Chapter 19 A Shattered Dream

In Kyiv, Wednesday, January 22, 1919, turned out to be a fine winter day, with some frost but no snow. We know this because a film crew was in the city that day for one of the first filmings of a public event in the capital of Ukraine.

As the bells of St. Sophia began to ring the noon hour, the camera captured images of happy faces, women holding flowers, and crowds of men in military uniforms. At the center of attention were the members of the Directory — the new revolutionary government — led by a tall man with a goatee wearing a dark leather overcoat and sporting a broad-brimmed wool hat. This was the head of the Directory and the former premier of the Central Rada government, Volodymyr Vynnychenko. To his right marched the representatives of western Ukraine, authorized by the popular assemblies of Ukrainian lands formerly under Habsburg rule to conclude the unification of the two Ukrainian states. But neither Vynnychenko nor Lev Bachynsky, the deputy chairman of the parliament of the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic, attracted most of the cameraman’s attention. The greatest amount of “air time” went to a middle-aged man of medium build wearing a sheepskin hat of the kind worn by most of the officers around him.

Born in the city of Poltava in 1879, Petliura was thirty-nine years old at the time of the filming. Like Joseph Stalin, who was half a year older, Petliura began his revolutionary activities as a student at a theological seminary. He rose through the ranks to become one of the leaders of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Labor Party. After the defeat of the Revolution of 1905, he edited a number of Ukrainian journals and newspapers, first in Kyiv, then in St. Petersburg and, from 1912, in Moscow. In 1917, as head of the Ukrainian General Military Committee and then as the Central Rada’s general secretary for military affairs, he led the formation of Ukrainian units in the ranks of the Russian army. The imperial authorities would entrust one such unit to the command of future hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky.

The film made in Kyiv on January 22, 1919, shows Petliura standing together with Volodymyr Vynnychenko but not conversing with him. There was no love lost between the two politicians. Their rivalry went back to prewar times, when both were leading members of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Labor Party. Vynnychenko, who had strong pro-Bolshevik sympathies, blamed Petliura for provoking the Bolshevik invasion of Ukraine. In December 1917, on the verge of that invasion, Petliura was forced to resign from the government. Although Petliura and Vynnychenko teamed up to lead the uprising against the hetman, their rivalry continued within the Directory. By March 1919, Vynnychenko, whose attitude was still pro-Soviet and pro-Bolshevik, would be out of the Directory, out of Ukraine, and pretty much out of politics. In early May 1919, Petliura would be elected head of the Directory with dictatorial powers.

There were important political and military reasons for the rise of Petliura at a time when not only Vynnychenko but also Mykhailo Hrushevsky, another major figure of 1917, went into the emigration.

There was no alternative to retreat because the Ukrainian army was again in disarray. The peasant detachments that Petliura had led in the last months of 1918 against Hetman Skoropadsky had all but evaporated: out of 100,000 peasant soldiers, only a quarter stayed with Petliura, while others departed for their villages, believing that they had accomplished their mission and the rest was up to the government they had helped to install. Most of those who stayed were led by otamans — a Cossack-era word for commanders now applied to independent warlords. Petliura’s title of chief otaman reflected a sad reality: he presided over a group of unruly warlords, not a disciplined army. Petliura and his officers never managed to make the transition from an insurgent force to a regular army. Successful rebels, the Ukrainian politicians turned out to be amateurs at building a state and organizing armed forces.

The only reliable units in the service of the Ukrainian People’s Republic were those composed of Galician soldiers — Ukrainians in the Austrian service captured by the Russian army during World War I who joined the forces of the republic after the February Revolution of 1917. They turned out to be the most disciplined formations of a number of successive Ukrainian governments. In July 1919, Petliura got new reinforcements from Galicia.

How and why did that happen? Despite losing Lviv to the Poles in November 1918, the western Ukrainian government had managed to establish effective control over most of Ukrainian-populated eastern Galicia. It created a functioning administrative system, proposed a set of reforms that included the redistribution of land, which benefited the peasantry, and mobilized the Ukrainian population around the idea of independence from Poland. The turning point in the Polish-Ukrainian war was the arrival in Galicia in April 1919 of an army of 60,000 led by General Józef Haller von Hallenburg. It had been formed in France out of Polish prisoners of war (they had originally fought on the Austrian side) and armed by the Entente. Part of the army’s officer corps was French. The army was sent to the eastern front to fight the Bolsheviks, but Haller deployed it against the Ukrainian troops in Galicia. The French protested and sent telegrams to that effect, while the Poles, driving the ill-equipped Ukrainian army eastward, assured the French that the Ukrainians were all Bolsheviks. In the summer of 1919, the Ukrainian Galician army retreated to the Zbruch and crossed it to join Petliura’s forces in Podolia.

Between the 50,000-strong Galician army, 35,000 troops loyal to Petliura, and some 15,000 men fighting under the leadership of allied otamans, the Ukrainian armed forces constituted a major fighting force. The arrival of the Galicians gave Petliura a chance to reclaim territories lost to the Bolsheviks in central and eastern Ukraine.

Not only the Ukrainian government in Kyiv but also nationalist governments in other parts of the empire, especially the Baltics and the North Caucasus, resisted the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd in October 1917. In southern Russia, former imperial officers and the Don Cossacks joined forces to create the White Army, which fought for the restoration of the pre-Bolshevik political and social order. The Western powers, including Britain and France, threw their support behind the White Army under the leadership of General Anton Denikin, who began an offensive against the Bolsheviks in Ukraine in the early summer of 1919. The appearance of Denikin in southern Ukraine and his northward drive posed a new question for the Ukrainian government and its military forces. Should they ally themselves with Denikin against the Bolsheviks or shun him, since he aimed not only to undo the social revolution advocated by the Ukrainian leaders but also to restore the one and indivisible Russian state?

The Galicians and the Dnieper Ukrainians responded differently to that question. The westerners saw no problem in allying themselves with the anti-Bolshevik and anti-Polish White Army. The easterners, for their part, regarded the Poles, whom the Galicians despised, as potential allies against the Bolsheviks and the Whites, while the otamans were not above joining the Red Army. Brought together by ideology and circumstance, the two sides were still fighting their own wars. In August, when the Whites and the Galician units simultaneously entered Kyiv, the Galicians graciously retreated, leaving the city to the Whites, causing a major conflict between Petliura and the Galician commanders.

The year 1919, which had begun on a high note, with great hopes for the two Ukrainian states, was ending in disaster. By the end of the year, the Ukrainian armed forces were no more, and with them went statehood. The eastern Ukrainians were defeated because they were politically divided and ill organized, whereas the Galicians lost because, outnumbered and outgunned, they got no help from their eastern brethren. The unification of the two states and armies had resulted more in a military alliance than in the creation of a united state or armed force. A long period of existence in separate states under different political and social orders had strongly affected the political and military cultures of the two Ukrainian elites and their followers, who believed that they belonged to the same nation. Despite the disasters of 1919, they were not prepared to give up that idea.

As the Ukrainians armies left the battlefield and the idea of Ukrainian independence seemed to be fading away, three major forces clashed in the fight for control of Ukraine. The Polish armies, driven by the vision of reestablishing a Polish state with borders as close to those of the prepartition commonwealth as possible, held sway over Galicia and moved into Podolia and Volhynia. The White armies, backed by the Entente, pushed northward from southern Ukraine into Russia with the goal of reestablishing the one and indivisible Russian state of tsarist times. Then there were the Bolsheviks, whose long-term goal was world revolution, while their immediate imperative was military survival. They could achieve neither without Ukrainian coal and bread, as Vladimir Lenin openly admitted.

Of all the regimes and armies that fought in Ukraine in 1919, the Bolsheviks left the largest footprint and kept Kyiv in their hands longest — from February to August, and then again in December. But holding the capital and controlling the large industrial cities of the Ukrainian steppe did not mean controlling Ukraine as a whole. The countryside was in revolt against the new Bolshevik masters. Their rule antagonized Ukrainian liberals and socialists, many of whom were prepared to welcome Soviet power in principle but not at the expense of their nation-building program. The same was true of the peasants, who took Bolshevik promises to give them land at face value, only to have their crops requisitioned at gunpoint. Led by a variety of warlords, the peasants rebelled, and their revolts became as much a factor in the Bolshevik loss of Ukraine as the White armies of Denikin and the Galician and eastern Ukrainian armies of Petliura. After the defeat of Denikin and the recapture of Kyiv in December 1919, the Bolsheviks decided to learn from their mistakes of the previous year.

Vladimir Lenin himself spelled out the “lesson of 1919” for his followers. According to Lenin, the Bolsheviks had neglected the nationality question. Consequently, the Bolshevik army returned to Ukraine in late 1919 and early 1920 under the banner of the formally independent Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic and tried to address the Ukrainians in their native language. Russification was out; cultural accommodation of the national revolution in Ukraine was in. In a move reminiscent of imperial co-opting of local elites, the Bolsheviks opened their party’s door to the Ukrainian leftists; these former Socialist Revolutionaries had accepted the idea of a Soviet organization of the future Ukrainian state and became known as Borotbists after the title of their main periodical, Borot’ba (Struggle). Accepted into the Bolshevik Party on an individual basis, they provided the Bolsheviks with badly needed Ukrainian-speaking cadres and a cultural elite. Peasants, too, were finally accommodated and given the land they had been promised for so long: in the spring of 1920, the Bolsheviks postponed their plans for establishing big collective farms on lands confiscated from the nobility and allowed the peasants to divide the land of their former masters.

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 Jozef 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.