In the late spring and summer of 1915, a joint German-Austrian offensive allowed the Austrians to recapture most of Galicia and Bukovyna. As a result, the region was completely cleansed of Russophiles, who retreated eastward with the Russian army. “They went in whole households, led by their village heads, followed by their horses, cows, and the treasures they had managed to snatch up,” wrote the newspaper Kievskaia mysl’ (Kyivan Thought) about the Russophile exodus. Most of the refugees ended up in Rostov and the lower Don region on the Russo-Ukrainian ethnic border. It was the final chapter in the history of the Russophile movement as a major political force: those who had avoided Thalerhof were now leaving their land for Russia. In the spring and summer of 1916, the Russian army, led by the talented General Aleksei Brusilov, launched a major offensive that recaptured Volhynia, Bukovyna, and parts of Galicia. But it turned out to be the last hurrah of an empire close to economic and military exhaustion. The all-Russian idea would soon find itself under attack not only in Habsburg-ruled Ukraine but also in the realm of the Romanovs.
The Romanov dynasty, if not the empire itself, came to an end in early March 1917. In the previous month, food shortages in Petrograd (the war-era name of St. Petersburg) had sparked workers’ strikes and mutiny in the military ranks. The leaders of the Duma convinced Emperor Nicholas II, psychologically exhausted after years of war, to abdicate the throne. He passed the crown to his brother, who refused the honor—the Duma leaders predicted a new revolt if he were to agree. The dynasty was no more: pressure from the street, a soldiers’ revolt, and the skillful maneuvering of the formerly loyal Duma had put an end to it. The leaders of the Duma then stepped in to create a provisional government, one of whose tasks was to conduct elections for a constitutional assembly that would decide the future of the Russian state.
The Petrograd events, which became known in history as the February Revolution, took the embattled leaders of the Ukrainian organizations completely by surprise. Mykhailo Hrushevsky, a key figure in the Ukrainian national movement in Galicia and during the Revolution of 1905 in Dnieper Ukraine, was working on an article in the Moscow Public Library when he heard noises and loud voices outside. When he asked the librarian what was going on, he learned that it was a revolution: Muscovites were rushing to the Kremlin to take control of that symbol of Russian statehood. In Kyiv in early March, representatives of Ukrainian political and cultural organizations created a coordinating body that they called the Central Rada. They elected Hrushevsky as its head and awaited his speedy arrival in Kyiv. When he came, he threw his support behind the young generation of Ukrainian activists, most of them students and professionals in their twenties.
Few of Hrushevsky’s old colleagues from the moderate branch of the Ukrainian movement (now called the Society of Ukrainian Progressives) wanted to join the young revolutionaries: having experienced the Revolution of 1905, they knew that revolutions end in reaction and were prepared to exchange their loyalty to the regime for concessions in the cultural sphere. Making Ukrainian a language of educational instruction was their highest priority. Hrushevsky believed that they were wrong: the time had come not to ask for educational reform but to demand territorial autonomy for Ukraine in a reformed democratic Russian state. That sounded too ambitious to many veterans of the Ukrainian movement, if not downright unrealistic, given the difficult history of Ukrainian dealings with the imperial government. But Hrushevsky and his young, enthusiastic supporters thought otherwise.
They began their activities in March, working from a room in the basement of the Pedagogical Museum in downtown Kyiv. They created a General Secretariat—a government of autonomous Ukraine—headed by Volodymyr Vynnychenko, a leading modernist writer. Writing in both Ukrainian and Russian, Vynnychenko had become the first Ukrainian since Nikolai Gogol to acquire a significant readership in Russia proper. The new government claimed jurisdiction over a good part of today’s Ukraine, including the imperial gubernias of Kyiv, Podolia, Volhynia, Chernihiv, and Poltava. By July, the Provisional Government in Petrograd recognized it as the regional government of Ukraine.
How could all that happen? How could the Ukrainian idea, marginalized after the Revolution of 1905, emerge victorious in competition with visions of the future promoted by Russian liberals and social democrats, as well as by proponents of Great Russian nationalism from the ranks of “true Russian” patriots? In the revolutionary atmosphere of the time, the mixture of liberal nationalism and socialism offered by the young leaders of the Rada turned out to be an addictive ideology. The politically active public came to regard the territorial autonomy of Ukraine advocated by the Ukrainian parties as the only way out of the plethora of military, economic, and social problems besieging the country. The Central Rada led the way as the only institution capable of meeting the two main demands of the moment: land and peace.
The soldiers, who wanted to end the war as soon as possible, enthusiastically backed the Rada en masse. While the Provisional Government in Petrograd was busy launching a new offensive on the eastern front and pleading with soldiers to fight to the end alongside Britain and France, the Central Rada promised peace and became the only hope for it in Ukraine, which the fighting had devastated. The “Ukrainized” army units—detachments formed of recruits from the Ukrainian provinces and sent to the Ukrainian sector of the front in the course of 1917—declared their loyalty to the Rada. There were altogether close to 300,000 recruits. These war-weary peasants in soldiers’ uniforms were not only eager to return home but wanted to get there in time for the redistribution of noble land, which the Central Rada promised to carry out despite strong opposition from the landowning classes. The Ukrainian peasantry, politically dominated by the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries, which happened to be the largest political party in the Rada, was solidly in the Rada’s corner.
During the summer of 1917, the Central Rada, originally little more than a coordinating committee of Ukrainophile political and cultural organizations, had turned into the country’s parliament as all-Ukrainian congresses of peasants, workers, and soldiers sent their representatives to it. The national minorities did likewise. Mykhailo Hrushevsky went out of his way to call on his supporters not to permit the repetition of the pogroms of 1905 and promised Jews, Poles, and Russians cultural autonomy in a self-governing Ukrainian republic federated with Russia. In return, the Jewish socialist parties joined the Rada and backed the idea of Ukrainian territorial autonomy. So did the left-leaning representatives of other minorities. The Rada’s membership exceeded eight hundred, and its leaders had to create a smaller standing body, the Little Rada, to coordinate the work of the new revolutionary parliament.
Dozens of prominent Ukrainians returned to Kyiv from Petrograd and Moscow, which the Bolsheviks had made the new capital of Russia in March 1918, to take part in building the new Ukraine. One of them, Heorhii Narbut, a talented artist with an international reputation, became a founder of the Ukrainian Academy of Fine Arts. He also became the principal designer of the Ukrainian coat of arms and the country’s first banknotes and stamps. The coat of arms included two historical symbols, a trident borrowed from the coinage of Prince Volodymyr of Kyiv, and the image of a Cossack: the new state claimed Kyivan Rus’ and the Cossack Hetmanate as its two predecessors. The two colors of the coat of arms, blue and yellow, came from Galicia, where they had been part of its coat of arms for centuries. The colors symbolized the unity of the Ukrainian lands on both sides of the eastern front in the world war.
Not everything was rosy in the newly created Ukrainian autonomy. The Rada had failed to establish a viable state apparatus or create reliable armed forces out of the hundreds of thousands of officers and soldiers who pledged their allegiance to it. Writers, scholars, and students, who found themselves at the helm of the new parliament, were busy living the romantic dream of national revolution and destroying the old state machine. The lack of a functioning government and a loyal army became an issue in the fall of 1917, when the C
entral Rada began to lose control of the situation on the ground because of its inability to fulfill its earlier promises. In the cities, where support for the Rada dropped between 9 and 13 percent (the only exception was Kyiv, with 25 percent), power was shifting toward the Bolshevik-dominated soviets (councils). The countryside was growing ever more restless as the Central Rada failed to deliver either land or peace. The peasants began seizing state and noble lands on their own initiative.
The Bolshevik coup in Petrograd, subsequently known as the October Revolution, had a major impact on the developments in Ukraine. In direct response to the coup, the Central Rada proclaimed the Ukrainian People’s Republic—a state in its own right, but one that would remain in federal union with Russia. It also claimed new territories in the east and south: the Kharkiv and Kherson gubernias, as well as parts of the Tavrida, Kursk, and Voronezh gubernias settled by ethnic Ukrainians. These actions spelled the end of the short-lived cooperation between the Central Rada and the Bolsheviks, who had joined forces in Kyiv to defeat the troops loyal to the Provisional Government. The confrontation between the Ukrainian government in Kyiv and the Bolshevik government in Petrograd had begun.
The Bolsheviks gained power in Russia by taking control of the soviets—a new form of government created by representatives of workers, peasants, and soldiers and contested by various political parties. The October coup, which brought down the Provisional Government, was rubber-stamped by the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which met in Petrograd during the coup and was dominated by the Bolsheviks and their allies. They tried the same tactic in Ukraine, calling a session of the Ukrainian Congress of Soviets to take place in Kyiv in December 1917. But most of the delegates turned out to be peasant supporters of the Central Rada: the planned Bolshevik coup in Kyiv failed.
That turned out to be a temporary setback. The Bolshevik organizers left Kyiv for Kharkiv, where a congress of soviets from the industrial east of the country met in late December. It declared the creation of a new state, the Ukrainian People’s Republic of Soviets, on December 24, 1917. At the beginning of January 1918, Bolshevik troops from Russia entered Ukraine and moved on Kyiv under the banner of the virtual state proclaimed in Kharkiv, which would eventually become the capital of Soviet Ukraine. Led by the Russian officer Mikhail Muraviev, they advanced by railroad and took control of major industrial centers, where workers’ detachments mobilized by the Bolsheviks backed them. The Central Rada had effectively lost control of the industrial towns, where it held sway over the liberal intelligentsia but not over the workers. It also had very few troops to protect itself against the Russian invasion. Those military units that declared support for Ukrainian independence in the summer of 1917 had been sent to the front. Now the leaders of the Central Rada found themselves constrained to declare their country’s complete independence of Russia, but they had no troops to defend it.
On January 25, 1918, the Central Rada issued its fourth, and last, universal—the Cossack-era word for decree—which proclaimed the political independence of Ukraine. “The Ukrainian People’s Republic hereby becomes an independent, free, and sovereign state of the Ukrainian people, subject to no one,” read the text. In introducing the bill to the Rada, Mykhailo Hrushevsky stressed its two immediate goals: to facilitate the signing of a peace treaty with Germany and Austria—only an independent country could do that—and to protect Ukraine from the Bolshevik invasion and the insurgency of the Red Guards, workers’ units organized by the Bolsheviks in the large industrial centers. But the historical significance of the Fourth Universal went far beyond its immediate objectives. It was Ukraine’s first open break with Russia since the times of Ivan Mazepa. The idea of an independent Ukrainian state, first formulated in Dnieper Ukraine only seventeen years earlier, had acquired broad political legitimacy. The genie of independence was now out of the imperial bottle.
“We want to live in peace and friendship with all neighboring states: Russia, Poland, Austria, Romania, Turkey, and others, but none of them has the right to interfere in the life of the independent Ukrainian republic,” read the universal. This was, of course, easier said than done. Russian troops were converging on Kyiv from the north and east, while in the city itself, the Bolsheviks staged a workers’ uprising at the Arsenal, the major military works whose buildings serve today as Kyiv’s art center and exhibition hall. There was a shortage of reliable troops, as Bolshevik promises of land, peace, and the revolutionary transformation of society had lured many away. The Rada called for mobilization. At the railway station of Kruty in the Chernihiv region, a detachment of approximately four hundred Ukrainian students and cadets engaged advancing Bolshevik forces consisting of sailors from the Baltic Fleet and a military unit from Petrograd. Twenty-seven of the Ukrainian fighters ended up in enemy hands and were shot in retaliation for the stubborn resistance they had put up to the Bolshevik advance for five long hours. In Ukrainian historical memory, they became celebrated as the first martyrs for the cause of national independence. More would follow.
On February 9, 1918, the Central Rada abandoned Kyiv and retreated westward. That night, in the town of Brest on today’s Polish-Belarusian border, its representatives signed a peace treaty with the Central Powers: Germany, Austria-Hungary, and their allies. Having refused to form a regular army in the summer and fall of 1917, the Central Rada now had no choice but to look beyond Ukraine’s borders for protection. The Ukrainian delegates asked for German and Austrian military assistance, which was granted immediately: exhausted by the long war, the armies and economies of the Central Powers needed agricultural products, and Ukraine already had a reputation as the breadbasket of Europe. The peace treaty spoke of “reciprocal exchange of the surplus of . . . more important agricultural and industrial products.” In exchange for Ukrainian grain, the Central Powers offered their well-armed and well-oiled military machine. It rolled into Ukraine within ten days after the signing of the treaty. By March 2, it had driven the Bolsheviks out of Kyiv, the Central Rada was back in the building of the Pedagogical Museum, and the students who died at Kruty had been buried with military honors at Askold’s Mound, the legendary burial place of the first Viking ruler of Kyiv.
The Bolsheviks were in retreat, and unable to stop the advancing German and Austrian troops (about 45,000 men) by military force, they tried to do so by diplomatic and legal means. They began to create on paper and declare the independence of virtual people’s republics in southeastern Ukraine. The Odesa People’s Republic and the Donets, Kryvyi Rih, and Taurida republics all declared independence in February and March. The Central Powers paid no attention. With the help of Ukrainian troops, they even took the Crimea—which the Central Rada had never claimed—but did not annex it to the Kyiv-based Ukrainian People’s Republic. Soon the Bolsheviks found themselves outside Ukraine, whose independence they were forced to recognize in order to conclude a peace treaty of their own with the Central Powers.
The new Ukrainian state was now independent of Russia not only de jure but also de facto. But its independence of the Central Powers, to whom the Central Rada had agreed to supply 1 million tons of grain, was anything but a given. This became perfectly apparent in late April 1918, when the German military authorities dissolved the Rada, not trusting its socialist-dominated government to fulfill their “pump out grain” agenda. The dissolution took place only a few days after the Rada agreed to supply its allies with the aforementioned million tons of grain, as well as significant quantities of other agricultural products. The coup engineered by the Germans brought to power the government of General Pavlo Skoropadsky, a descendant of an eighteenth-century Cossack hetman, deeply conservative in his views, who represented the interests of Ukraine’s landowning class. He declared himself hetman of the new state, appealing to the historical memory of the masses. In the tradition of the hetmans of old, he ruled as a dictator, his power limited only by foreign authority—the German and Austrian command.
A product of the Russian cu
ltural milieu, Skoropadsky had undergone rapid Ukrainization in the revolutionary year 1917, when the Provisional Government put him in charge of its new Ukrainian military formations—a desperate attempt to continue the war by appeasing the nationalities. He embraced the Ukrainian idea first in autonomous and then in pro-independence form, remaining dedicated to it (and to his German backers) to the end of his life, which came in April 1945, when an Allied bomb killed him in Germany. Skoropadsky’s rule turned out to be a great boon for Ukrainian state and institution building. For the first time, the country got its own banks and a functioning financial system. The hetman recruited imperial-era officials to run ministries and establish local government offices, and the former imperial officers created military units. In the realm of education, Ukraine acquired its own Academy of Sciences, its first national library, and a national archives. It also got two new universities, one in Katerynoslav, another in Kamianets-Podilskyi. Although Skoropadsky never fully mastered the Ukrainian language, he helped fulfill the old dream of the Ukrainophile intelligentsia—the introduction of Ukrainian into the school system, which the Central Rada had initiated.
Whatever Skoropadsky’s achievements in the institutional sphere, his rule was anathema to the socialist leaders of the Central Rada. They refused to cooperate with the new regime, which they considered, often for very good reason, a creation of and safe haven for Russian conservatives driven out of Russia by the Bolshevik revolution. Many socialist leaders went underground and plotted a political comeback. An uprising against the hetman was in the air. The regime was anything but popular among laborers, whose working day it extended to twelve hours, or peasants, whose harvests the authorities confiscated. By the end of the summer of 1918, thousands of workers were on strike, and close to 40,000 peasants had joined armed detachments—post–World War I Ukraine now had no shortage of trained military personnel. The punitive expeditions carried out by German troops made things even worse. By early fall, the regime was in a death spiral. It tried to save itself by raising the banner of federalism with non-Bolshevik Russia, but this belated attempt to appease the Entente, which supported the idea of a united Russian state, backfired. The symbolic surrender of Ukrainian independence only angered the socialist leaders of the Central Rada, who were working actively to overthrow the hetman. But more than anything else, the end of the world war spelled the end of the Skoropadsky regime.
The Gates of Europe Page 26