Bolshevik Reassessments

Even before the final victory in 1920, a number of prominent party leaders recognized that they had alienated the Ukrainian peasantry. M. Ravich- Cherkasskii, the first official historian of the Bolshevik Party in Ukraine, admitted that the party had succeeded in mastering the cities, but had failed in the countryside:

Soviet power in Ukraine during its second campaign learned unsatisfactorily the peculiarities of the Ukrainian village.

Although Lenin and the Bolsheviks created the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic, modelled on the structure of the RSFSR, this political entity did not enjoy complete sovereignty within its borders. Many of the Soviet Ukrainian commissariats were subordinated to similar Soviet Russian commissariats in Moscow. The Soviet Russian government en­hanced the sovereignty of the government of the Ukrainian SSR on 11 December 1919. But two weeks later, Lenin openly questioned whether Ukraine would remain a separate Soviet Republic in a federation with Russia or whether it would cease to exist and become an integral part of Russia. The next Ukrainian Congress of Soviets would decide this issue, he asserted.⁸¹ In light of these stark choices, the various Ukrainian com­munist political forces (such as the Ukrainian Bolsheviks, the Borotbists, and members of the Ukrainian Communist Party, the Ukapists) sought to preserve, if not enhance, the Soviet Ukrainian Republic’s sovereignty.⁸²

On 19 February 1920, when the All- Ukrainian Revolutionary Committee reorganized itself into the regular government of the Ukrainian SSR (this time headed by Christian Rakovsky), the authorities possessed only seven People’s Commissariats (internal affairs, agriculture, education, food, la­bour and social welfare, health, and justice).⁸³ The most important commis­sariats, such as those concerning military, economic, and foreign affairs, remained in Moscow.

Two months later, on 20 May 1920, the Fourth Congress of the Soviets of Ukraine reasserted Soviet Ukraine’s sovereignty. Although the Congress re­peated the Ukrainian adherence to the defence treaty of 1 June 1919, it claimed that the agreement dealt only with military matters. In addition, it demanded that all the commissariats dealing with defence issues become joint agencies of all the Soviet republics rather than solely agencies of the RSFSR.⁸⁴

Conflicts over this resolution led to a new accord between the Russian SFSR and the Ukrainian SSR on 28 December 1920. The treaty proclaimed that both partners represented separate and entirely sovereign states, forming a partial federation for purposes of mutual defence and peaceful economic development. The RSFSR yielded to many of the major de­mands proposed by the Fourth Ukrainian Congress of Soviets. It increased the number of People’s Commissariats in the government of the Ukrainian SSR to sixteen, including: foreign affairs, internal affairs, justice, social welfare, education, agriculture, food, state control, health, army and navy, labour, post and telegraph, finance, transport, trade, and the Supreme Council of the National Economy. The first nine remained independent Ukrainian commissariats, while the last seven joined the corresponding commissariats of the RSFSR.⁸⁵

Despite the retention of its own Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, the sovereignty of the Ukrainian SSR remained incomplete. Although the Ukrainian SSR proclaimed itself a sovereign and independent state and remained actively engaged in foreign affairs (concluding forty-eight bilat­eral and multilateral international treaties and agreements with other countries between 1920 and 1923), it did not control its own internal af­fairs.⁸⁶ Soviet Russian violations of the December 1920 concord increased over the next few years.

By 1922, the RSFSR’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs claimed to repre­sent the interests of the four independent Soviet republics (the RSFSR, the Ukrainian SSR, the Belarusan SSR, and the Transcaucasian Federal Soviet Republic, which encompassed Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan) to the outside world.

Lenin’s proposal possessed an important geopolitical subtext. Inasmuch as the Bolsheviks anticipated a revolution in Germany in the near future, a Soviet Germany would most likely prefer to enter a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of Europe and Asia than the Russian Federation.⁸⁹ On 6 October 1922, the Central Committee of the RKP(b) discussed Lenin’s proposal and agreed with his idea of creating a new superstate - the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which would consolidate the four Soviet republics. Inasmuch as all of these non-Russian republics enjoyed brief periods of independence between 1917 and 1921, the new Soviet state reflected a compromise between proletarian internationalism and non­Russian nationalism. Although Russians would comprise the majority of the USSR’s residents, the new state’s political engineers envisioned the new body as “an internationalist state raised in the spirit of friendship of peo­ples.”⁹⁰ Unlike the new European countries created as national states after 1918, the first socialist state would represent the interests of all national groups within its borders, not just the Russians. Of course, not all party members (the majority of whom identified themselves as Russians or Russified) understood or supported this distinction.

Nevertheless, the RKP(b)’s Central Committee bound all regional com­munist parties to champion this new political structure. In the second half of October 1922 the Central Executive Committee of the Ukrainian SSR and the All-Ukrainian Seventh Congress of Soviets agreed to form the Soviet Union.⁹¹

The First Congress of Soviets of the USSR convened in Moscow on 30 December 1922 and established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. After the Ukrainian SSR agreed to join the USSR, this geopolitically im­portant republic retained only six independent People’s Commissariats (ag­riculture, internal affairs, justice, education, health, and social welfare) and five joint ones, those subordinated to the corresponding Moscow agencies (finance, food supply, labour, workers’ and peasants’ inspection, and the Higher Council of National Economy). The new Soviet government com­pletely took over five commissariats - foreign affairs, army and navy, trans­port, foreign trade, and communications.⁹²

Although Ukraine entered the union as a “sovereign” state, the new Soviet authorities soon whittled away almost all of its sovereignty.⁹³ Never­theless, the Communist Party created the Soviet Union, federal in form, centralized in content, as reflected in the political architecture of the Soviet constitutions of 1924, 1936, and 1977. As Richard Pipes first suggested in 1954, the design of the first socialist state represented a “subversive institu­tion” within the heart of the Soviet political system.⁹⁴ The federal structure of the Soviet Union constructed in the early 1920s produced waves of unin­tended consequences over the next 100 years.