Lost Kingdom

by Serhii Plokhy

  Police officials considered Hrushevsky to be the leader of the Galician “Mazepists” and planned his exile to Siberia. Only the intervention of the Russian liberal intelligentsia—including such diverse figures as Aleksei Shakhmatov, one of the coauthors of the Academy of Sciences’ memorandum on the Ukrainian language, and Petr Struve, a liberal opponent of the Ukrainophiles—made the government change its mind. Instead of Siberia, Hrushevsky was exiled to the town of Simbirsk. The joke went that his supporters had slipped a few letters into the word “Siberia,” turning it into “Simbirsk,” a town on the Volga closer to Moscow but still far from Ukraine. Not only Hrushevsky but the entire Ukrainian movement was effectively silenced. The government and its “true Russian” supporters got a free hand to carry out their own nation-building agenda within the old imperial borders and beyond.

  IN MARCH 1915, AS HRUSHEVSKY WAS SETTLING DOWN TO HIS Simbirsk exile, Emperor Nicholas II was planning his visit to the recently conquered Galicia. The fall of Peremyshl on March 9 gave him an opportunity to bask in military glory. It would not be his first visit to the vicinity of the front but his first wartime venture outside the old imperial frontiers—a fact that caused panic among his bodyguards. Also opposed to the idea of the tsar’s visit to Galicia was the military brass, run by Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich—the Russian commanders were not sure that they could hold the freshly conquered territory, and the tsar’s presence in what the press hailed as part of the Russian land might force them to put politics ahead of military considerations in what they knew would be the difficult summer campaign of 1915.

  But Nicholas insisted, and his bodyguards and the military went along. It was a media coup for the tsar, who was much less popular with the army than his relative, Nikolai Nikolaevich. The Russian nationalist press celebrated Nicholas’s visit to the “ancient Russian land” as a victory not only for Russian arms but also for the Russian national idea. The inspection of the occupation administration and troops in Galicia included visits to Lviv, Peremyshl, and Brody. It took place in early April, during the Easter season, when the emperor traditionally demonstrated his closeness to the people by exchanging Easter eggs (and kisses) with officers and rank-and-file soldiers and sailors of units attached to the court. He would present them with porcelain Easter eggs—not of Fabergé manufacture, which were reserved for members of the imperial family, but still a major luxury by the standards of the time—in exchange for red-colored boiled eggs offered by the soldiers. Now that same tradition was being brought to the troops in Galicia, extending the sacred space of the empire westward.

  On his trip, Nicholas often felt as if he were at home, within the borders of the empire. “The farther we traveled, the more beautiful the country became. The appearance of the settlements and inhabitants strongly recalled Little Russia,” reads the tsar’s diary of the time. After visiting Lviv, he noted: “A very beautiful city slightly reminiscent of Warsaw, a wealth of gardens and monuments, full of armies and Russian people.” In the city, Nicholas was welcomed not only by the governor general of Galicia, Count Bobrinsky, but also by the principal Orthodox hierarch of the land, Archbishop Evlogii.

  On the eve of the visit, Evlogii received a request from Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich not to bring up “politics” in his welcoming speech to the tsar. He was nonplussed. “Can I really not say, for example, ‘You enter here as the sovereign master of this land’?” he asked the chief military chaplain who delivered the request. “No,” came the answer, “the war is not over yet, and no one knows whether the tsar will remain the master of that land.” Evlogii refused to follow the grand duke’s advice. “Your Imperial Highness,” he said in addressing the tsar upon his arrival in Lviv, “you are the first to enter this ancient Russian land, the patrimony of the old Russian princes Roman and Daniil, where no Russian monarch has ever been. This subjugated, long-suffering Rus’, from which sighs and groans were heard for ages, now raises a triumphant hosanna to you.”

  Nicholas was delighted by the speech. He was also impressed by the reception the local Russophiles gave him. During dinner at the governor general’s mansion, a group of Evlogii’s Orthodox parishioners broke through the security perimeter around the building and showed up on the adjacent square with icons and church banners, singing the “people’s song,” “God Save the Tsar.” Nicholas addressed the crowd from the balcony, as he had done on the Senate Square in St. Petersburg in August 1914. He thanked the crowd for the warm reception and concluded his brief speech with words dear to the heart of Evlogii and other Russian nationalists: “Let there be one mighty, indivisible Rus’!” The tsar’s sister Olga, who was in the city with the military hospital, remembered the reception offered to her brother in Lviv with great warmth. “For the last time I felt the mysterious bond that united our family with the people,” she wrote later.

  NICHOLAS’S EASTER 1915 VISIT TO GALICIA WAS FILMED BY A Russian crew, and the celebration of Orthodox Easter in Galicia became a subject of paintings and postcards. It was a symbolic high point in the long campaign of Russian nationalists to gather the lands of the former Kyivan Rus’, construct a big Russian nation, including Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, and bring together monarchy, religion, and nation in the service of the state. For anyone looking out of the governor general’s palace in Lviv on April 9, 1915, there would have been little doubt that the Russian Empire had finally succeeded in making its long transition to a Russian nation-state. Instead of succumbing to the rising ethnic nationalism that threatened to divide the empire, it had risen to the challenge by expanding its borders to incorporate all the Russias.

  The hopes and dreams of the Russian “unifiers” were crushed even more quickly than they had been raised by the victories over the Austro-Hungarian forces. In May 1915, barely a month after the tsar’s triumphal entrance into Lviv, the Germans brought their divisions to the Austrian front and began their attack on the Russian armies in Galicia, retaking Peremyshl and forcing the imperial army out of Lviv. By the end of September the Russian armies had lost most of Galicia, a good part of Volhynia, all of Poland, western Belarus, and most of the Baltic provinces.

  In August 1915, an indignant Nicholas assumed personal command of the army, helping to raise morale but also taking direct responsibility for the conduct of the war. The fighting continued to go badly, exhausting Russia’s economic and human resources. In the summer of 1915, soon after the spring and summer defeats of the Russian army in Galicia, the Russian nationalists in Duma had joined forces with Miliukov’s Constitutional Democrats and monarchists from the “Union of October 17” in a Progressive Bloc that demanded a government responsible to the people, meaning one composed of Duma deputies. The tsar refused to create such a government. For the rest of 1915 and all of 1916, as Russian troops exhausted themselves and the empire in a positional war with the Germans and Austrians, the court remained in conflict with the Duma.

  February 1917 brought a food shortage in the capital, long bread lines, and popular protests, as well as mutiny in the army, which refused to suppress the revolt. The socialists created a soviet (council) that became the real power in the city, making the tsarist government all but irrelevant. The leaders of the Duma, who formed a government of their own, were unable to calm the masses and bring the situation under control. Eventually they decided that the only way to save the country was to engineer the resignation of the tsar. They got the support of the generals, who believed, as did many courtiers and Duma deputies, that the tsar had lost touch with reality and was a puppet in the hands of his German-born wife, Alexandra, who was in favor of signing a peace treaty with Germany without the participation of Britain and France, Russia’s Entente Allies.

  The generals, led by Chief of Staff Mikhail Alekseev, believed that signing a separate peace would not only violate Russia’s duties as an ally but also lead to the dismemberment of the empire, as a good part of its prewar territory would remain under German control. They were also concerned about the morale of the army and p
otential revolts behind the lines. Now, with rebellion in the streets and a soldiers’ mutiny in Petrograd, they knew that Nicholas had to go. The leaders of the Duma agreed. On March 2, 1917, the Duma sent a delegation to Nicholas II, who was outside the capital, with the thankless task of telling the tsar that he was no longer welcome on the throne. The two men entrusted with the mission were the prominent Duma deputy Vasilii Shulgin and the newly appointed minister of the army and navy in the Duma-created government, Aleksandr Guchkov.

  NICHOLAS II AND HIS ENTOURAGE, WHOM THE REVOLUTIONARY events in Petrograd found at army headquarters in the Belarusian city of Mahilioŭ (Mogilev), and who were now desperately trying to get back to the capital by rail via Pskov, learned of the Duma delegation beforehand. Some believed that Vasilii Shulgin’s presence in it was a good sign for the tsar and the future of the monarchy.

  Shulgin was well known not only as a leading Russian nationalist ideologue but also as a devoted monarchist, and the monarchy needed all the support it could muster. A graduate of the Kyiv University law school, Shulgin had been born into the family of Vitalii Shulgin, the publisher of the newspaper Kievlianin (The Kyivan), a mouthpiece of the all-Russian party in Ukraine. He had been raised by the newspaper’s other editor, Dmitrii Pikhno, and had assumed its editorship himself in 1913. Shulgin’s first foray into politics had taken place during elections to the Second Duma in the fall of 1906. In the Duma, Shulgin had become one of the leaders of the Russian nationalists and rightists. He was also a leader of the All-Russian Nationalist Union, a mass organization created in early 1910.

  In March 1917, Shulgin volunteered for the Duma mission to the tsar. He felt that by asking Nicholas to resign he would save the monarchy. His companion, Aleksandr Guchkov, shared that view. Like other members of the government, such as the new minister of foreign affairs, Pavel Miliukov, Guchkov believed that the tsar’s abdication in favor of his son and heir, the twelve-year-old Tsarevich Aleksei, would calm the people and allow the Duma and the Provisional Government to retake the initiative from the Petrograd Soviet. The monarchy would survive at the price of becoming constitutional.

  Late in the evening of March 2, 1917, when Shulgin and Guchkov arrived in Pskov, where Nicholas and his entourage were stationed, they asked to see General Nikolai Ruzsky, the commander of the northern front. Chief of Staff Mikhail Alekseev had already consulted with the commanders of the military fronts and obtained their go-ahead for what amounted to a coup. Ruzsky, the master of Pskov, had been ordered to use his powers of persuasion to convince the tsar to resign. He was in close contact with the Duma leadership and, like other top generals, wanted the tsar to go. He succeeded admirably. Upon their arrival at the Pskov train station, Shulgin and Guchkov did not have a chance to see Ruzsky and were immediately ushered into the tsar’s train car. When Ruzsky joined the meeting, he whispered to Shulgin that the question of resignation was already resolved.

  Calm and composed as always, Nicholas informed Shulgin and Guchkov that he had decided in favor of abdication, but not, as they expected, in favor of his son, Aleksei, whose serious health problems made it necessary for him to stay with his parents. Nicholas would relinquish power to his brother Mikhail. After some hesitation, the guests agreed to the tsar’s proposal. Shulgin even decided that it was a better solution, as the underage Aleksei could not legally swear allegiance to the constitution—an important element of Shulgin’s vision for the future of the Russian monarchy—while Mikhail, as an adult, could do so. Shulgin asked the tsar to make one amendment to the resignation manifesto, indicating that Mikhail would swear “to the whole people” to work with their representative institutions, meaning the Duma. Nicholas agreed but replaced “oath to the whole people” with “inviolable oath.” He was still struggling to define relations between the monarchy and the people.

  The people, for their part—or, at least, those who had revolted in Petrograd—were more than clear about their attitude toward the monarchy. As Shulgin and Guchkov found out on their return to the capital, the people wanted neither Nicholas nor the monarchy. The government formed by the Duma had little choice but to accept the people’s will, as did the heir apparent, Mikhail. On the day after Nicholas’s resignation, Mikhail signed a document of his own, stating that he would accept the throne only if asked to do so by the Constitutional Assembly, which was to be elected by the people in order to decide Russia’s form of government. The resignation of a second Romanov in as many days had the desired effect. With the agreement of the Petrograd Soviet, the Duma government was installed as the Provisional Government of Russia and charged with organizing elections to the Constitutional Assembly. The government issued a decree declaring an end to political persecution, introducing democratic freedoms, and promising the abolition of “all estate, religious, and national restrictions,” which meant the equality of all Russian subjects in the eyes of the law. The monarchy was now gone in all but name.

  Shulgin, his Duma colleagues, and the generals were disappointed, but they had to accept reality. More immediately important to them was the failure of the Provisional Government to say anything in its declaration about peace with Germany, separate or general. It became clear that the government was prepared to continue fighting the war in order to restore the territorial unity of the empire. It had the full support of those in the political and military elite who put the unity and indivisibility of Russia above all other values. They would soon learn that the main threat to the unity of the empire, and, indeed, of the hoped-for big Russian nation, was posed not so much by the German and Austrian armies as by revolutionary forces within the empire itself.

  THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY AND THE VACUUM OF POWER IN Petrograd, which resulted from competition between the liberals in the Provisional Government and the socialists in the Petrograd Soviet, created an opening for the leaders of the national movements, which had been in retreat since the outbreak of the war. The first to take advantage of the new revolutionary situation were the leaders of nations that had experienced some form of self-rule in the course of the nineteenth century. Thus the Finns, who had enjoyed autonomy between 1809 and 1899, immediately demanded that their constitution be restored. The Provisional Government complied on March 20, 1917, less than three weeks after Nicholas’s abdication. Nine days later, the Poles were promised an independent state in military alliance with Russia. The final decision on the Polish and Finnish questions was postponed until the convocation of the Constitutional Assembly, although, in the case of Poland, this was merely pro forma. “Recognizing the independence of Poland is like granting independence to the moon,” people quipped in Petrograd in those days. The country had been lost in the summer of 1915 and was now under German occupation.

  When it came to the western provinces of the empire, the Polish question had never existed in a vacuum. Each of the Polish uprisings, as well as Polish political achievements in the Habsburg monarchy, had chipped away at the imagined monolith of the big Russian nation by encouraging the Ukrainians and Belarusians to raise demands of their own. In the spring of 1917, the Ukrainians and Belarusians did not ask for independence, but they were eager to demand cultural and then territorial autonomy and the federal restructuring of the Russian state, which, according to the Provisional Government, now consisted not of imperial subjects but of Russian (rossiiskii) citizens.

  The Provisional Government was reluctant to give the two lesser branches of the imperial Russian nation what they wanted. The reason was not only that it wished to postpone all decisions on the government and structure of the state until the Constitutional Assembly, but also that it was beholden to the Constitutional Democrats, the most influential party in the government in the early spring of 1917. Some of them, such as Petr Struve, still opposed the very idea of dividing a Russian nation held together by language and culture rather than by ethnicity. Others, like Pavel Miliukov, were prepared to grant the non-Russians personal autonomy, which allowed for the development of language and culture, but not autonomous terr
itory or government.

  But that was exactly what the Ukrainian leaders, and some of the Belarusian ones, were demanding from the Petrograd government. They would make their voices heard as never before and get further than they had ever dreamed as the political, social, and economic turmoil, known in history as the Russian Revolution, gained speed in the subsequent months of 1917.

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  THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

  THERE IS PROBABLY NO MORE IMPORTANT, THOUGH CONVOLUTED and often confusing, term for understanding Russian history than “Russian Revolution.” To begin with, there were three revolutions in Russia between 1905 and 1917. In 1917 alone, two revolutions took place: the February 1917 overthrow of the tsarist government and the October 1917 takeover of state power by Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks. As if that were not enough, the dates of those two revolutions are usually given according to the ancient Julian calendar used in the Russian Empire, and are thus known as the February and October revolutions. However, according to the Gregorian calendar adopted in the former imperial territories in 1918, they took place respectively in March and November 1917. Then there is the issue of the revolutions’ chronology. Under the capacious umbrella of the “Russian Revolution,” historians usually include the civil war in Russia and the international conflicts within the former imperial borders that took place from 1917 to 1921 and claimed millions of lives of combatants and innocent victims. Some scholars extend the term to a good part of the 1920s, or even the entire Soviet period.