Historical Events

1917.12–1918.11

Brest-Litovsk and Germany’s eastern occupation

The peace of Brest-Litovsk was a dictated settlement between a Soviet Russia whose army had melted away and an undefeated Germany. In the talks that opened in December 1917 three lines split the party: revolutionary war, "neither war nor peace", and immediate peace. After the German offensive of February 1918 Lenin staked his resignation on acceptance and the treaty was signed on 3 March. Russia gave up its rights over Ukraine, the Baltic and Finland and a third of its population, while Germany installed a Hetman in Ukraine, sent troops into Finland's civil war and planned duchies under its own umbrella in the Baltic. Germany's defeat in November voided the treaty, but the vacuum left by Article 12 of the armistice, which kept German troops in the Baltic, and the meeting of the Red Army, national governments and Whites in it became the stage for the borderland wars of the following year.

1917–1921

Ukraine’s revolution and wars

The Central Rada formed in Kyiv in March 1917 began by seeking autonomy within a federal Russia and declared independence in January 1918, but over the next four years Kyiv changed hands more than ten times. Soviet troops, the German occupation and Hetman Skoropadsky, the Directory of Vynnychenko and Petliura, Denikin's Whites and the Polish army held the city in turn, while the peasant armies of Hryhoriv and Makhno fought a war of their own that belonged to no state. Some 1,500 pogroms killed tens of thousands of Jews. The Warsaw agreement of 1920 and the Treaty of Riga of 1921 ended the Ukrainian People's Republic's war of independence, leaving the contradiction between Soviet Ukraine's formal statehood and the real control of the Bolshevik centre.

1919–1921

The Soviet-Polish War

The Soviet-Polish War was fought from 1919 to 1921 between reborn Poland and Soviet Russia in the borderlands of three collapsed empires. Begun without declaration in Belorussia in February 1919, it became full-scale war in April 1920 when Pilsudski, allied with Petliura, drove on Kiev. Budyonny's cavalry and Tukhachevsky's July offensive reversed the tide, and the Red Army marched on Warsaw under the banner of exporting revolution, only to be decisively beaten in the Battle of Warsaw in August. The Peace of Riga in March 1921 drew the border far east of the Curzon Line, partitioning Belorussia and Ukraine; it stood until 1939. The defeat before Warsaw proved in practice the last attempt to export revolution by bayonet, and turned the Soviet state onto the road of building in one country.

1922.12

Formation of the USSR

On 30 December 1922 the Soviet republics of Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia, and Transcaucasia concluded a union treaty as equals, creating the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The autonomization draft that would have absorbed the republics into the Russian federation was abandoned after Lenin's intervention, in favor of a union of equal republics with an explicit right of secession. The korenizatsiya (nativization) policy that followed had the state systematically promote national languages and national cadres, a nationality policy without precedent in the world of its time.

1932–1933

The Holodomor and the Collectivisation Famine

The Holodomor was a man-made famine that killed approximately 3.9 million people in Soviet Ukraine between 1932 and 1933. Its direct cause was the unmeetable grain procurement quotas imposed on Ukraine by Stalin's leadership, which was pursuing forced collectivisation and accelerated industrialisation. Although the 1931 harvest had collapsed, procurement targets were maintained; from autumn 1932, Kremlin emissaries such as Molotov and Kaganovich were dispatched to strip the countryside of grain. Villages that failed to meet quotas were blacklisted and subjected to economic blockade, and in January 1933 Stalin and Molotov sealed the borders of Ukraine and the Kuban, preventing starving peasants from fleeing to areas where food might be found. The famine struck grain-growing regions across the Soviet Union, but losses were heaviest in Ukraine. Soviet authorities denied the famine's existence until late 1987.

1986

The Chernobyl Disaster

On 26 April 1986, reactor no. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine exploded, spreading large amounts of radioactive material across Europe. The reflex to minimize and conceal the accident became a test for a new leadership that professed glasnost. A government commission under Ryzhkov led the response, and hundreds of thousands of liquidators were mobilized at the risk of radiation.

1988–1991

The Nationalities Crisis and the Collapse of Central Authority

The sequence running from the Sumgait pogrom of 1988 to the killings in Vilnius in 1991 is the process by which the Soviet national order and Soviet central authority came apart together under perestroika. The four episodes were not of one kind. Sumgait was an anti-Armenian pogrom touched off by the Nagorno-Karabakh question and a failure of policing; Tbilisi in 1989 was the military dispersal of an unarmed national and independence movement; Baku in 1990 was a large military intervention where ethnic violence and the collapse of central power overlapped; Vilnius in 1991 was force used against the sovereign institutions of a republic that had declared independence. Yet they show one crisis. The centre could not protect people from ethnic violence, and still reached for the army whenever a republic moved politically away from it.

1991

The Novo-Ogaryovo Process and the New Union Treaty

When the March 1991 referendum returned 76 percent for preserving the union, Gorbachev made it his last political capital. On 23 April, at the Novo-Ogaryovo estate outside Moscow, he issued the 9+1 statement with the leaders of nine republics, Yeltsin's Russia included, opening negotiations on a new union treaty that would recast the USSR as a voluntary federation of sovereign republics; six republics, among them the Baltic states and Georgia, stayed away from the start. Through a summer of tugging over taxation and the division of powers a draft was completed, with signing set for 20 August. In a late-night meeting at the end of July, Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Nazarbayev agreed that after the signing the hardliners, Kryuchkov and Pavlov among them, would be replaced; the KGB's microphones carried the conversation straight to its subjects.