku. Istorychnyi kontekst – stan doslidzhennia – ekonomichni ta sotsial’ni naslidky, ed. Wolfram Dornik and Stefan Karner (Chernivtsi, 2009), 110–40; Wolfram Dornik, “Okupatsiia Ukraïny avstro-uhors’kymy viis’kamy u 1918 rotsi,” ibid., 141–83. For more detail, see chapter 3b in the present volume.
- Doroshenko, Istoriia Ukraïny 1917–1923 rr., 2: 11.
- The attitude of the “allies” is expressed very clearly in the words of General Hoffmann: “I am interested in Ukraine only until the next harvest. I do not care what happens after that.” See “Bericht des Leiters der operativen Abteilung der deutschen Ostfront über die Lage in der Ukraine im März 1918,” Archiv der Russischen Revolution, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1922), 288n.
- Ibid., 288.
- Two weeks later, the German command installed military courts for civilians.
- Ievhen Chykalenko, Shchodennyk , 1918 –1919, vol. 2 (Kyiv, 2004), 9.
- Doroshenko, Istoriia Ukraïny, 2: 31–32.
- See the detailed discussion in chapter 3b of the present volume.
- Konstytutsiini akty Ukraïny, 1917–1920, 82.
- R. Pyrih, “Derzhavna sluzhba Het’manatu Pavla Skoropads’koho (kviten’–hruden’ 1918),” Ukraïna ХХ stolittia: kul’tura, ideolohiia, polityka (Kyiv), no. 15 (2009): 67.
- Ia. Pelens’kyi, “Peredmova. Spohady het’mana Pavla Skoropads’koho (kinets’ 1917–hruden’ 1918),” in Pavlo Skoropads’kyi. Spohady. Kinets’ 1917–hruden’ 1918 (Kyiv, 1995), 23.
- V. Soldatenko, Ukraïna v revoliutsiinu dobu. Istorychni ese-khroniky. Rik 1918, vol. 2 (Kyiv, 2009), 201. This work can be found on the home page of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance: http://www.memory.gov.ua/.
- In close proximity to the Hetman there were people (such as Dmytro Doroshenko) who were in constant contact with the leaders of the Ukrainian opposition parties. Skoropadsky himself was not inclined to use radical measures against representatives of the Ukrainian movement. It is worth mentioning that Symon Petliura was released on 12 November 1918 on personal instructions from the Hetman, whereupon he immediately joined the organizers of the uprising against the Hetman in Bila Tserkva (Skoropadsky, Spohady, 376n).
- V. Vynnychenko, Shchodennyk, 1911–20, vol. 1 (Edmonton and New York, 1980), 289–96.
- P. Zakharchenko, Selians’ka viina v Ukraïni: rik 1918 (Kyiv, 1997), 49.
- The “Law on Rights to the Harvest of 1918 on the Territory of the Ukrainian State” of 27 May required that one-third of the harvest (or a corresponding compensation) from land sown without authorization would have to be given to the owner of the land. On 14 June it was declared that the sugar-beet harvest on fields sown without authorization belonged to the owners of the factories.
- The “liquidation commissions” established by the government attempted without much success to manage locally the return of property to the owners and reach some amicable settlement regarding compensation. The peasants were unwilling to return what had been taken, and the landowners made unrealistic demands. The situation was made worse by the government’s instruction of 4 July 1918, according to which it was the landowners themselves who would determine the value of losses. A number of measures were taken in July and August to force the peasants to bring in the harvest (which was very good), whereby the sanctions for sabotage included fines, imprisonment, and forced labor.
- Soldatenko, Ukraïna v revoliutsiinu dobu, 2: 317. Archival source: TsDAVO, f. 2311, op. 1, spr. 120, 143.
- V. A. Savchenko, Pavlo Skoropads’kyi – ostannii het’man Ukraïny (Kharkiv, 2009), 223–24. These data require scrutiny.
- According to the (exaggerated) numbers in the Bolshevik press, more than two hundred thousand workers were involved in the strike.
- The term “reprisal” included arrest, detention, and expulsion. Extreme forms of violence, such as regularly existed in Soviet Russia or in areas involved in civil war, happened very seldom.
- See the detailed discussion in chapters 3a and 3c in the present volume.
- In a whole series of cases, gubernia starostas, whose powers were similar to those of prerevolutionary governors, simply dissolved local organs of self-administration that they considered an annoyance, which led to strenuous protests and central government intervention.
- This special corps was to maintain order in the border regions.
- A. O. Buravchenkov, “Zbroini syly Ukraïns’koï Derzhavy 1918 r.,” in Entsyklopediia istoriï Ukraïny, vol. 3 (Kyiv, 2005), 311. See also the detailed discussion in chapter 3b in the present volume.
- Ukraïna. Khronika XX stolittia. Rik 1918 (Kyiv, 2005), 349–50.
- The leading bodies of the Ukrainian Bolsheviks were outside the country.
- Pavlo Khrystiuk, Zamitky i materiialy do istoriï ukraïns’koï revoliutsiï 1917–1920 rr., vol. 3 (New York, 1969), 115–16.
- Mykyta Shapoval, Velyka revoliutsiia i ukraïns’ka vyzvol’na prohrama (Prague, 1928), 120–21.
- The intention was to elect the Directory for the period of the uprising, after which power would pass to a representative body. In addition to Vynnychenko, the Directory included Petliura, Andrii Makarenko, Fedir Shvets, and Opanas Andriievsky.
- A fact worth mentioning here is that, during the preparations for the uprising, Vynnychenko met secretly with representatives of the Council of People’s Commissars, Khristian Rakovsky and Dmytro Manuilsky, who promised him the “neutrality” of the communist underground, demanding in return the legalization of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine in the future Ukrainian state.
- P. Hai-Nyzhnyk, Finansova polityka uriadu Ukraïns’koï Derzhavy Het’mana Pavla Skoropads’koho (29 kvitnia–14 hrudnia 1918 r.) (Kyiv, 2004), 346.
- The mass of recruits increased its numerical strength while decreasing its fighting capacity.
- Between the summer and winter of 1918, left-wing factions split from the two main parties in Ukraine, the Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries. These left-wing factions supported Bolshevik ideology and fought against the Directory.
- Zh. V. Mina, “Zbroini syly Dyrektoriï na pochatku ïï isnuvannia (lystopad 1918–traven’ 1919 r.),” Visnyk Natsional’noho Universytetu “L’vivs’ka politekhnika” “Derzhava ta armiia” (Lviv), no. 408 (2000): 49–54.
- A Cossack expression for a military unit having the strength of a battalion.
- Antin Krezub (Osyp Dumin), “Hrupa polkovnyka Rogul’s’koho,” Kalendar “Chervonoï kalyny” (1929), 57–58. Quoted from the National Archives of the Czech Republic, f. Ukrainian Museum, Kt. 44, inv. c. 710/5, 452–53.
- These differences of opinion did not pertain only to the organization of the army. The left-wing factions of the Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries did not want to fight against the Bolsheviks and eventually went over to their side.
- Soldatenko, Vynnychenko i Petliura.
- Vynnychenko, Vidrodzhennia natsiï, 3: 351.
- P. Hai-Nyzhnyk, “Otamanshchyna v period Dyrektoriï UNR: sotsial’na baza, rol’ i mistse v natsional’no-vyzvol’nii borot’bi,” Literatura ta kul’tura Polissia, no. 58: Problemy filolohiï, istoriï ta kul’tury ХХ stolittia u suchasnykh doslidzhenniakh (Nizhyn: Vyd-vo NDPU im. M. Hoholia, 2010), 105 –14.
- The best-known of these, the Kholodnyi Yar Republic in the Cherkasy gubernia, existed (with interruptions) until the autumn of 1921.
- V. Savchenko, Atamany kazach’ego voiska (Moscow, 2006), 14.
- Both representatives of the Volunteer Army and Makhno’s people attempted to win Hryhoriiv to their side. See A. A. Lysenko, “Viis’kova ta politychna diial’nist’ otamana N. Ia. Hryhor’ieva (Servetnyka) u 1918–1919 rr.,” Ukraïns’kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, 2009, no. 6: 63–80.
- Other efforts at state-building included the revocation of the decisions of the Hetmanate and the replacement of its institutions by “new” ones, the State Senate by the Supreme Court and the State Guard by the People’s Militia.
- Ukraïna. Khronika XX stolittia, Rik 1919 (Kyiv, 2005), 12.
- These were units of the All-Ukrainian Military Revolutionary Central Committee in Kursk, as well as units of the Red Army in “neutral guise,” both from Russia.
- V. F. Soldatenko, Ukraïna v revoliutsiinu dobu. Istorychni ese-khroniky. Rik 1919, vol. 3 (Kyiv, 2010), 43.
- According to the estimates of the UNR’s minister of military affairs, General Oleksandr Hrekov, the UNR’s total troop strength was around twenty-one thousand men. See Vynnychenko, Vidrodzhennia natsiï, 3: 244ff.
- Pan is a Ukrainian term for “landowner.”
- Soldatenko, Ukraïna v revoliutsiinu dobu, 3: 76.
- On 9 February, under pressure from the French, who were negotiating with the UNR, Vynnychenko resigned from the Directory. Petliura, who was also persona non grata for the Entente, remained in the Directory but resigned from his party.
- The French were making impossible demands that would effectively have abolished Ukrainian sovereignty: control of the UNR army, railway junctions, and finances. Ukraine would be recognized at an international peace conference, after which it would become a French protectorate.
- As usual, the battles were fought over control of the railway junctions.
- Oleksandr Dotsenko, Litopys Ukraïns’koï revoliutsiï. Materiialy i dokumenty do istoriï Ukraïns’koï revoliutsiï, 1917–1923, vol. 2, bk. 4 (Lviv, 1923), 243–45.
- For a detailed discussion, see chapter 1a in the present volume.
- Dotsenko, Litopys Ukraïns’koï revoliutsiï, 46.
- I. Mazepa, Ukraïna v ohni i buri revoliutsiï (Kyiv, 2003), 324–25.
- See chapter 4b in the present volume.
- This was to be a Ukrainian Bolshevik party, although a number of representatives, led by Emmanuil Kviring, were demanding a regional section of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik).
- The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic proclaimed in Kharkiv in December 1917 is meant here.
- Grazhdanskaia voina na Ukraine 1918–1920 gg., vol. 1, bk. 1 (Kyiv, 1967), 134.
- It is noteworthy that the decision to form the government was made by five people: TsDAVO, f. 2, op. 1, spr. 14, 1ff. Real power was in the hands of the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Kursk Direction, which was set up on instructions from Moscow and whose members were Antonov-Ovsiienko, Stalin, and Zatonsky.
- Ukraïna: politychna istoriia ХХ – pochatok ХХІ stolittia (Kyiv, 2007), 409.
- This term is a euphemism. Real power in the cities was exercised by the military revolutionary committees, which were dominated by members of the CP(B)U and, in the countryside, by the committees of poor peasants. One should not forget the Extraordinary All-Ukrainian Commission, formed on 3 December 1918 as a regional branch of the Extraordinary All-Russian Commission to Combat Counterrevolution, Speculation, and Sabotage (VChK or Cheka). It organized class terror, and its power was unrestricted.
- O. V. Mykhailiuk, Selianstvo Ukraïny v pershi desiatylittia ХХ st.: sotsiokul’turni protsesy (Dnipropetrovsk, 2007), 333–34.
- Ukraïna: politychna istoriia ХХ – pochatok ХХІ stolittia (Kyiv, 2007), 412.
- For more details on Denikin’s policies, see chapter 1a in this volume.
- A. V. Lykholat, Rozhrom natsionalistychnoï kontrrevoliutsiï na Ukraïni (1917–1933) (Kyiv, 1955), 404.
- A. Voinovych, “Uchast’ livykh politychnykh partii v diial’nosti mistsevykh orhaniv vlady na Pivdni Ukraïny v 1920 r.,” Problemy istoriï Ukraïny: fakty, sudzhennia, poshuky (Kyiv), no. 14 (2005): 60–61.
- I. Khmel’, Agrarnye preobrazovaniia na Ukraine (1917–1920 gg.) (Kyiv, 1990), 105–12.
- The forced deliveries also involved fodder, cattle, hay and straw. The activists of the local committees of poor peasants were allowed to take clothing, personal objects, and even meals as payment.
- In the early autumn of 1920, there were 482,000 men in the army on the territory of Soviet Ukraine.
- Descriptions of this kind are to be found mostly in the apologetic literature. See, for instance, V. Ia. Revehuk, U borot’bi za voliu Ukraïny (Vyzvol’ni zmahannia na Poltavshchyni 1920–1925) (Poltava, 2000).
- O. I. Hanzha, Opir selian stanovlenniu totalitarnoho rezhymu v USRR (Kyiv, 1996), 5ff.
- In October 1920, a military and political agreement was signed with Makhno according to which the rear of the Red Army, now advancing toward the Crimea, would be kept free, and Makhno’s army would join in the fighting against the Whites. In return, Makhno’s supporters and the anarchists who had not fought against Soviet power would be granted an amnesty and a guarantee of security. The treaty was violated as early as November of the same year, but the attempt to destroy Makhno’s army was unsuccessful. It was not until the autumn of 1921 that Soviet forces managed to drive the remnants of Makhno’s army as far as the Romanian border, which they finally crossed on 28 August.
- Along with other measures, such as the centralized distribution of food and industrial commodities by means of ration cards, payment for the use of public transport, post, telegraph, and communal services was also abolished.
- On the integration of Ukraine into the USSR, see chapter 4b in the present volume.
Chapter 2a (76-131) from The Emergence of Ukraine: Self-Determination, Occupation, and War in Ukraine, 1917-1922, by Wolfram Dornik, Georgiy Kasianov, Hannes Leidinger, Peter Lieb, Alexei Miller, Bogdan Musial, and Vasyl Rasevych (University of Alberta Press, 05.11.2022), published by OAPEN under the terms of an Open Access license.