Lost Kingdom

by Serhii Plokhy

  Kornilov’s supporters among the imperial officer corps were imprisoned by supporters of the Provisional Government in the Belarusian town of Bykhaŭ, and it was there, while incarcerated, that they began to discuss their strategy and tactics in detail. Their overall objective was to prevent the disintegration of Russia, which they considered imminent in case of a separate peace with Germany. Escaping from Bykhaŭ in the wake of the Bolshevik coup and the chaos created by the fall of the Provisional Government, the officers made their way to the Don region, where they reached an accommodation with the Don and Kuban Cossacks, whose leaders opposed the Bolshevik coup. A new power center was thus formed to restore the unity of Russia. It was easier said than done.

  If 1917 ended with the triumph of the Bolsheviks, 1918 brought in the Germans and Austrians. They occupied the western provinces of the former Russian Empire on the basis of treaties signed first with the leaders of the Central Rada and then with the Bolsheviks in February and March 1918 in the city of Brest-Litovsk. The first treaty allowed the Germans and Austrians to occupy the territory of the formally independent Ukrainian state and exact payment for their nation-building services in the form of agricultural products. As the Austro-German forces began their eastward march, the Bolsheviks, whose army was unable to resist the well-oiled German military machine, withdrew, leaving Kyiv on March 1. Two days later, the Bolsheviks signed their own treaty with Germany and Austria-Hungary. According to that treaty, they ceded control of half the Russian Empire’s European possessions, from the Baltics in the north to Ukraine in the south, to the German and Austrian High Command and undertook to pay 6 billion rubles to Berlin and Vienna. The Germans marched all the way to Taganrog in southern Russia, taking control of all Ukraine and the Crimea.

  Erich Ludendorff, the chief architect of the German war effort and Eastern policy, considered that support for nationalist movements and the creation of a belt of client states adjoining Germany on the territory of the former Russian Empire would secure a territorially extended German Reich and keep a future Russia, Bolshevik or not, at bay. In December 1917, Finland had declared its independence from Russia and established close ties with Germany, to be sealed ten months later by the election of a German prince to the Finnish throne. The same happened in Lithuania, where an independent state was declared in December 1917 and a German prince elected to rule it eight months later. A separate United Baltic Duchy was created on the territory of Estonia and Lithuania, again in close alliance with Germany.

  In February and March 1918, Ukraine became one more nation-building project supported by the Germans. Austria-Hungary, which had its own plans vis-à-vis Ukraine, joined in and dispatched a member of the imperial family, Archduke Wilhelm, who had long been preparing to become king of a future Ukrainian state closely allied with Austria. He learned Ukrainian and commanded Ukrainian units in the Austrian army. In Ukraine, Wilhelm Habsburg became known as the red prince, gaining the friendship of local elites and protecting the Ukrainian peasantry from the excesses of the Austro-German occupation. The Germans wanted him gone, fearing a coup in the interests of Austria, but Wilhelm, known locally as Prince Vasyl, stayed on.

  The German High Command initially tolerated the socialist Central Rada, but in April 1918, frustrated by the Rada’s inability to supply agricultural products to the German army, the High Command engineered a coup, replacing the socialists with conservatives led by a Russian aristocrat of Ukrainian origin, General Pavlo (Pavel) Skoropadsky. Back in June 1917, Vasilii Shulgin had listed Skoropadsky among the Russians of Little Russian origin who were not Ukrainians. But Skoropadsky eagerly took the leadership of the Ukrainian state from German hands, delivering a major blow to Shulgin’s definition of Russian identity by language alone.

  Skoropadsky, in fact, was not unique in his political choice, representing a growing group of Russian-speaking Ukrainians who combined allegiance to Russian culture with loyalty to the Ukrainian state and nation. Upon taking power, Skoropadsky proclaimed himself hetman of the Ukrainian state and declared everyone living in Ukraine a Ukrainian citizen. This inclusive approach to Ukrainian citizenship met with a formal protest filed by Vasilii Shulgin and two of his like-minded associates.

  Not all proponents of Russian unity were as stringent as Vasilii Shulgin. Skoropadsky’s Ukraine became a safe haven for former imperial government officials, politicians, and officers of the imperial army—anyone trying to escape the Bolshevik regime, which had established itself in central Russia. Many members of the Constitutional Democratic Party supported the hetman’s regime or even joined his government. Since Russia had been taken over by the Bolsheviks, they saw the Ukrainian state led by a former Russian aristocrat as a base from which the traditional Russia might be restored. Independent Ukraine was supposed to save Russia and then trade its independence for a form of federative relationship with Russia. “If Ukraine remains indifferent to the struggle with the Bolsheviks, it will never be forgiven by its neighbors. If, on the other hand, it helps Russia defeat the Bolsheviks, it can be assured of free development in alliance with Russia,” read a statement issued by Constitutional Democrats in the hetman’s government in October 1918.

  In November 1918, faced with the imminent withdrawal of German troops from Ukraine after the end of World War I, Skoropadsky indeed opted for federation with a future anti-Bolshevik Russia. “The former vigor and strength of the all-Russian state must be restored on the basis of the federal principle,” read Skoropadsky’s decree surrendering Ukrainian independence. “Ukraine deserves a leading role in the federation because it was from Ukraine that law and order spread throughout the country, and it was within its borders that for the first time the citizens of the former Russia, humiliated and oppressed, found refuge.” Now Russian nationalists in Ukraine, initially skeptical about Skoropadsky’s aspirations, joined his army. Among them was Vasilii Shulgin’s own son, Vasilko, who was killed on the outskirts of Kyiv, defending Skoropadsky’s dying regime against the advancing forces of the Ukrainian People’s Republic.

  GERMAN NATION-BUILDING INITIATIVES IN EASTERN EUROPE were not limited to support for a Ukrainian state independent of Russia. They also had a major impact on the articulation and development of the Belarusian project, whose rise created additional cracks in the imagined monolith of the imperial Russian nation.

  The imperial government lost western Belarus after the disastrous spring and summer campaign of 1915. At first the German occupation authorities were unaware of the Belarusians as a distinct nationality and of their national organizations. They discovered both a few months after the start of the occupation, as they looked for local cadres to limit the influence of the dominant Polish elites in the region. A German report on ethnic policy in the region, now called Ober Ost, blamed the Poles for arresting the national development of the Belarusians and living “off this disoriented group parasitically, drawing upon it for recruits for their own nationality.” The author of the report suggested that “the German future in this land depends on the Weissruthenen [White Ruthenians] experiencing a renaissance and confronting the Poles.”

  There was indeed a renaissance. The German commanding officer in the region, General Erich Ludendorff, ordered the creation of Belarusian-language schools to replace the Russian ones. By the end of 1917, the school system in western Belarus had 1,700 teachers educating about 73,000 schoolchildren in Belarusian. In February 1916, with German support and financial assistance (they supplied the paper), the Belarusian-language newspaper Homan (Echo) was launched with a press run of 3,000 copies, astonishing for a non-Russian and non-Polish publication in that time and place. The German military command, seeing Belarus as a nation in the making, also helped organize a Belarusian theater, which was characterized in a German newspaper in a paternalistic and condescending manner as representing “the earliest stages of dramatic sensibility.”

  German Orientalist paternalism notwithstanding, the military command’s perception was accurate. The formation of the modern Belarusia
n nation was retarded in western Belarus, then under German occupation, by a mass exodus of ethnic Belarusians. They left the region, often under the guidance of their Orthodox priests, who were active participants in Russian nationalist organizations. These priests portrayed the Germans as Teutonic barbarians with no other purpose than that of killing and torturing Orthodox Slavs. With almost a million and a half Orthodox Belarusians gone, the national project had difficulty extending its base: political, intellectual, and economic power in the countryside was mainly in the hands of the Polish nobility, and a good part of the urban population was Jewish. Under the circumstances, Belarusian activists were reluctant to declare the creation of a Belarusian state as their political goal. They opted instead for the idea of a joint Belarusian-Lithuanian polity.

  Belarusian national mobilization on the Russian side of the World War I front line began in earnest only after the February Revolution of 1917, when it emerged from the cocoon of the all-Russian nationalist project promoted by the imperial government during the war. The Bolshevik coup in Petrograd forced the Belarusian activists and socialist opponents of the Bolshevik regime (many of them ethnic Russians) to mobilize in support of Belarusian statehood. In December 1917, they convened the First All-Belarusian Congress, which recognized Soviet rule in Russia but not in Belarus. The Great Belarusian Rada elected by the congress declared itself the only legitimate authority in the land (meaning Belarusian territory not under German control) and announced plans for the creation of a Belarusian army. That was easier said than done.

  The Bolsheviks, in power in Petrograd and Moscow and enjoying strong backing from soldiers’ committees in the Belarusian sector of the Russo-German front, dissolved the congress. They saw no need for a Belarusian government not controlled from Moscow. They barely saw the need for a Belarusian government at all. Instead they formed the Soviet of Commissars of the Western Region, which included not only Belarus but also the Baltic provinces of the former empire. As in Kyiv, however, the Bolshevik triumph in Minsk was short-lived. After signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Ukrainian Rada and imposing their conditions on Bolshevik Russia, the Germans occupied central Belarus, including the city of Minsk.

  Now all Ukraine and most of Belarus (with the exception of its eastern lands) was under German or Austrian control. But the Germans treated the two nationalities differently: whereas the Ukrainian Rada had signed a separate peace with the Central Powers at Brest, the Belarusian Rada was not invited to the negotiating table. Whereas Ukraine had a government recognized by Berlin and Vienna, the Belarusian lands were simply occupied by German troops with no provision for a separate state or government—the Brest treaty explicitly prohibited the recognition of any new state on the territory of the former Russian Empire. It was something of a repetition of the mid-seventeenth-century situation in which Ukraine became part of the tsar’s realm on the basis of special rights and conditions negotiated by the Cossacks, while Belarus was merely occupied by Muscovite troops with no such provisions.

  After the German forces took Minsk in late February 1918, two groups of Belarusian activists—one that had worked with the Germans from the outset, and another that had been formed on the Russian side of the border in the previous year—got together and decided, after heated debates, on the formation not of a Lithuanian-Belarusian but a separate Belarusian state independent of Russia. Their declaration of March 25, 1918, read as follows: “Today we, the Rada of the Belarusian National Republic, cast off our country the last chains of political servitude imposed by Russian tsarism upon our free and independent land.” The decision to declare Belarusian independence was passed by a slim majority of the Belarusian Rada—the supreme governing body of the newly formed Belarusian Democratic Republic—and its significance was more symbolic than practical. The Belarusians were no longer claiming national-cultural autonomy or federal status in a future Russian state but outright independence.

  The German occupation authorities approved the Rada’s declaration, but the Kaiser’s government in Berlin refused to recognize either the creation of a Belarusian state or the Rada as its representative. The Rada now found itself in legal limbo. In a move reminiscent of the installation of the conservative Skoropadsky regime in Ukraine, the Germans helped to put a conservative landowner, Raman Skirmunt, at the helm of the Belarusian Rada. No significant powers were delegated to the Rada, which served as an intermediary between the occupation authorities and the local population, advising German military commanders and running self-government at the local level. Tolerated but not officially recognized by the Germans as a governing body, the Belarusian Rada was neither popularly elected nor supported by the occupation authorities, although its very existence helped promote the idea of an independent Belarus.

  It was in this period that Belarus acquired its insignia of statehood: a national flag with white stripes at the top and bottom and a red one in between, and a coat of arms featuring a mounted knight with a sword and shield—a symbol dating from the times of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The Rada dispatched diplomatic missions to Vilnius, Kyiv, Berlin, and other European capitals, issued Belarusian postage stamps, and supported cultural and publishing projects. A leader of the Belarusian movement, Vatslaŭ Lastoŭski, presented the basics of the Belarusian national “faith” in a book titled What Every Belarusian Needs to Know. In fact, the book was nothing if not an attack on religion, as it sought to replace the old confessional identity of the Belarusian peasantry with a new ethnonational one.

  “The first important question to answer,” wrote Lastoŭski, “is who are we? When we ask our brother ‘Of what faith are you?’ then the parishioner of the Catholic Church answers: ‘I am a Pole,’ and the Orthodox parishioner answers: ‘I am a Russian.’” “Is that really true?” continued Lastoŭski. His answer was negative. “All those… who go to the Catholic chapel are Catholics—not Polish, not French, not Italian, but Catholic. And he who goes to the [Orthodox] church does not belong to the Russian faith but to the Orthodox faith.… When somebody asks: what people do you belong to, what nationality do you have, you ought to answer: we are Belarusians!—since our language is Belarusian.” Apart from language, other markers of Belarusian identity, according to Lastoŭski, were blood, Belarusian ancestry, and sharing the nation’s land. When it came to blood, one of Lastoŭski’s fellow activists, the author of the first Belarusian geography, Arkadz Smolich, considered his countrymen the purest of Slavs, since Russian blood was contaminated by the Mongols and Finns, and Ukrainian blood by the Tatars.

  In the course of just one year, from March 1917 to March 1918, the Belarusian national movement, like the Ukrainian one, made a huge leap from demands for cultural autonomy to full independence. Despite differences in strength—the Ukrainian movement was much stronger and more mature—both benefited from German occupation policies. They were dismissed as mere German intrigue by the leaders of Russian nationalist circles as well as by liberal politicians, both of whom found safe haven in the Don region of southern Russia in late 1917 and early 1918. With the German withdrawal from Ukraine and Belarus at the end of World War I, the proponents of Russia, one and indivisible, in the North Caucasus were presented with their last chance to restore the unity of the Russian state. They took full advantage of the new situation.

  IN JANUARY 1919, THE VOLUNTEER ARMY—THE MILITARY ARM OF the White movement, formed in the Don region by Russian generals in late 1917—began its advance on Ukraine and central Russia. It was led by General Anton Denikin, who took first military and then political control of the White movement after the deaths of Generals Lavr Kornilov and Mikhail Alekseev in the course of 1918.

  Denikin, who happened to be half-Polish by birth, was a strong proponent of an indivisible Russia. He hated the Bolsheviks for various reasons, blaming them for signing the Brest-Litovsk treaty with Germany and thereby giving up some of Russia’s historical territories. He also opposed his former fellow imperial officer Pavlo Skoropadsky for his alliance with Germany. To Den
ikin, the Ukrainian movement was a threat, whether based in Ukraine or in his own backyard, the Kuban region of southern Russia originally settled by Ukrainian Cossacks who now dreamed of unity with Ukraine. In the summer of 1918, Denikin sent his troops to the Kuban in order to prevent a takeover by the Bolsheviks or by the Skoropadsky regime. In the fall of 1918, Denikin dissolved the Kuban Cossack Rada and executed its pro-Ukrainian leaders, thereby solving his internal Ukrainian question.

  In theory, the leaders of the White movement were not associated with any particular party and took no position on the form of government in a future Russian state. In reality, those leaders were close to former members of the Progressive Bloc in the Duma and relied on their political and intellectual support. The bloc had included not only Constitutional Democrats but also monarchists such as Vasilii Shulgin, who had returned to the Don region in the fall of 1918. He became a key political adviser to General Denikin. Shulgin helped not only to formulate but also to execute the White movement’s policy on the Ukrainian question.

  When Denikin took Kyiv in August 1919, Shulgin got an opportunity to apply his solution to the Ukrainian question to the rest of Ukraine. He was the principal drafter of Denikin’s programmatic appeal “To the Inhabitants of Little Russia” on the eve of his entrance into Kyiv. The appeal proclaimed Russian as the language of state institutions and the educational system but did not outlaw the “Little Russian language.” It was to be allowed only in elementary schools to help students master Russian, as well as in private secondary schools. Its use in the court system was also permitted. This approach was very much in line with the program advocated by the Constitutional Democrats before the war and, in particular, with the thinking of Petr Struve, who opposed prohibition of the Ukrainian language and culture but envisioned them as serving the lower classes of society, reserving the higher cultural spheres for the Russian language alone.