The Ukrainian Revolution of 1917-21: populists and statesmen

The first General Secretariat of the Central Rada of Ukraine in 1917. Volodymyr Vynnychenko (in the middle, seated) was the head of the secretariat. With Symon Petliura (seated, right) as the head of military affairs. Photo: public domain. Source: Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine / Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Photo:(CC) commons.wikimedia.org

 Realising the difficulty of waging war on two fronts, Germany sought ways to force the Russian Empire out of the war, yet its first attempt during February and March 1917 failed. Although Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, the new provisional government declared its readiness to fulfil its obligations to the Allies (primarily England and France) in the war. When the news of the overthrow of the autocracy reached Kyiv and other parts of the empire, revolutionary changes and decentralisation trends began to take hold.

In Kyiv, a number of public figures, including Serhiy Yefremenko, Dmytro Doroshenko, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, Symon Petliura, Mykola Mikhnovsky, and others, gathered and decided to create the Central Council of Ukraine (CCU or Central Rada) as a body that would represent the interests of Ukrainians before Petrograd. Most of them had left-wing and centre-left views and were members of the Russian (later Ukrainian) Social Democratic Labour Party (R(U)SDLP) or the Socialist-Revolutionaries (SRs), with the exception of a small group of the so-called samostiynyky (editor’s note: independents) who gathered around the author of the famous essay Independent Ukraine – Mykola Mikhnovsky. The independents began their activities before the outbreak of the First World War in 1912-13. At first, they worked underground, spreading the idea of independence among the population by all available means.

The founder of the Brotherhood of Independents was the Ukrainian activist Valentyn Otamanskyy, and among his associates were the poet and writer Vasyl Ellan-Blakytny and the aforementioned lawyer Mykola Mikhnovsky. Among the achievements of this group was the founding of the “Vernyhora” publishing house, where they were able to print their appeals and brochures. During the tumultuous events of 1917-18, the independents took an active part in the formation of military units.

Achievements and failures at the first stage of the revolution

After the overthrow of the monarchy, political and social chaos appeared in Petrograd. The peoples once subjugated by the empire began their journey to liberation and the restoration of their states. Ukrainians were no exception, although they had been part of the Romanov empire for perhaps the longest period, since 1654. The Ukrainian Central Rada was proclaimed on the night of March 3rd/4th 1917. A well-known scholar and historian, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, who had returned to Kyiv from exile in Moscow, was elected its chairman in absentia. He was seen as a compromise figure for everyone, with unquestioned authority. It was under Hrushevsky’s leadership that an appeal to the Russian provisional government was adopted, declaring the CCU the representative body of Ukrainians and taking over power in Kyiv.

A characteristic feature of that time was also mass demonstrations that covered all imperial territories. Ukrainian committees and representative offices were active not only in Petrograd, Moscow and Kyiv, but also in Siberia and the Far East, the Kuban, Odesa, Kharkiv, Poltava, Yelisavethrad (modern Kropyvnytskyi) and Chernihiv. All these Ukrainian organisations declared their loyalty to the Central Council of Ukraine in Kyiv. There is a myth that the Ukrainian movement was inferior to the Russian movement in terms of activity and numbers, but this is far from true. Yes, at the beginning there was some confusion and misunderstanding about the situation, but by mid-March Ukrainian national committees and organisations were active. Demonstrations were held under yellow and blue flags, and the Ukrainian national flag was even raised on the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet in Crimea.

Under these circumstances, the Russian provisional government, headed by Prince Georgy Lvov, hosted a Ukrainian delegation that came with cultural proposals. However, Petrograd initially refused to recognise the authority of the Central Rada in Kyiv. Eventually, a delegation of the provisional government led by Alexander Kerensky, Irakli Tsereteli and Mikhail Tereshchenko arrived in Kyiv and brought their proposals in the form of the provisional government’s temporary instruction to the Central Rada.

One may ask here: what made the Russian side make concessions and actually recognise the real state of affairs in Ukraine? First, the Central Rada issued its first universal declaration on June 23rd 1917, which proclaimed the autonomous status of Ukraine. This was welcomed by virtually all the All-Ukrainian congresses, committees, etc. Unexpectedly, even the All-Russian Congress of Workers and Soldiers’ Deputies in Petrograd expressed support for this declaration. Second, it was necessary to slow down the growth of decentralising tendencies. Third, the First World War was still ongoing, in which Russia continued to participate and it was necessary to have confidence in the front line neighbourhood. Discussions between the parties lasted for two days and resulted in a compromise: the Central Rada withdrew its declaration and the provisional government recognised it and gave it powers, which was enshrined and published in the Second Universal of the Central Rada on July 16th 1917. Despite all the ambiguity, this compromise should be considered one of the successes of the CCU of that period.

At the same time, the vast majority of the political parties of the time supported the position of Ukraine’s autonomous status in a future federal democratic Russia. This idea had significant practical implications, in particular for the question of building Ukraine’s own armed forces. The army of the Russian Empire, like the state itself, was multinational. According to the first all-Russian census conducted in 1897, only 43 per cent of the military personnel considered themselves Russian. It can be safely assumed also that the situation in the army was not in favour of Russians in terms of numbers. It is known that there were about two million Ukrainians in the army, including officers. Among the top commanders, General Pavlo Skoropadskyi is worth noting. He came from an ancient Cossack foreman’s family, a descendant of Hetman Ivan Skoropadskyi, who was elected after the Battle of Poltava in 1709. He was a respected authority in the military and in April 1917 he sent 40,000 experienced and battle-hardened troops to defend Kyiv. However, the CCU and its leadership did not see the need for their own armed forces, so the soldiers sent by General Skoropadskyi were simply sent home. This had tragic consequences less than a year later.

Rivalries and disputes

According to the text of the Second Universal, the CCU created the General Secretariat (a prototype of the future government), headed by Volodymyr Vynnychenko, with Symon Petliura appointed secretary for military affairs. Petliura was known to be openly wary of Pavlo Skoropadskyi’s authority in the army. Still, Hrushevsky played a key role in the first period of the revolution. He was the only one during that chaos who had the authority to consolidate the young and inexperienced, but extremely ambitious figures, who gathered in the Central Rada.

At the initial stage, Hrushevsky managed to politically and tactically outplay Petrograd, but internal competition, especially between Petliura and Vynnychenko, for power was becoming increasingly difficult for him to contain. The main problem was that despite the considerable support from the country’s society and national minorities of the time, the Central Rada failed to resolve most acute social issues. Ukraine remained largely an agrarian country, most ethnic Ukrainians lived in villages and if it were not for the war, most of them would not have likely left their villages. It was a Ukrainian world in which land was of great value and those who had the means gradually bought land, even during the turbulent years of the war. At the same time, the rest, which was the vast majority, waited for the government, no matter which one, to finally resolve the land issue.

The CCU, on which most peasants had pinned their hopes, proved unable to make any appropriate decision. Hrushevsky distanced himself from this difficult issue and often locked himself in his office, picking up the phone and continuing to work on his scientific monographs. Timothy Snyder claims that he was impressed by this chosen approach. But in those extraordinary circumstances, it was extremely short sighted and dangerous to leave the solution of complex social issues to the literary writer Vynnychenko and the journalist Petliura. Therefore, in my subjective opinion, the Central Rada chose the path of populism rather than solving important issues of state-building and the formation of relevant institutions.

While the villages were Ukrainian, the towns around them were predominantly Russian, Polish, Jewish and German. It was extremely difficult to hear Ukrainian in the towns even in the early 20th century. And here the most important task was to maintain that extremely fragile balance between different ethnic groups. The general secretariat and the Central Rada achieved some success here, as well as in the field of education.

The idea of federal relations between equal peoples in a democratic Russia was finally buried after the Bolshevik revolution. As it was aptly characterised, power was simply lying on the pavement of Petrograd, and Lenin and his associates were the first to pick it up and were not going to let it go without a fight. The CCU met the new government in Russia with reservations. But it is worth paying tribute to the strategic thinking of the Bolsheviks, as the first decrees of the new government were the “Decree on Land” and the “Decree on Peace”. The new Russian leadership declared that it was withdrawing from the war and that the land now belonged to the peasants and the factories to the workers. After the publication of these decrees, Ukrainian peasants began to align themselves with the Bolsheviks, while workers in industrial centres were already under their influence. Although at the beginning the Bolsheviks were a rather small political force, numbering about 30,000 people, while various types of socialists had hundreds of thousands of members, the situation later changed significantly in the opposite direction.

The relations between Kyiv and Red Petrograd were extremely tense. The Don Cossacks were returning to Kuban through the territory of Ukraine, and upon their return, they went to fight the Bolsheviks. In order to stop this flow of opponents, the Council of People’s Commissars (Bolshevik government) sent an ultimatum to Kyiv demanding that it should block the passage of the Don Cossacks and other military units through its territory. The ultimatum was rejected and the Bolsheviks’ first attempt to seize Ukraine by force began.

Geopolitical choice without choice

Under pressure from the Bolsheviks and their formation of parallel power structures, first in Kursk and later in Kharkiv, the CCU was forced to issue the Third Universal. At its core was the proclamation of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, but as an autonomous part of democratic Russia. What the Bolsheviks were effective at was propaganda and agitation. They used all kinds of methods to get their agitators where they needed to go, including in military units that were loyal to the Ukrainian People’s Republic. There, the agitators told soldiers that the Bolsheviks had given the peasants land and that when they took power in Ukraine, they would also have their own land, which no one would take away. And since most of the soldiers were from rural areas, they willingly believed this and left the military units.

Therefore, between December 1917 and January 1918 there was practically no capacity to even defend the capital. And because of its essentially populist ideas and short-sightedness, the young republic found itself in extremely grave danger. Students and final-year pupils of the gymnasium stood up to defend it, and this unit was called the “student kurin”. It was sent to Kruty in the Chernihiv region, which was soon attacked by General Muravyov’s army of 6,000 soldiers. They were opposed by 300 students who bravely defended the settlement. To their credit, it should be noted that despite the retreat and the subsequent tragedy of the capture of the Ukrainian capital, these men fulfilled their duty with dignity: 4,000 Red Army soldiers reached Kyiv, while 2,000 were killed. Consequently, the captured Ukrainians (32 people) were shot, and Kyiv was subjected to the Red Terror.

Before the evacuation from Kyiv, the CCU proclaimed the Fourth Universal on January 22nd 1918, which declared the Ukrainian People’s Republic free and independent. This was done for a specific purpose. The German command, with the permission of the Kaiser, began negotiations with the Reds in Brest-Litovsk, Belarus, to conclude a separate peace. Ukraine, in turn, needed protection from the Bolshevik threat and, in order to have a separate delegation at the negotiations, had to become a full-fledged actor in international relations. The Germans and Austrians agreed to negotiate with both delegations and demanded that the Russians leave Ukrainian territories, among other things. In exchange for their protection, the Germans demanded that the Ukrainian delegation supply one million tons of grain and other food for the needs of the German and Austrian troops at the front. Realising the gravity of the situation, the Ukrainian delegation, headed by Vsevolod Holubovych, accepted the German terms, and on March 3rd, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed, according to which the Bolsheviks recognised the Ukrainian People’s Republic and the Central Rada, with the government undertaking to provide German troops with all the necessary food.

However, when the German generals who were sent to Kyiv to monitor the implementation of the agreements saw the complete mismanagement of the Ukrainian government and the CCU, they proposed a coup d’état. Two candidates were considered for the new leader of Ukraine – Wilhelm von Habsburg and Pavlo Skoropadskyi. At the end, they chose the second option. And when the Central Rada was adopting a constitution for the Ukrainian People’s Republic, according to which Hrushevsky became president of the republic, German soldiers came and closed the meeting. As Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy rightly argues, General Skoropadskyi was a child of the monarchist past, who quickly “Ukrainianised” himself and his military units and supported the idea of Ukrainian statehood. As a true statesman, he offered his predecessors a chance to build the Ukrainian state together. But socialists of various stripes refused this offer and went into hiding, and Hrushevsky left the country altogether. Although the general, who was proclaimed hetman, and the representatives of the Central Rada had a lot in common, as both sought to revive and continue the traditions of the Cossack past and build an independent Ukrainian state, their methods were different. This proved to be the main reason for the impossibility of cooperation.

Short-lived statehood

As a military man, the hetman understood the importance of his own armed forces, so he devoted a lot of time to their development. He also actively developed state and educational institutions. Ukrainian was introduced as the official language in all state institutions and former tsarist officials were forced to learn and speak it. Trains ran exactly on schedule. Many noble families fled from the Red Terror to Kyiv, though they did not like the absence of the Russian language. During the reign of Hetman Skoropadskyi, the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, the National Library and two universities were established in Kyiv and Kamianets-Podilskyi. The hetman also pursued an active international policy. It was during his rule that Ukraine was recognised internationally, with diplomatic missions in Berlin, Vienna, Istanbul and several other European capitals. In 1918 the first attempt was made to revive church autocephaly (independence) for the Orthodox Church in Ukraine.

The relationship between the hetman’s regime and the peasants became a serious problem. There were several important reasons for this, the first being that Skoropadskyi was supported by large landowners who did not want to lose their property to the peasants. The second reason was the need to supply the Germans with provisions, and for this purpose, German representatives and the hetman’s officials often took away the harvest from the peasants by force. The peasants responded by organising armed groups to defend their villages from punitive German units. This is how the period’s notorious otamanshchyna and anarchy were born, and it was impossible to curb them for a long time.

Thus, at the first stage of the February 1917 revolution, Ukrainian leaders united in the Central Rada and achieved recognition from the provisional government in Petrograd, primarily due to the skilful actions of Mykhailo Hrushevsky, who headed the CCU. However, the personal ambitions and short-sightedness of some leaders put the young republic in an extremely difficult situation, especially after the Bolshevik coup and the Red Army’s offensive against Kyiv in early 1918. The refusal of the Ukrainian leaders to cooperate with General Skoropadskyi, who was proclaimed hetman of the Ukrainian state as a result of the coup d’état in Kyiv, led to tensions in Ukrainian society at the time, especially in the countryside. This, in turn, resulted in the spontaneous creation of armed groups and the so-called otamanshchyna. These tendencies led to a situation in which the Ukrainian People’s Republic could not withstand the Bolshevik military onslaught and disappeared as an independent state from the world map for another 70 years.

Oleksii Lionchuk graduated with a master’s degree in history from Rivne State University of Humanities. For seven years worked as a teacher of history, philosophy and political science in primary and postgraduate schools in Ukraine. Since 2014, he has been a PhD student at the Institute of History at the Jagiellonian University (Poland).

history, interwar, Ukraine, Ukrainian history