The Gates of Europe

by Serhii Plokhy

  The new strategy worked. In the course of 1920, the Bolsheviks were able to establish control over central and eastern Ukraine and fend off the last real threat in the region. In late April 1920, the Polish armies of Józef Piłsudski, supported by the remnants of Petliura’s army, launched an advance on Kyiv from the front line in Volhynia and Podolia. Piłsudski’s goal was the creation of a Ukrainian buffer state between Poland and Soviet Russia. The offensive met with initial success. On May 7, Petliura once again entered Kyiv as head of the Ukrainian government, but this time there was no Galician army at his side. The price he had to pay for the support of his Polish allies was hardly of much importance in practical terms, but it had enormous symbolic significance. The chief otaman agreed to recognize Polish control over Galicia, delivering the final blow to the troubled relations between the two Ukrainian states.

  Petliura’s success was short-lived. The Soviets launched a counteroffensive, forcing the joint Polish-Ukrainian army out of Kyiv on June 13. The First Cavalry Army, led by one of the best-known Soviet cavalry commanders of the war, Semen Budenny, broke through the defenses, headed off the retreating troops, and wreaked havoc behind the Polish and Ukrainian lines. The Red Army was advancing along the entire front, not only in Ukraine but also in Belarus, covering up to twenty miles per day. It soon neared the city of Lviv, which Joseph Stalin, then a commissar of one of the Red Army fronts, was determined to take in order to make a name for himself. Ironically, not only Polish but also Ukrainian troops, the latter being Petliura’s men from eastern Ukraine, defended Lviv against the Red Army’s onslaught. Their successful defense of the city turned out to be a major factor leading to ultimate Soviet defeat in the war with Poland.

  The fortunes of war changed yet again in mid-August 1920. Armed with the help of the Entente and advised by British and French officers (among the latter was the future French president Charles de Gaulle), the Polish units stopped the Red Army’s offensive on the outskirts of Warsaw, defeating it in a battle that became known as the Miracle on the Vistula. One of those responsible for the miracle on the Soviet side was Stalin. He encouraged Budenny to disobey the orders of his commanders and try to take Lviv instead of proceeding against Warsaw. Now the Red Army found itself in a chaotic retreat. By October, when the two sides signed an armistice, the Polish-Soviet border had been pushed back deep into Belarus in the north and Ukraine in the south. In Ukraine, the Poles were once again in control of Volhynia and parts of Podolia. Despite this gain, the Polish attempt to create a Ukrainian buffer state with its capital in Kyiv failed, as did Ukrainian hopes for the revival of independent statehood. The Miracle on the Vistula also put an end to Soviet plans to bring their revolution into the heart of Europe.

  By far the best-known “chronicler” of the Polish-Soviet War was the Odesa-born Russian Jewish writer Isaac Babel. He fought in the ranks of Budenny’s First Cavalry Army and kept a diary that he later used to write a collection of short stories titled Red Cavalry. The collection, which Budenny criticized for distorting the heroic image of his soldiers, describes the brutality of war, the violence of Red cavalrymen, and the tragic plight of the Jewish population of Ukraine in conditions of permanent warfare. With numerous armies fighting one another for almost three years, constantly changing front lines, the civil population of Ukraine suffered new terror and destruction without having had a chance to recover from the devastation of the world war. No group fared worse than the Jews, who became subject to attack from all sides, by Reds, Whites, Ukrainian armies, and warlords.

  Pogroms were hardly a new phenomenon in Ukraine and the Pale of Settlement in general, but now armed aggressors were carrying them out. The casualties of the pogroms grew exponentially, passing the 30,000 mark in Ukraine alone. To the usual causes of pogroms—the desire to loot, economic rivalry, Christian anti-Judaism, and modern anti-Semitism—yet another was added: the ideologies and politics of the revolutionary era, which viewed the Jews on the one hand as capitalist exploiters, hated by communist and socialist propagandists, and, on the other, as ardent supporters of Bolshevism.

  Major pogroms began in the spring of 1918, the last year of the war, when German and Austro-Hungarian armies moved into Ukraine. The perpetrators, however, were not the advancing Germans or the troops of the Central Rada but the retreating Bolsheviks, who replaced Christian zeal with communist righteousness and justified their assault on the Jews of Novhorod-Siverskyi and Hlukhiv—the capital of the former Hetmanate—as an attack on the bourgeoisie. In the spring of 1919, when the Petliura army was retreating westward under Bolshevik attacks, the Ukrainian units unleashed a series of pogroms, the largest of which, in the town of Proskuriv (today’s Khmelnytskyi), took the lives of close to 1,700 Jews. Later that year, warlords and their unruly bands, who did not care much about slogans and were interested mainly in loot, plundered Jewish settlements. In the fall came the Denikin forces, who conducted their own pogroms under the new anti-Semitic slogan “Beat the Jews, save Russia.” The largest of those took place in the town of Fastiv south of Kyiv, killing close to 1,000 innocent victims. Overall, the Whites were responsible for up to 20 percent of the pogroms, the Reds for up to 10 percent, the warlords for up to 25 percent, and Petliura’s forces for up to 40 percent; the latter carried out the largest number of pogroms during the war years. The White Army was the only organized armed force whose soldiers conducted pogroms with the explicit approval of their commanding officers. The only soldiers who seemed to steer clear of pogroms were the Galician Ukrainians.

  The Jews of the Ukrainian shtetls organized self-defense units, which were quite effective at stopping warlords but could not do much about large armies. Jewish youths also joined the Red Army en masse: its political commander, Leon Trotsky, was a native of Ukraine and often regarded as a symbol of Jewish Bolshevism. But the Red Army’s popularity among Jews went far beyond Trotsky. Jewish revolutionaries had always been active in social democratic movements, whether Bolshevik or Menshevik. Moreover, young Jews were joining the army that, judging by the number of pogroms, seemed the friendliest to them. From that point of view, the story of Isaac Babel, who after a short stint in the Cheka—Lenin’s secret police—joined Budenny’s Cavalry Army as a political commissar and reporter, was hardly atypical for a Jewish youth from Odesa.

  The pogroms of 1919 ended the Ukrainian-Jewish alliance of the first months of the revolution. They also turned Symon Petliura into a dreadful symbol of Ukrainian anti-Semitism, an identification only strengthened when, in 1926, while he was living in emigration in Paris, a former Red Army soldier named Sholom Schwartzbard gunned him down. Many believed that Schwartzbard had eliminated the leader of the Ukrainian political émigrés on behalf of the Soviet secret police. But Schwartzbard claimed that he had acted on his own and killed Petliura to avenge his Jewish relatives, who had died in the Ukrainian pogroms. A Paris court set the perpetrator free.

  Was Petliura indeed responsible for the pogroms? A social democrat in his prerevolutionary years and a leader of the leftist Directory, Petliura himself was as internationalist in his outlook as in his political milieu. He shared the view of Mykhailo Hrushevsky and other leaders of the Central Rada that the Jews were natural allies of the Ukrainians in the struggle against national and social oppression. That motif made its way into the orders that he issued to his troops. “It is time to realize that the world Jewish population—their children, their women—was enslaved and deprived of its national freedom, just as we were,” he wrote in an order of August 1919. “It should not go anywhere away from us; it has been living with us since time immemorial, sharing our fate and misfortune with us. I resolutely order that all those who incite you to carry out pogroms be expelled from our army and tried as traitors to the Fatherland.”

  In Petliura’s mind, attacking Jews was equivalent to betraying Ukraine. The problem was that while he issued decrees, he only rarely or belatedly punished perpetrators. Otaman Ivan Semesenko, whose detachment conducted the
Proskuriv pogrom in February 1919, was tried and shot on Petliura’s orders only in March 1920—too late to have a broader impact on the army at the height of the pogroms. Petliura was reluctant to enforce his orders, as he had limited control over his army. The reasons for the army’s engagement in pogroms were the same as those for its loss of the struggle for independence—its units were unruly and disorganized. The socialist Ukrainian leaders, such as Petliura, were riding the wave of peasant revolution, which came too early from the perspective of the Ukrainian national movement. Before their country went up in the flames of revolution, foreign intervention, and civil war, the Ukrainian activists never had a chance to work with the peasant masses and educate them in the basics of their socialist faith. The parties that had a free hand to conduct propaganda in Ukraine on the eve of World War I were the proponents of the Little Russian idea and the activists of Russian nationalist organizations, for whom anti-Semitism was a key ideological factor. Right-Bank Ukraine, the bastion of Russian nationalism on the eve of the war, also became the scene of the most horrendous pogroms of 1919.

  The only warlord who tried, though with mixed success, to restrain his troops from conducting pogroms and fought anti-Semitism in the ranks of his peasant army was Nestor Makhno. A short, frail man with a moustache and long hair, he was the charismatic commander of the largest “private” army in the former Russian Empire, which numbered 40,000 at its height. A peasant by origin and an anarchist according to his political views, Makhno was the most ideologically driven of the warlords. His home base and area of operation was the town of Huliaipole in southern Ukraine—a peasant heartland between the coal mines of the Donbas and the iron mines of Kryvyi Rih. At the turn of the twentieth century, a railroad that crossed the Moscow-Sevastopol line in the city of Aleksandrovsk (today’s Zaporizhia), not far from Makhno’s hometown, linked the two regions. The location of the railroads placed Makhno and his army at the center of the fighting.

  Makhno’s peasant fighters shared few of his anarchist principles and dreams and looked down on the ideologically motivated anarchists around their bat’ko, or father, as they referred to him in the tradition of peasant paternalism. The peasants hated state control of any kind—an attitude that appealed to Makhno’s anarchist ideologues—and wanted expropriation and redistribution of land. Like the Zaporozhian Cossacks of the early modern era, Makhno’s army, which operated on the former Cossack-Tatar borderland, kept its distance from the Ukrainian governments to the north and often fought with them. While the absolute majority of Makhno’s fighters were ethnic Ukrainians, and the Ukrainian national agenda was not entirely foreign to Makhno—his teacher wife actively promoted it—the warlord’s vision of anarchist revolution was basically internationalist.

  Of all the forces that fought over Ukraine, Makhno regarded the Bolsheviks alone as potential candidates for an alliance, but they turned against him immediately after he helped them defeat their main enemy, General Petr Wrangel’s White Army, whose remnants had turned the Crimea into their last bastion. Wrangel’s was the eighth Crimean government in less than three years. The Crimean Tatars had established the first as the Crimean People’s Republic on December 25, 1917. After two major waves of emigration to the Ottoman Empire, the Tatars constituted close to 30 percent of the peninsula’s population (the rest were Russians, Ukrainians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Jews, and representatives of other nationalities). Their republic represented one of the first attempts of any Islamic group to build a secular state—a result of the cultural and educational activities of the previous generation of Crimean Tatar activists, led by Ismail Gaspirali, the father of the modern Crimean Tatar nation. But the Crimean People’s Republic was short-lived. In January 1918, power on the peninsula passed to the Bolsheviks, who declared an independent Taurida (Crimean) Republic but were soon overrun by Ukrainian and German forces.

  Under German rule, the Crimea remained independent of Ukraine, but in September 1918 Hetman Skoropadsky declared an economic blockade of the peninsula and forced the Crimean government to join the Ukrainian state as an autonomous region. This arrangement did not last long, as the German retreat brought to power a new government led by a liberal politician of Karaite origin, Solomon Krym. His minister of justice was Vladimir Nabokov, father of the famous writer. But the Bolsheviks were already on the march. They executed Emperor Nicholas II and his immediate family in the Urals in July 1918. On April 7, 1919, surviving members of the Romanov imperial family left their mansions near Yalta and were brought to the safety of the West by the British dreadnought Marlborough. From June 1919, the Crimea was under the control of the White Army, first under the leadership of General Denikin and, once he resigned in April 1920, then under General Wrangel.

  Wrangel claimed to lead the government of southern Russia, but in fact he controlled only the Crimean Peninsula and a strip of steppeland north of it. He and his ministers wanted to recover the whole Russian Empire, which was easier said than done. Despite the support offered by the Entente, Wrangel was losing the war with the Bolsheviks. On November 8, 1920, the Red Army and allied detachments of Makhno’s forces began their attack on the Crimea from the mainland, marching in freezing weather through the shallow waters of the Syvash lagoon and storming the White Army’s fortifications on the four-mile-wide Perekop isthmus connecting the peninsula with the mainland. On November 17 they entered Yalta. General Wrangel evacuated the remnants of his army to Istanbul. Those who stayed behind—close to 50,000 officers and soldiers—were massacred in the largest mass killing of the war. It turned out to be not only the last slaughter of the bloody revolutionary war but also a prelude to the no less bloody rule of the Bolsheviks over a vast country, of which most of Ukraine was forced to be a part.

  In March 1921, representatives of the Russian Federation, Soviet Ukraine, and Poland signed a peace treaty in Riga, Latvia, that established a new Polish-Soviet border. Under the terms of the treaty, Poland not only retained Galicia but also took over previously Russian-ruled Volhynia. Ukraine found itself divided not between two countries, as before World War I, but among four. Bukovyna, occupied by Romania in 1918, remained under the control of Bucharest, while Transcarpathia was taken away from defeated Hungary and handed over to the newly created Czechoslovak state. Czechs and Slovaks, Poles and Lithuanians—the western neighbors of Ukraine—all got independent states, while the Ukrainians, despite repeated efforts to secure one for themselves, received little more than autonomy within a Russian-led polity.

  How to explain such an outcome? The reasons are numerous. One is the presence of more powerful and aggressive neighbors that claimed Ukrainian territories for themselves. But the key factor was the immaturity of the Ukrainian national movement and the late arrival of the idea of independent statehood in both Habsburg- and Romanov-ruled Ukraine. Whereas in Austrian Galicia the division between proponents of Ukrainian and all-Russian identity had been overcome by 1918, in Dnieper Ukraine it continued throughout the war and the revolution. Regionalism, which resulted from the different historical trajectories of individual parts of Ukraine, was a major obstacle both in Austrian Ukraine, where the dynamics of nation building differed significantly between Galicia, Bukovyna, and Transcarpathia, and in Dnieper Ukraine, where the idea of Ukrainian statehood gained much greater support in the former Hetmanate and the formerly Polish-ruled Right Bank than in the steppe regions of the east and south. Cities, especially big cities populated by non-Ukrainians, remained beyond the scope of the Ukrainian drive for independence, which relied almost exclusively on the support of the peasant masses.

  Given these constraints on the Ukrainian national project, another important question arises: How could the nascent national movement, which first formulated the political goal of independence at the turn of the twentieth century and did not embrace it until 1918, get as far as it did in a political landscape dominated by former imperial powers and much more developed national movements? The revolutionary impact of World War I and the collapse
of two empires created unexpected opportunities for the Ukrainian movement in 1917 and 1918, and it took full advantage of them. The Ukrainian national project emerged from the bloody turmoil of World War I and the struggle for independence much more mature than it had been previously. Despite the failed effort to create one functioning state out of Habsburg and Dnieper Ukraine, the ideal of unified and independent statehood became central to the new Ukrainian credo.

  chapter 20

  Communism and Nationalism

  During the interwar period (1918–1939), the Ukrainians emerged as the largest nation in Europe with an unresolved national question. Ukraine lacked a state of its own, and four European states had divided its territories: Bolshevik Russia, Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia. Soviet Ukraine, which became part of the Russia-led Soviet Union in 1922, included the central and eastern Ukrainian lands; it had a common border with Poland in Volhynia and Podolia, as agreed at the peace talks in Riga in 1921, and with Romania along the Dniester River. The erstwhile Entente had recognized the latter border in its 1920 Treaty of Paris with Romania, but the Soviet authorities challenged it.

  Each of the governments that found itself in control of Ukrainian territory tried to solve its Ukrainian question in a different way, using a number of strategies ranging from accommodation to suppression. The two competing ideologies and belief systems throughout the twentieth century in eastern Europe were communism and nationalism. In the Ukrainian case, as in many others, nationalism and communism not only opposed each other but also sought accommodation in the hybrid form of national communism. As a result of different ways of mobilizing Ukrainian political and cultural identity, a number of Ukrainian national projects emerged that attempted to replace the Ukrainian liberal and socialist projects of the prewar era. The two most influential new projects turned out to be the Soviet variant of national communism in Soviet Ukraine (the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic, or Ukrainian SSR) and radical nationalism, based largely in Polish-ruled Galicia and Volhynia. The interaction between these two models of Ukrainian identity would define much of the country’s twentieth-century history.