Ukraine’s revolution and wars

Kyiv in 1917: what did the Central Rada want?

On 17 March 1917, ten days after news of the February Revolution arrived, Ukrainian parties and associations in Kyiv formed the Central Rada. Its chairman was Mykhailo Hrushevsky, the historian whose ten-volume History of Ukraine-Rus had written Ukraine as a historical subject distinct from Russia. In April an All-Ukrainian National Congress endorsed the Rada as Ukraine's representative body, and on 23 June its First Universal, or proclamation, declared autonomy without waiting for the Provisional Government's consent. The executive General Secretariat was led by the writer and Social Democrat Volodymyr Vynnychenko, with Symon Petliura as secretary for military affairs. This was not a government bent on breaking with Russia from the start. The Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries and Social Democrats who made up the Rada's majority wanted autonomy inside a democratic federal Russia. But the compromise reached with the Provisional Government in July was shaken by Petrograd's demands to trim its powers, and the "Ukrainization" of army units gave the Rada an armed base.

The October Revolution broke this balance. The Rada refused to recognize the Petrograd uprising without backing Kerensky, and on 20 November its Third Universal proclaimed a Ukrainian People's Republic "within the Russian federation". Its programme was socialist: abolition of private property in land, the eight-hour day, autonomy for national minorities. To the Bolsheviks the Rada was an armed rival. On 17 December the Council of People's Commissars sent an ultimatum, charging that the Rada was blocking Red Guards on their way to fight Kaledin's Don Cossacks and pulling Ukrainized units out of the front. At the All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets in Kyiv in December the Bolsheviks were a minority; they walked out, moved to Kharkiv and proclaimed a Soviet government of Ukraine on 25 December. In the Constituent Assembly elections the Ukrainian provinces gave most of their votes to Ukrainian parties, and the Bolsheviks won around a tenth. Which government represented Ukraine would be decided not by proclamations but by force and by support in the provinces.

January and February 1918: independence declared, Kyiv lost

On 22 January 1918 the Rada's Fourth Universal declared the full independence of the Ukrainian People's Republic, a legal status it also needed in order to make a separate peace at Brest. By the time the declaration appeared, Soviet forces under Muravyov were already advancing on Kyiv. On 29 January several hundred Kyiv cadets and students tried to stop them at Kruty station and dozens were killed. The same day workers at Kyiv's Arsenal plant rose and fought the Rada's troops in the streets until the Sich Riflemen crushed them on 4 February. On 9 February Muravyov's troops entered the city. Estimates put the dead of the following days' executions in the thousands, with Ukrainian speakers and officers singled out. The Rada withdrew to Zhytomyr.

On the same day at Brest the Rada's delegation signed a separate peace with the Central Powers, trading a million tons of grain for recognition and military help. German and Austro-Hungarian troops entered Ukraine from 18 February, and on 1 March the Rada returned to Kyiv behind the German army. The Soviet government in Kharkiv and Artyom's Donets-Krivoy Rog republic were pushed east. The international side of this negotiation and occupation is told in Brest-Litovsk. What it meant in Ukraine was that the government had come back on the strength of a foreign army.

A capital returned by Germany, a Hetman sustained by Germany

Relations between the occupiers and the Rada soon soured. The land law the Rada promulgated on 31 January socialized large estates without compensation, but what the German army needed was grain, and grain came from large farms. The German commander Eichhorn ordered peasants on 6 April to sow the landlords' fields and on 25 April introduced German courts martial to Ukraine. When the Rada protested, German soldiers entered the chamber on 28 April and searched the deputies. The next day, 29 April, a congress of landowners meeting in a Kyiv circus building acclaimed Pavlo Skoropadsky, a general of the old imperial army, "Hetman of all Ukraine". The title was borrowed from the seventeenth-century Cossack state; the Rada's People's Republic was replaced by the "Ukrainian State".

The Hetman's government built a bureaucracy, revived banks and railways and widened its diplomatic ties. On 14 November a Ukrainian Academy of Sciences was founded with Vladimir Vernadsky as its first president; a Ukrainian-language university opened at Kamianets-Podilskyi and a national library in Kyiv. But the regime's social base was narrow. While land was returned to the landlords and punitive detachments collected grain and reparations in the villages, the countryside armed itself. In June a peasant rising of tens of thousands in the Zvenyhorodka and Tarashcha districts held out for more than two months. On 30 July Eichhorn was assassinated in Kyiv. The regime could stand as long as the occupying army guaranteed order, but domestic consent and foreign protection were not the same foundation, and Germany's defeat in November exposed the difference. On 14 November Skoropadsky issued a charter proclaiming federation with a future non-Bolshevik Russia, abandoning Ukrainian independence in a bid for White and Allied support. The rising against him began that night.

The Directory: two fronts and one government

On the night of 13 November 1918 a five-man Directory was formed: Vynnychenko, Petliura, Shvets, Andriievsky and Makarenko. Yevhen Konovalets's Sich Riflemen rose at Bila Tserkva and defeated the Hetman's troops at Motovylivka on 18 November, and peasant bands joined from every side. On 14 December Skoropadsky signed his abdication and left with the Germans, and the Directory proclaimed the People's Republic restored. But the anti-Hetman coalition never became a national army. The provincial otamans who had joined the rising changed sides according to their own interests in land, food and local autonomy, and the Directory could deliver them neither pay nor reliable orders.

The government was divided against itself. Vynnychenko wanted to negotiate with Soviet Russia and build a state on councils of workers and peasants; Petliura put military victory and Allied support first. French troops landed at Odesa in December and held the southern ports until the following April, but France refused to recognize the Directory and backed the Whites. On 22 January 1919, in Kyiv's St Sophia Square, the People's Republic and the Western Ukrainian People's Republic of Galicia proclaimed their union. The two armies and administrations did not merge, however, and the Galician army fighting Poland in the west and the Directory's troops fighting the Soviets in the east each put its own enemy first.

Soviet forces were already pressing in again. Kharkiv fell on 3 January 1919 and Kyiv on 5 February, with Mykola Shchors's Bohun regiment the first to enter. Vynnychenko left the leadership in February and went abroad; Petliura became head of the Directory. The government moved between Vinnytsia and Kamianets-Podilskyi, mocked as "the republic on wheels". Meanwhile Christian Rakovsky's Soviet Ukrainian government in Kharkiv imported Russian grain requisitioning, state farms and committees of poor peasants wholesale. A policy that gave no room to the Ukrainian language or to Ukrainian communists produced widespread rural revolt within months; otamans such as Zelenyi, Sokolovsky and Anhel attacked Soviet troops around Kyiv.

The age of the otamans: Hryhoriv and Makhno

Nykyfor Hryhoriv, a former imperial officer, had joined the rising against the Hetman, become an otaman of the Directory, and in February 1919 brought his troops over to the Soviets. His units took Kherson on 10 March, then Mykolaiv, and on 6 April entered Odesa as the French and Greek troops evacuated. It was in effect this peasant army that ended Allied intervention in the south. But on 7 and 8 May he issued a "Universal" and rose against Soviet power, denouncing grain requisitioning and outsider officials. The revolt spread within days from Yekaterinoslav to Cherkasy, and from 15 to 17 May his troops murdered more than 1,500 Jews at Yelysavethrad, violence on a scale that the phrase "peasant resistance" cannot be allowed to hide. Soviet troops under Voroshilov and Parkhomenko put down the rising by the end of May, and on 27 July Hryhoriv was shot dead by Makhno's men at a meeting with Makhno.

Nestor Makhno led the anarchist peasant army of Huliaipole. Beginning in the summer of 1918 as partisans against Austrian troops and the Hetman's punitive detachments, his force was absorbed in early 1919 as the 3rd Brigade of the Soviet army and fought Denikin. Anarchists of the Nabat confederation, Volin among them, shaped the movement's political debate. But the Makhnovists rejected the centralized party-state and forced requisitioning, and in June Trotsky outlawed Makhno. When Denikin's summer offensive swept Ukraine, the Makhnovists destroyed a White force at Peregonovka on 26 September, crossed hundreds of kilometres of the White rear in days and seized Yekaterinoslav; Denikin, marching on Moscow, had to turn troops back. In January 1920 the Soviets outlawed Makhno again, and in October they made a third alliance with him against Wrangel; Makhnovist cavalry crossed the Sivash in the attack on Crimea. On 26 November, days after Crimea fell, Soviet forces attacked the Makhnovist units there and surrounded Huliaipole. On 28 August 1921 Makhno escaped into Romania with a few dozen followers.

Between 1918 and 1921 some 1,500 pogroms took place in Ukraine, with the dead estimated at 50,000 to 100,000. The perpetrators ranged across units of the Directory, independent otamans, the Whites and Red troops, in very different proportions. On 15 February 1919 a Zaporozhian Cossack unit of the Directory killed more than 1,500 Jews at Proskuriv in a few hours. Petliura issued orders forbidding pogroms and the commander, Semesenko, was later executed, but the existence of orders does not erase what was done on the ground or the delay in punishing it. The trial of Sholem Schwarzbard, who shot Petliura in Paris in 1926 and was acquitted the next year, made the argument over responsibility an international one. For civilians, each change of regime meant renewed plunder, requisition, massacre and flight.

The Whites' Ukraine: Denikin and "Russia one and indivisible"

In the summer of 1919 Denikin's Armed Forces of South Russia pushed into Ukraine. Kharkiv fell on 25 June and on 3 July Denikin issued his order to march on Moscow. On 31 August two armies entered Kyiv at once: the Galician army and the Directory's troops from the west, Bredov's Whites from the east. Both hung their flags on the city hall, and that evening the Whites tore the Ukrainian flag down. The Ukrainians gave up the city to avoid a clash. A common enemy in the Bolsheviks did not make an alliance. Denikin called Ukraine "Little Russia", denied its independence, cut state funding for Ukrainian schools and closed Ukrainian institutions. The People's Republic now had to face the Soviets and the Whites at the same time, and in the autumn typhus destroyed its army. On 6 November the Galician command signed a separate truce with Denikin, and in early December Petliura handed his remaining troops to Omelianovych-Pavlenko for the "First Winter Campaign", a raid through the Soviet and White rear, and left for Warsaw.

The Whites took the cities but never won the countryside. The return of the landlords, requisitioning and pogroms combined with the Makhnovists' attacks on their rear. The pogroms carried out by White troops at Fastiv in September 1919 and in Kyiv in October were among the largest massacres of the period. Denikin's offensive, which had reached Orel, broke in mid-October, and on 16 December Soviet forces retook Kyiv. The march on Moscow and the southern front as a whole are covered in the Russian Civil War. In Ukraine, 1919 was the year Kyiv changed hands four times.

The Warsaw agreement and the last campaigns

Having lost his own military base, Petliura concluded the Warsaw agreement with Józef Piłsudski on 21 April 1920. Poland recognized the People's Republic and would fight the Soviets alongside it; in return Ukraine recognized eastern Galicia and western Volhynia, up to the Zbruch river, as Polish territory. Giving away the lands of the Western Ukrainian People's Republic was taken as betrayal by the Galicians and split the Ukrainian camp again. The joint offensive that began on 25 April brought Polish and Ukrainian troops into Kyiv on 7 May, but even in Petliura's name no mass peasant rising followed. When Budyonny's First Cavalry Army broke the front on 5 June, the Poles left Kyiv on 12 June. The battle of Warsaw and the peace talks that followed are told in the Soviet-Polish War. The Ukrainian 6th Division took part in the defence of Zamość in August, helping hold off Budyonny's cavalry.

When Poland and the Soviets agreed an armistice in October, the People's Republic's army of some twenty thousand was left alone. Driven back by a Soviet offensive that began on 10 November, it crossed the Zbruch on 21 November and was interned in Poland; camps at Kalisz, Aleksandrów and elsewhere housed the exile army for years. In the Treaty of Riga of 18 March 1921 Poland recognized Soviet Ukraine, and the People's Republic was not admitted as a party. In November of that year the "Second Winter Campaign" under Tiutiunnyk entered Volhynia hoping to spark a rising, failed, and on 21 November 359 prisoners were shot at Bazar. Peasant resistance, in Kholodnyi Yar and elsewhere, went on into 1922, but the regular army of Ukraine's war of independence ended here.

Soviet Ukraine, with its capital at Kharkiv, governed central, eastern and southern Ukraine, while Galicia and Volhynia went to Poland, Bukovina to Romania and Carpathian Ukraine to Czechoslovakia. On 28 December 1920 Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Russia signed a treaty of military and economic alliance, and two years later Ukraine entered the USSR.

Assessment: national revolution or a front of the civil war?

Ukraine's years from 1917 to 1921 long went by two names. Ukrainian émigré historiography called them the "Ukrainian Revolution" or the "war of independence"; Soviet writing called them "the October Revolution and Civil War in Ukraine". In the first account the Rada and the Directory are protagonists who tried to build a nation-state and were crushed by two Russian forces; in the second they are "bourgeois nationalists" and traitors who called in foreign armies. That Hrushevsky returned to Soviet Ukraine in 1924 and died under surveillance, and that Petliura was shot in Paris, shows that these two narratives were people's fates.

Research since 1991 has unsettled both. Western scholarship from John Reshetar onward stressed how narrow the social base of the Ukrainian national movement was, and that for peasants land came before nation. Andrea Graziosi read the period as the first phase of "the great Soviet peasant war", seeing the risings of the otamans, Makhno and Hryhoriv as a peasant war of its own that belonged to no state. Studies of the pogroms by Henry Abramson and Jeffrey Veidlinger have rebuilt the picture of who the perpetrators were and how responsibility was structured, and treat the massacres of 1919 as a foreshadowing of the mass killing of the next generation in Europe. The Makhno movement is read both as anarchism's one large-scale experiment and as peasant regionalism.

The outcome for Soviet Ukraine was itself not simple. Formal statehood survived and a policy of Ukrainization followed in the 1920s, but political and military power was bound to the Bolshevik centre. The absorption of the Ukrainian left, the Borotbists, into the party and the later purge of the national communism of Shumsky and Skrypnyk lead into the debates over the formation of the USSR in 1922. The result cannot be explained as the predestined failure of a nation-state or as one provincial front of the Russian Civil War. National independence, land revolution, rival forms of socialism and foreign intervention collided here, and shaped the memory of Ukrainian politics for a century.