Lost Kingdom

by Serhii Plokhy

  The most confusing aspect of the term “Russian Revolution” is that it obscures what actually took place in the multiethnic Russian Empire—a revolution of nations, of which the Russians were only one. Thus, historians have spoken for decades about the Ukrainian and other non-Russian revolutions as part of or coinciding with the revolutionary events in Russia proper. Whatever meaning one ascribes to “Russian Revolution,” it fundamentally changed not only the economic, social, and cultural life of the former subjects of the Romanovs, but also relations among the nationalities. Nowhere were those revolutionary changes more dramatic than in the triangle of imperial Russian national identity—its “Great,” “Little,” and “White” components. Thus, the “Russian Revolution” was indeed “Russian” in more than one way.

  As the Provisional Government that came to power in March 1917 did its best to maintain the façade of one all-Russian nationality, one political party in Russia seemingly had no problem with recognizing Ukrainians and Belarusians as distinct peoples and acknowledging their autonomy or even independence. That party was Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks, a small branch of the Russian Social Democrats that was rapidly increasing in popularity and numbers. Like most Marxists of that day, the Bolsheviks denounced capitalism, rejected private property, and believed that the future belonged to the proletariat—the industrial working class, whose vanguard they aspired to be. But unlike their European counterparts, the Bolsheviks, who established themselves as a separate political force in 1903, believed not in an evolutionary but a revolutionary ascension of the proletariat to political power. They needed state power to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and lead the world to socialism. They knew that a proletarian revolution was all but doomed to failure in the largely peasant Russian Empire unless they ignited the fire of world revolution in Central and Western Europe, which had a well-developed proletariat and was thus supposedly ready for the advent of socialism.

  Lenin and his cohort were internationalist in composition and outlook and in their conception of the forthcoming revolution. Russian imperial nationalism was anathema to them, and they declared themselves prepared to recognize the separate identity of the Ukrainians and Belarusians. What Lenin and the Bolsheviks thought about the nationality question in general and the Russian question in particular took on unexpected importance after the night of November 7 (October 25 by the Julian calendar), 1917, when they deposed the Provisional Government in a largely bloodless coup and declared themselves the new government of the Russian republic. The extent of that republic’s borders was as yet unspecified.

  For Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who insisted on the political primacy of social classes, the nationality question was of secondary importance, and for a long time they had all but ignored it. Only the rise of national movements in the Russian Empire and Austria-Hungary on the eve of World War I forced Lenin and his allies to articulate their view of the nationality question. In 1912, Lenin commissioned the Georgian Bolshevik Joseph Stalin, who read no languages other than Russian and Georgian and was largely unknown outside the Caucasus, to formulate the party’s position on the matter. That position was to be defined in debate with the views of the Austrian Marxists, whose works Stalin could not read in the original. Relying on Lenin’s support and advice, he fully incorporated his leader’s views on the subject of nationalities into a long article published in 1913 that subsequently appeared as a separate pamphlet under the title Marxism and the National Question.

  The ideas first presented by Lenin and then spelled out in Stalin’s pamphlet were further developed in Lenin’s own articles published during the first months of the war. Lenin declared the right of all nations of the Russian Empire to self-determination, up to and including secession, but there was one caveat. In the final analysis, it was up to the working class of every nation—or, more prosaically, up to the Bolshevik Party—to determine whether “self-determination” meant secession or not. If secession was in the interest of the proletariat, as understood by the party, then the nation could leave the empire; otherwise, it would have to stay in order to ensure the victory of the working class over its enemies.

  The principles looked quite clear on paper, but could they be implemented in practice? The first test came immediately after the Bolsheviks took power in Petrograd. In reaction to the coup, the Kyivan politicians declared Ukrainian statehood, claiming not only the provinces of central Ukraine but also the traditionally Ukrainian-settled territories of Kharkiv, Odesa, and the Donets River Basin in eastern Ukraine that many in Petrograd considered part of Russia. More importantly, the Ukrainians refused to cooperate with the new government in Petrograd, which Lenin and the Bolsheviks considered evidence of counterrevolution.

  THE UKRAINIAN ACTIVISTS HAD ORGANIZED THEMSELVES ON March 4, 1917, into a Central Council, or, in Ukrainian, a Central Rada. Its mandate was to coordinate the activities of all Ukrainian organizations, political and otherwise. In political terms, its composition resembled that of the Provisional Government in Petrograd—the Rada consisted of activists close to the Constitutional Democrats as well as increasingly more influential socialists of various stripes. Its initial demands were quite moderate and compatible with the Constitutional Democrats’ program on the nationality question. The Rada wanted finally to achieve something that the Ukrainian activists had demanded for decades—to bring the Ukrainian language into the school system. But Mykhailo Hrushevsky, the newly elected leader of the Rada, who had returned to Kyiv in mid-March after years of exile in Russia, had his eyes on a higher prize—the territorial autonomy of Ukraine.

  In late March 1917, Hrushevsky wrote a programmatic article titled “No Turning Back,” in which he threatened the Provisional Government with the prospect of complete independence if it did not agree to grant Ukraine territorial autonomy. He wrote:

  Broad autonomy for Ukraine with sovereign rights for the Ukrainian people—that is the program of the given moment from which there can be no turning back. Any obstacles, any vacillation in satisfying it on the part of the leaders of the Russian state or the ruling circles of Russian society will tip the scales in the direction of Ukrainian independentism.… At the present moment, those who support an independent, or, more precisely, a self-sufficient, Ukraine agree to remain on a common platform of broad national-territorial autonomy and federal guarantees of Ukraine’s sovereign right. The flag of independent Ukraine remains folded. But will it be unfurled the moment all-Russian centralists might wish to tear the banner of broad Ukrainian autonomy in a federal, democratic Russian republic?

  Hrushevsky’s program soon became that of the Central Rada and was supported by numerous congresses of peasants’ and soldiers’ deputies—the true source of legitimacy and power in the months following the February Revolution. Whereas in the Russian provinces of the empire the revolution brought about peasant revolts against the local nobility, and in the Caucasus and Central Asia it took the form of an insurgency of autochthonous populations against Russian colonists, in Ukraine the peasants were mobilized by Ukrainian activists in support of territorial autonomy. Having played his role in the abdication of Nicholas II, Vasilii Shulgin returned to his native Kyiv, complaining that Ukrainian activists were stirring up the peasants by telling them that if they assumed a Ukrainian identity and supported Ukrainian autonomy, they would assure themselves of the right to obtain land of their own and prevent foreigners, especially Russian peasants, from claiming the rich Ukrainian soil. The soldiers, who had been allowed to form Ukrainian units since June 1917, also supported the Rada, seeing it as the only institution that could end the war and send them back home in time for the redistribution of the land.

  Encouraged by such popular support, Hrushevsky and the Rada unilaterally declared the territorial autonomy of Ukraine in June 1917. The genie of the federal restructuring of the Russian Empire and the concomitant partitioning of the big Russian nation was out of the bottle. The Provisional Government tried to put it back by sending its ministers to Kyiv, ho
ping to convince the Rada to withdraw its declaration of autonomy. Faced with the Rada’s refusal, which was backed by Ukraine’s minorities, including Jewish and Polish socialists, the ministers negotiated a deal in which they recognized the Rada and its government, the General Secretariat, as representatives of the Provisional Government in Ukraine. Thus Ukrainian autonomy, in curtailed form, survived its first encounter with the central government in Petrograd.

  The Russian nationalists were outraged by what they interpreted as a surrender of Russian national interests by the socialist ministers of the Provisional Government. Vasilii Shulgin led the charge. In early April 1917, Shulgin had published an article in Kievlianin arguing that if the old regime had persecuted the non-Russians, the new one would go after the Russians, turning the state into a prison for them. Shulgin was prepared to tolerate the rule of the Central Rada, which he called “the despotism of an organized band,” but only if its leaders supported the war effort. The Rada, however, opted for peace. It also wanted autonomy, which in Shulgin’s eyes was tantamount to treason and stabbing Russia in the back in its war against Germany and Austria. He argued that an autonomous Ukraine would become easy prey for Germany.

  But Shulgin’s key issue remained the unity of the big Russian nation. He regarded the Provisional Government’s recognition of curtailed Ukrainian autonomy as a betrayal of the Russian nation, of which Ukraine (Little Russia) and its inhabitants were an integral part. Shulgin insisted that Russians constituted the majority in Ukraine. He defined Russianness on the basis of the written rather than the spoken language, and if one could judge by the number of readers of the Kyivan press, it was the Ukrainians, not the Russians, who were in the minority. For Shulgin, the most important question was not the future structure of the Russian state, but the “reclassification” of Little Russians as Ukrainians and Little Russia as Ukraine.

  VLADIMIR LENIN NEVER SHARED SHULGIN’S CONCERNS ABOUT the unity of the Russian nation. In June 1917, he went out of his way to manifest his support for the Rada, not only recognizing the Ukrainians as a distinct nation but also endorsing their right to autonomy, or even independence. “The Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks tolerated the fact that the Provisional Government of the Constitutional Democrats, that is, of the counterrevolutionary bourgeois, did not fulfill its elementary democratic duty by failing to announce that it was for the autonomy of Ukraine and its complete freedom to separate,” wrote Lenin.

  Lenin saw the Rada as a potential ally in his assault on the Provisional Government, and in November 1917 the Bolsheviks and the Rada did indeed cooperate to expel the government’s supporters from the city. But the situation changed dramatically after the Bolshevik takeover. The Kyiv Bolsheviks tried to gain a majority in the Ukrainian Congress of Soviets convened in Kyiv in December 1917 in order to repeat the Petrograd scenario and seize power in Ukraine in the name of the Soviets, but they found themselves in the minority. The Rada was no longer an ally but an enemy. The Kyiv Bolsheviks moved to Kharkiv, an industrial center close to the border with Russia, and declared the creation of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic. It claimed the same territory as the Ukrainian People’s Republic, whose formation was declared by the Rada after the Bolshevik coup.

  The Rada, as the government of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, refused to recognize the Bolshevik clone or to support Lenin in his struggle against anti-Bolshevik forces, which was more than Lenin and his party comrades could take. As far as they were concerned, the Rada had abused the right of the Ukrainian people to self-determination. In the “Manifesto to the Ukrainian People with an Ultimatum to the Central Rada,” drafted by Lenin along with Leon Trotsky, the second most powerful party and government official, and Joseph Stalin, the commissar for nationalities, the Bolshevik leaders made a contradictory argument, simultaneously recognizing the right of the Ukrainian people to self-determination and denying it in the name of the revolution. They began by asserting their recognition of “the Ukrainian People’s Republic and its right to separate completely from Russia or enter into an agreement with the Russian Republic on federative or similar mutual relations between them.” They then revoked their recognition of the Ukrainian government, claiming that it had an “ambiguous policy, which makes it impossible for us to recognize the Rada as a plenipotentiary representative of the workers and exploited masses of the Ukrainian Republic.”

  At stake was the Central Rada’s neutrality with regard to the conflict between the Bolshevik government in Petrograd and commanders of the former Russian imperial army who had remained loyal to the Provisional Government and established their base of operations in the Don region of southern Russia. Lenin wanted the Rada to stop disarming Bolshevik formations in Ukraine, block the access of the anti-Bolshevik forces to the Don region, and join his government in a war against the opponents of the Bolshevik regime in Ukraine. That was the extent of the “self-determination” permitted by Lenin, who was no longer in opposition to the Provisional Government but in power. The Rada refused. Lacking strength in Ukraine itself, Lenin sent Russian military units to Kyiv led by the former security chief of the Provisional Government and commander of the Petrograd garrison, Lieutenant Colonel Mikhail Muraviev.

  In January 1918, Muraviev’s troops began their advance on Kyiv. In early February, he took the Ukrainian capital after firing 15,000 artillery shells at the city. Among other targets, the gunners bombarded the house of Mykhailo Hrushevsky, setting it on fire and causing the death of the elderly mother of the head of the Ukrainian movement. Hrushevsky and the Central Rada left the city, but not before proclaiming Ukraine’s complete independence from Bolshevik Russia. In formal terms, Muraviev was acting on behalf of the Soviet Ukrainian government formed in Kharkiv in December 1917. Its commissar for military affairs was Yurii Kotsiubynsky, a son of the prominent Ukrainian modernist writer Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky. But the army that theoretically reported to that scion of the Ukrainian cultural elite was shooting people on the streets of Kyiv simply for using the Ukrainian language, which Muraviev’s Russian troops considered evidence of nationalist counterrevolution. In February 1918, Volodymyr Zatonsky, the minister of education of the Soviet Ukrainian government, who had earlier served as a personal secretary to Lenin, was arrested on the streets of Kyiv by Muraviev’s soldiers for speaking Ukrainian. Only a paper signed by Lenin that was found in his pocket saved him from execution.

  The entire population of Kyiv was subjected to weeks of arbitrary arrests and executions, the kind of “Red terror” that served as a template for subsequent Bolshevik atrocities. After entering the city, Muraviev demanded 5 million rubles to supply his army. He also ordered his troops “mercilessly to destroy all officers and cadets, haidamakas [members of Ukrainian military formations], monarchists, and enemies of the revolution in Kyiv.” According to some estimates, close to 5,000 people suspected of allegiance either to the old regime or to the Central Rada were killed by Muraviev’s thugs. Among them was Metropolitan Vladimir (Bogoiavlensky) of Kyiv. In early February 1918, Muraviev sent a report to Lenin stating that “order has been reestablished in Kyiv, and revolutionary authority in the form of the People’s Secretariat, the Soviet of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, which has arrived from Kharkiv, and the Military Revolutionary Committee is working energetically.”

  The new Bolshevik masters of Kyiv arrested Vasilii Shulgin, who had returned to his native city in the spring of 1917, simply on the basis of his earlier political activity. He was lucky to survive the ordeal. The plan was to send him to Moscow, but that turned out to be impossible because of the changing situation at the front, where the Germans and Austrians were beginning their advance into Ukraine. One day he was called to the head of the investigative unit and informed that he would be released on condition that he return to prison at the first summons. He promised to do so and was released. The reason for this bizarre demand was simple: the Bolsheviks were leaving the city in haste before the advance of German forces and were not sure what to do
with their prisoners. Eventually they would develop the practice of executing those whom they could not evacuate, but these were the early days of the Bolshevik regime, and Shulgin not only stayed alive but was set free. Along with him, the all-Russian project would gain a new lease on life.

  Shulgin considered the Bolshevik coup of October 1917 in Petrograd a national catastrophe. In an article published in Kievlianin upon receiving the news from the capital, he had treated the Bolshevik revolution as a pro-German coup. As far as he was concerned, the foreign enemy was no longer making inroads into the periphery of the empire but had seized its capital. Shulgin suggested that if a German government were established in Petrograd, then a Russian government would have to be set up somewhere else. Before the end of the year, Shulgin left Kyiv for the Don region of southern Russia, where General Mikhail Alekseev, the former chief of staff of the imperial army, and General Lavr Kornilov were gathering forces to fight the Bolsheviks and continue the war on the German front.

  THE WHITE MOVEMENT—THE NAME UNDER WHICH THE DON EXILES became known in opposition to the Red Army of the Bolsheviks—had its origins in the military coup staged by General Lavr Kornilov in August 1917 in an attempt to dissolve the Petrograd Soviet, which was then gaining strength in its competition for political power with the ever weaker Provisional Government. The coup failed, helping the Bolsheviks take control of the soviets in Petrograd and Moscow and stage their own coup in October 1917.