Bolshevik Response

Between 1917 and 1920, the Central Rada, Skoropadsky’s regime, the Directory, and the Central Powers created and recreated their own ver­sions of “Ukraine” from Russia’s nine southwestern provinces.

The views of the Bolsheviks on the national question during the Russian Revolution remained contradictory, and the party did not speak with a single unified voice on this issue. Two trends emerged within the party. The first, represented by Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, acknowledged that the Bolsheviks had to recognize the power of non-Russian nationalisms and to incorporate them into their overall political strategy. The second, advocated by Nikolai Bukharin and Georgi Piatakov, viewed any conces­sion to these nationalisms as a compromise with the party’s ideological pu­rity. Both trends, however, subordinated non-Russian aspirations for political autonomy to the demands of the worldwide class struggle.⁵⁸

Prior to October 1917, the Bolsheviks aggravated the tensions between the Provisional Government and the non-Russian nationalities.⁵⁹ After they took power in Petrograd, they sought to extend their influence and gain control over the non-Russian borderlands, especially Ukraine, which they considered an integral part of Russia. Piatakov, the chairman of the Kiev Bolshevik committee and a fierce opponent of Lenin’s concept of national self-determination, best expressed this pro-Russian class perspec­tive in June of that year:

Generally we should not support the Ukrainians, for this movement is not advantageous to the proletariat. Russia cannot exist without the Ukrainian sugar industry, the same can be said for coal (the Donets Basin), grain (the Black Earth belt), etc.

According to Piatakov’s logic, the economic needs of the proletariat tran­scended the aspirations of the Ukrainian-speaking peasant majority. Although this statement may have violated democratic principles, social democracy, in his mind, meant that the interests of the “most progressive class in history” possessed special privileges. To any nationally conscious Ukrainian, Piatakov’s statement represented Red imperialism.⁶¹

After the collapse of the tsarist order in 1917, Bolsheviks in the Ukrainian provinces organized themselves into two separate groups: the Southwestern Organization, headquartered in Kiev; and the Donets-Krivoi Rog organi­zation, centred in Kharkov. The former possessed about 7,800 members, the latter 15,800. Bolsheviks appealed to the working classes that had grown dramatically during the war but emerged tired, underemployed (if not unemployed), and hungry in the post-revolutionary period. Unlike the peasants who were tied to the land, the workers had time on their hands. Because most identified themselves as Russians or as Russian speakers, Ukrainians constituted a small minority in the Bolshevik ranks. In 1918, only 3.2 per cent of the total members of the newly created Communist Party of Ukraine (Bolshevik) identified themselves as Ukrainians.⁶² In the Donets-Krivoi Rog organization, where Russians comprised an absolute majority, Bolsheviks stood for the complete integration of the Ukrainian­speaking provinces with Russia. Although the leaders of the Southwestern Organization did not want to compromise with the Ukrainian national movement, its Ukrainian members called for an alliance with the peasant masses.⁶³

Each of these groups and factions, in addition to those generated within the Bolshevik party’s Central Committee, played an important role in helping to define the borders of the Ukrainian homeland and the sover­eignty of the future Soviet Ukrainian Republic.

Although Lenin’s Council of People’s Commissars recognized the Ukrainian National Republic and its right to secede from the Russian Republic, the Bolshevik organization opposed the Rada’s “non-recognition of the Soviets and Soviet power in Ukraine.” The Rada’s efforts to imple­ment a national sovereignty based on the majority of the population identi­fying itself as Ukrainian provoked the Council of People’s Commissars to disavow it as “the plenipotentiary representative of the working and exploit­ed classes of the Ukrainian republic,” even though the overwhelming major­ity of Ukraine’s “exploited classes” were Ukrainian-speaking peasants.⁶⁴ At the First All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets in Kiev on 25 December 1917, local Bolsheviks rhetorically deposed the Central Rada and announced the creation of the first Soviet Ukrainian government - the People’s Secretariat of the Ukrainian National Republic - in Kharkov five days later.⁶⁵

Fearing that the Rada’s delegation at Brest-Litovsk would strike a sepa­rate deal with the Central Powers, Lenin sent Red Guard units from Petrograd, Moscow, and other northern industrial centres into Ukraine. These groups quickly brought pro- Bolshevik Soviet power to Ekaterinoslav, Odessa, Poltava, Mariupol, Kherson, and other cities.⁶⁶

With this external intervention, the Bolshevik-led People’s Secretariat won Kiev in late January 1918. After this new government moved its capi­tal from Kharkov to Kiev on 12 February 1918, the Bolsheviks in Kharkov announced the secession of the Donets-Krivoi Rog (DKR) Soviet Republic from Ukraine, following Soviet Odessa’s declaration of independence on 30 January 1918. Dissident Bolshevik factions within the DKR organiza­tion sought to divorce the industrial areas of the Ukrainian provinces from their agricultural counterparts.

After the successful German advance into Ukraine, the People’s Secretariat split into factions, and on 24 February 1918, most of its mem­bers resigned. Mykola Skrypnyk, a Ukrainian Bolshevik, chaired a new cabinet. In early March 1918, his government unilaterally proclaimed the reintegration of the Donets-Krivoi Rog, Odessa, and Don republics into Soviet Ukraine within the boundaries established by the Third and Fourth Universals of the Central Rada.⁶⁸

The Second All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets, held in Ekaterinoslav in March 1918, approved the merger of these republics into a single Soviet Ukrainian Republic, which would remain independent of Soviet Russia.⁶⁹ Purely tactical considerations motivated this action. The party’s left faction, which dominated the Congress, opposed Soviet Russia’s Brest-Litovsk treaty and “hoped that by proclaiming Ukrainian independence from Soviet Russia, it could continue to fight against the German invaders, without in­volving Russia in a war with the Central Powers.”⁷⁰ The Soviet Russian government immediately recognized the independence of Soviet Ukraine, but - of course - the Austrians and Germans did not.

Despite their expectations, the Bolsheviks - who proclaimed peasants should seize the land without compensating the landlords - did not win the loyalty of the Ukrainian peasantry.⁷¹ Instead, the Borotbists, the for­mer left wing of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, became the most influential political party in the countryside.⁷²

When the war in Europe came to an end on 11 November 1918, the Germans and Austrians rapidly withdrew from Ukraine.

Shortly before the defeat of the forces of the Ukrainian National Republic that winter, the provisional Soviet Ukrainian government pro­claimed the formation of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic (later the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic). This political entity included the Ukrainian lands which earlier had been part of the Russian Empire: the provinces of Kiev, Poltava, Podolia, Kharkov, Kherson, Ekaterinoslav, Chernigov (without its four northern counties), Volhynia (without its western part which Poland annexed), Taurida (without the Crimean pen­insula), and part of the region of the Don Cossack Host.

But not all Ukrainian-speaking territories became part of the Ukrainian SSR. The Soviet-Polish Treaty of Riga of 1921 established Ukraine’s west­ern borders with Poland, leaving Eastern Galicia and Western Volhynia under Polish rule. The 1919 Treaty of Saint Germain and the 1920 Treaty of Paris united Bukovina and Bessarabia, respectively, to Romania. At the Paris Peace Conference, the victorious Allies assigned Transcarpathia to Czechoslovakia. Some of the Ukrainian-speaking territories came under the control of the Belarusian SSR and the Russian SFSR. In 1924 and 1925, Soviet authorities transferred the Shakhty region and three-quarters of the Taganrog okrug from the Ukrainian SSR to the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and parts of three RSFSR provinces (Briansk, Kursk, and Voronezh) to the UkrSSR.

Only in 1926 did the Soviet authorities finally delineate the southern and eastern borders between the Ukrainian SSR and the RSFSR. But even with this final demarcation, approximately 1.5 million Ukrainian speakers still lived in Russian areas directly bordering Ukraine, not to mention the nearly 1.5 million living in the Kuban region of the North Caucasus, which belonged to the RSFSR.⁷⁴

Yet, despite its hostility to all manifestations of nationalism, the Russian Communist Party - reacting to an adverse situation in Ukraine - inadver­tently recognized the territorial and national integrity of the nine prov­inces and, in effect, agreed with the position espoused by the Ukrainian nationalists.

In addition to the establishment of the Ukrainian SSR, the creation of an “autonomous” regional Communist Party in Ukraine also built on the legacy of the Central Rada and the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917-20. Founded in April 1918, shortly after the Germans occupied the area, the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine [CP(b)U] retained an “indepen­dent relationship” with the Russian Communist Party.⁷⁵ But the CP(b)U’s small membership hampered its effectiveness. Although the party grew from 22,500 in August 1917 to nearly 36,000 by May 1919, the majority of communists in Ukraine lived in the industrialized Left Bank. The party’s influence faded in the western agricultural regions. Because non- Ukrainians constituted the overwhelming majority of the CP(b)U’s members, they remained indifferent, if not hostile, to Ukrainian aspirations. Despite claims to the contrary, the CP(b)U remained a regional unit of the Russian Communist Party.⁷⁶

The Bolsheviks launched three military campaigns over the course of two years (January-February 1918, December 1918-March 1919, Decem­ber 1919-January 1920) to win the Ukrainian cities and the countryside. Unlike the Ukrainian nationalists, the Bolsheviks concentrated on the large cities (such as Nikolaev, Kremenchug, Kharkov, Ekaterinoslav, and Odessa) and on the Donbass. In August 1917, only 16 per cent of all Bolsheviks in the Ukrainian provinces lived and worked in the country- side.⁷⁷ Although local support for the Bolsheviks varied, these new re­cruits from the cities remained far more disciplined and ready to fight for their cause than the Ukrainian peasants, who rarely left their districts (they, after all, had to work their lands and defend them). Building on this urban alliance as well as the one with the Borotbists, the Bolsheviks fi­nally succeeded.⁷⁸

Cities emerged as the “strategic keys” to victory over the Ukrainian countryside. Bolshevik control of the urban rail centres, seaports, ware­houses, factories, and natural resources strengthened their hand in the struggle against the countryside. Possessing the wealth of the cities, “the Bolshevik party could woo the peasant masses, who would probably give their loyalty to the power that held the reins firmly and distributed manu­factured goods cheaply.”⁷⁹ The cities also contained large numbers of hun­gry and unemployed men, ready to be mobilized.

Only after the final military victory over Denikin and Petliura in December 1919 and early 1920 did the Bolsheviks re-evaluate their nation­ality policy in Ukraine. Having won on the battlefield, they now reviewed their recent political mistakes.