Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine
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Across the imperial border in Galicia, the mixed Ukrainian-Polish province of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the nationalist movement struggled much less. The Austrian state gave Ukrainians in the empire far more autonomy and freedom than did Russia or later the USSR, not least because they regarded the Ukrainians as (from their point of view) useful competition for the Poles. In 1868 patriotic Ukrainians in Lviv formed Prosvita, a cultural society that eventually had dozens of affiliates all around the country. From 1899 the Ukrainian National Democratic Party operated freely in Galicia too, sending elected representatives to the parliament in Vienna. To this day, the former headquarters of a Ukrainian self-help society is one of the most impressive nineteenth-century buildings in Lviv. A spectacular piece of architectural fusion, the building incorporates stylized Ukrainian folk decorations into a Jugendstil facade, creating a perfect hybrid of Vienna and Galicia.
But even inside the Russian empire, the years just before the revolution of 1917 were in many ways positive for Ukraine. The Ukrainian peasantry took part enthusiastically in the early twentieth-century modernization of imperial Russia. On the eve of the First World War, they were rapidly gaining political awareness and had grown sceptical of the imperial state. A wave of peasant revolts ricocheted across both Ukraine and Russia in 1902; peasants played a major role in the 1905 revolution as well. The ensuing riots set off a chain reaction of unrest, unsettled Tsar Nicholas II, and led to the introduction of some civil and political rights in Ukraine, including the right to use the Ukrainian language in public.21
When both the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires collapsed, unexpectedly, in 1917 and 1918 respectively, many Ukrainians thought they would finally be able to establish a state. That hope was quickly extinguished in the territory that had been ruled by the Habsburgs. After a brief but bloody Polish-Ukrainian military conflict that cost 15,000 Ukrainian and 10,000 Polish lives, the multi-ethnic territory of western Ukraine, including Galicia as well as Lviv, its most important city, was integrated into modern Poland. There it remained from 1919 to 1939.
The aftermath of the February 1917 revolution in St Petersburg was more complicated. The dissolution of the Russian empire briefly put power in the hands of the Ukrainian national movement in Kyiv – but at a moment when none of the country’s leaders, civilian or military, were yet ready to assume full responsibility for it. When the politicians gathered at Versailles in 1919 drew the borders of new states – among them modern Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia – Ukraine would not be among them. Still, the moment would not be entirely lost. As Richard Pipes has written, Ukraine’s declaration of independence on 26 January 1918 ‘marked not the dénouement of the process of nation-forming in the Ukraine, but rather its serious beginning’.22 The tumultuous few months of independence and the vigorous debate about national identity would change Ukraine for ever.
1
The Ukrainian Revolution, 1917
Ukrainian people! Your future is in your own hands. In this hour of trial, of total disorder and of collapse, prove by your unanimity and statesmanship that you, a nation of grain producers, can proudly and with dignity take your place as the equal of any organized powerful nation.
The Central Rada’s First Universal, 19171
We shall not enter the kingdom of socialism in white gloves on a polished floor.
Leon Trotsky, 19172
In later years there would be bigger demonstrations, more eloquent speakers, more professional slogans. But the march that took place in Kyiv on the Sunday morning of 1 April 1917 was extraordinary because it was the first of its kind. Never before had the Ukrainian national movement shown itself in such force on the territory of what had been the Russian empire. But only weeks after the February revolution had toppled Tsar Nicholas II, anything seemed possible.
There were flags, blue and yellow for Ukraine as well as red for the socialist cause. The crowd, composed of children, soldiers, factory workers, marching bands and officials, carried banners – ‘A free Ukraine in a free Russia!’ or, using an ancient Cossack military title, ‘Independent Ukraine with its own hetman!’ Some carried portraits of the national poet, Taras Shevchenko. One after another, speakers called for the crowd to support the newly established Central Rada – the ‘central council’ – which had formed a few days earlier and now claimed authority to rule Ukraine.
Finally, the man who had just been elected chairman of the Central Rada stepped up to the podium. Mykhailo Hrushevsky, bearded and bespectacled, was one of the intellectuals who had first put Ukraine at the centre of its own history. The author of the ten-volume History of Ukraine-Rus’, as well as many other books, Hrushevsky had turned to political activism at the very end of the nineteenth century when in December 1899, and in exile, he helped found the Ukrainian National Democratic Party in Habsburg Galicia. He returned to work in the Russian empire in 1905, but in 1914 he was arrested and once again went into exile. In the wake of the revolution, he had returned to Kyiv in triumph. The crowd now welcomed him with vigorous cheers: Slava batkovi Hrushevskomu, or ‘Glory to Father Hrushevsky!’3 He responded in kind: ‘Let us all swear at this great moment as one man to take up the great cause unanimously, with one accord, and not to rest or cease our labour until we build that free Ukraine!’ The crowd shouted back: ‘We swear!’4
From the perspective of the present, the image of a historian as the leader of a national movement seems odd. But at the time it did not seem unusual at all. From the nineteenth century onwards, Ukrainian historians, like their counterparts in many of Europe’s smaller nations, had deliberately set out to recover and articulate a national history that had long been subsumed into that of larger empires. From there, it was a short step to actual political activism. Just as Shevchenko had linked ‘Ukrainianness’ to the peasants’ struggle against oppression, Hrushevsky’s books also stressed the role of the ‘people’ in the political history of Ukraine, and emphasized the centrality of their resistance to various forms of tyranny. It was only logical that he should want to inspire the same people to act in the politics of the present, both in words and deeds. He was particularly interested in galvanizing peasants, and had written a Ukrainian history book, About Old Times in Ukraine, especially for a peasant audience. In 1917 it was reprinted three times.5
Hrushevsky was by no means the only intellectual whose literary and cultural output promoted the sovereignty of Ukraine. Heorhii Narbut, a graphic artist, also returned to Kyiv in 1917. He helped found the Ukrainian Academy of Fine Arts and designed a Ukrainian coat of arms, banknotes and stamps.6 Volodymyr Vynnychenko, another member of the Central Rada, was a novelist and poet as well as a political figure. Without sovereignty – and without an actual state that could support politicians and bureaucrats – national feelings could only be channelled through literature and art. This was true all across Europe: before they attained statehood, poets, artists and writers had played important roles in the establishment of Polish, Italian and German national identity. Inside the Russian empire, both the Baltic States, which became independent in 1918, and Georgia and Armenia, which did not, experienced similar national revivals. The centrality of intellectuals to all of these national projects was fully understood at the time by their proponents and opponents alike. It explains why imperial Russia had banned Ukrainian books, schools and culture, and why their repression would later be of central concern to both Lenin and Stalin.
Although they began as self-appointed spokesmen for the national cause, the intellectuals of the Central Rada did seek democratic legitimacy. Operating out of a grand, white, neoclassical building in central Kyiv – appropriately, it had been previously used for meetings of the Ukrainian Club, a group of nationalist writers and civic activists – the Central Rada convened an All-Ukrainian National Congress on 19 April 1917.7 More than 1,500 people, all elected one way or another by local councils and factories, converged on the National Philharmonic concert hall in Kyiv to offer their support for the new Ukrainian governme
nt. Further congresses of veterans, peasants and workers were held in Kyiv that summer.
The Central Rada also sought to build coalitions with a range of political groups, including Jewish and other minority organizations. Even the radical left wing of the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary Party – a large peasant populist party known as Borotbysty after its newspaper Borotba (‘Struggle’) – came to support the Central Rada. Some of the peasantry did too. Between 1914 and 1918 the army of the Russian tsar had contained more than 3 million Ukrainian conscripts, and the Austro-Hungarian army had included an additional 250,000. Many of these peasant-soldiers had shot at one another across the muddy trenches of Galicia.8 But after the war ended, some 300,000 men who had been serving in ‘Ukrainianized’ battalions, composed of Ukrainian peasants, declared their loyalty to the new state. Some brought back weapons and joined the new Central Rada militia. They were motivated by a desire to return to their homeland, but also by the new Ukrainian government’s promises of revolutionary change and national renewal.9
In subsequent months the Central Rada did enjoy some popular success, not least thanks to its radical rhetoric. Reflecting the left-wing ideals of the times, it proposed compulsory land reform, the redistribution of property from large landowners, both monasteries and private estates, to the peasants. ‘No one can know better what we need and what laws are best for us,’ declared the Central Rada in June 1917 in the first of a series of ‘Universals’, manifestos addressed to a broad audience:
No one can know better than our peasants how to manage their own land. Therefore, we wish that after all the lands throughout Russia held by the nobility, the state, the monasteries and the tsar, have been confiscated and have become the property of the people, and after a law concerning this has been enacted by the All-Russian constituent assembly, the right to administer Ukrainian lands shall belong to us, to our Ukrainian assembly … They elected us, the Ukrainian Central Rada, from among their midst and directed us … to create a new order in free autonomous Ukraine.10
That same Universal called for ‘autonomy’. In November, the third and final Universal would declare the independence of the Ukrainian National Republic and call for elections to a constituent assembly.11
Although some people predictably opposed it, the revival of the Ukrainian language was also popular, especially among the peasantry. As it had in the past, Ukrainian again became synonymous with economic and political liberation: once officials and bureaucrats began to speak Ukrainian, peasants had access to courts and government offices. The public use of their native language also became a source of pride, serving as a ‘profound base of emotional support’ for the national movement.12 An explosion of dictionaries and orthographies followed. Between 1917 and 1919, Ukrainian printers published fifty-nine books devoted to the Ukrainian language, as compared to a total of eleven during the entire preceding century. Among them were three Ukrainian-Russian dictionaries and fifteen Russian-Ukrainian ones. Heavy demand for the latter came from the large number of Russian speakers who suddenly had to get by in Ukrainian, not a prospect that they all enjoyed.13
During its brief existence, the Ukrainian government also had some diplomatic successes, many of which subsequently faded from memory. Following its declaration of independence on 26 January 1918, the Ukrainian Republic’s twenty-eight-year-old Foreign Minister, Oleksandr Shulhyn (also a historian by training), won de facto recognition for his state from all of the main European powers, including France, Great Britain, Austria-Hungary, Germany, Bulgaria, Turkey and even Soviet Russia. In December the United States sent a diplomat to open a consulate in Kyiv.14 In February 1918 a delegation of Ukrainian officials at Brest-Litovsk concluded a peace treaty with the Central Powers, a deal separate from the better-known one signed by the new leaders of Soviet Russia a few weeks later. The young Ukrainian delegation impressed everyone. One of their German interlocutors remembered that ‘they behaved bravely, and in their stubbornness forced [the German negotiator] to agree to everything that was important from their national point of view’.15
But it was insufficient: the spread of national consciousness, foreign recognition and even the Brest-Litovsk treaty were not enough to build the Ukrainian state. The Central Rada’s proposed reforms – especially its plans to take land from estate owners without compensation – brought about confusion and chaos in the countryside. The public parades, the flags and the freedom that Hrushevsky and his followers greeted with so much optimism in the spring of 1917 did not lead to the creation of a functioning bureaucracy, a public administration to enforce its reforms or an army effective enough to repel invasion and protect its borders. By the end of 1917 all the military powers of the region, including the brand-new Red Army, the White Armies of the old regime, and troops from Germany and Austria, were making plans to occupy Ukraine. To different degrees, each of them would attack Ukrainian nationalists, Ukrainian nationalism and even the Ukrainian language along with Ukrainian land.
Lenin authorized the first Soviet assault on Ukraine in January 1918, and briefly set up an anti-Ukrainian regime in Kyiv in February, of which more later. This first Soviet attempt to conquer Ukraine ended within a few weeks when the German and Austrian armies arrived and declared they intended to ‘enforce’ the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Instead of saving the liberal legislators of the Central Rada, however, they threw their support behind Pavlo Skoropadsky, a Ukrainian general who dressed in dramatic uniforms, complete with Cossack swords and hats.
For a few months Skoropadsky gave a sliver of hope to adherents of the old regime while maintaining some of the attributes of Ukrainian autonomy. He founded the first Ukrainian Academy of Science and the first national library, and used Ukrainian in official business. He identified himself as a Ukrainian, taking the title of ‘hetman’. But at the same time Skoropadsky brought back tsarist laws and tsarist officials, and advocated reintegration with a future Russian state. Under Skoropadsky’s rule, Kyiv even became, briefly, a haven for refugees from Moscow and St Petersburg. In his satirical novel White Guard (1926), Mikhail Bulgakov, who lived in Kyiv during that era, remembered them:
Gray-haired bankers and their wives had fled, as had smooth operators who had left their trusty assistants in Moscow … Journalists had fled, from Moscow and St. Petersburg, venal, greedy cowards. Demimondaines. Virtuous ladies from aristocratic families. Their gentle daughters. Pale Petersburg debauchees with lips painted carmine red. Secretaries to department directors fled, poets and usurers, gendarmes and actresses from the imperial theatres.16
Skoropadsky also reinforced the old ownership laws and withdrew promises of land reform. Unsurprisingly, this decision was deeply unpopular among the peasantry, who ‘hated that very same Hetman as though he were a mad dog’ and didn’t want to hear about reform from ‘bastard lords’.17 Opposition to what was quickly perceived as a German puppet government began to organize itself into various militant forms: ‘Ex-colonels, self-styled generals, Cossack otamany and batky [local warlords] blossomed like wild roses in this revolutionary summertime.’18
By the middle of 1918 the national movement had regrouped under the leadership of Symon Petliura, a social democrat with a talent for paramilitary organization. His contemporaries were of radically different minds about him. Some perceived him as a would-be dictator, others as a prophet before his time. Bulgakov, who disliked the idea of Ukrainian nationalism, dismissed Petliura as ‘a legend, a mirage … a word that combined unslaked fury, and the thirst for peasant vengeance’.19 As a young man Petliura had impressed Serhii Yefremov, an activist contemporary, with his ‘boastfulness, doctrinairism and flippancy’. Later, Yefremov reversed his views and declared that Petliura had evolved into ‘the only unquestionably honest person’ produced by the Ukrainian revolution. While others gave up or engaged in petty infighting, ‘only Petliura stood his ground and did not waver’.20 Petliura himself later wrote that he wanted the whole truth about his actions revealed: ‘the negative aspects of my personality, my actio
ns, must be illuminated, not covered up … For me, the judgement of history has begun. I am not afraid of it.’21
History’s judgement of Petliura has remained ambivalent. Certainly he was brave enough to seize an opportunity, reckoning that the end of the First World War gave Ukraine’s national movement one more chance. As German troops withdrew from the country, he patched together some of the ‘ex-colonels, self-styled generals, Cossack otamany and batky’ into a pro-Ukrainian force known as the Directory, and laid siege to the capital. Although the Russian-language press reviled the Directory as ‘bands of thieves’ and called their coup a ‘scandal’, Skoropadsky’s forces crumbled with amazing speed, almost without fighting.22 On 14 December 1918, Petliura’s troops marched into a surprised Kyiv, Odessa and Mykolaiv, and power changed hands yet again.
The Directory’s rule would be short and violent, not least because Petliura never managed to obtain complete legitimacy and could not enforce the rule of law. Economically, the Directory, like the Central Rada before it, was far to the left. Reflecting the increasingly radical views of its supporters, the leadership convened not a parliament but a ‘Workers’ Congress’ from representatives of the peasants, the workers and the working intelligentsia. But Petliura’s peasant army was the true source of his authority and, in the words of one of his opponents, it made for ‘neither a good government nor a good army’.23 Many of its members were ‘adventurers’ who wore a wide variety of uniforms and Cossack costumes and were perfectly capable of pulling out their revolvers to rob anyone who simply looked wealthy. The inhabitants of bourgeois Kyiv took turns standing sentry outside their apartment blocks.24