Chapter 18 The Birth of a Nation

Just two shots were fired on the morning of June 28, 1914, in the city of Sarajevo. With the first, the nineteen-year-old student Gavrilo Princip wounded Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria.

Gavrilo Princip, a member of a Serbian nationalist organization, hated the Habsburgs and dreamed of a single free Yugoslav state in the Balkans. The Austro-Hungarian government had other dreams. It wanted to preserve the empire and decided to exploit the assassination of the archduke as a reason to go to war with Serbia and punish it as an instigator of Slavic nationalism within the imperial borders. Russia backed Serbia, and Germany stood behind Austria-Hungary, while Britain and France supported Russia. By early August, virtually all of Europe was at war. The Great War, as it was known at the time, cost the world up to 18 million lives, both military and civilian, and more than 22 million wounded.

Historians have long argued about the causes of the first total war in human history. They most often cite the division of the world into two rival military camps: the Triple Entente of Britain, France, and Russia ranged against the Triple Alliance (Central Powers) of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy (later replaced by the Ottoman Empire). Vladimir Lenin emphasized great-power rivalry for control of markets and resources. Other factors include the rise of mass politics in Europe, as well as a military doctrine that stressed the need for speedy mobilization and the power of the first strike. All of them indeed contributed to the outbreak of the conflict and to the warring nations’ inability to end it until four long years of slaughter had passed.

In examining the underlying causes of the war, it is important not to lose sight of the reason why Princip fired the shots in Sarajevo and why Austria-Hungary decided to go to war. That reason was the growing conflict between ever more aggressive nationalism and rapidly weakening multiethnic empires. The war triggered by a nationalist activist did serious damage to empires. The losers included not only Austria-Hungary but also the Ottoman and Russian empires: the first disintegrated completely, while the latter two lost their monarchies and some of their territories, surviving in a different form. Among the victors were the numerous national movements that began building their own states on the ruins of the formerly invincible imperial giants. While hardly a victor by any stretch of imagination, Ukraine was among the nations that the war gave a chance to create a state of its own.

In its first months and even years, the war promised nothing good for minority nationalisms. It created a wave of support for ruling dynasties and imperial power. The Russian government used its outbreak to impose further restrictions on the activities of Ukrainophile organizations. The Ukrainian activists, whom government officials often called “Mazepists” — a reference to the eighteenth-century hetman who had joined forces with Sweden against Russia — were treated as potential agents of the Habsburgs. Despite their assurances of loyalty, the government closed Ukrainian organizations, including the Prosvita (Enlightenment) societies, and shut down the remaining Ukrainian publications, including the daily Rada — the last remnant of the liberal period inaugurated by the Revolution of 1905. All this dashed the hopes of those Ukrainian leaders who saw the war as an opportunity to create a united autonomous Ukraine within the Russian state. The Ukrainian liberals declared neutrality, refusing to support either of the warring sides. Leftist radicals turned to Austria in the hope of defeating the Russian Empire.

The war began with spectacular victories for the imperial Russian armies. In the north, the Russian troops made their way into Prussia; in the south, they entered Galicia and Bukovyna. In early September they took Lviv, and by the end of the year they controlled the Carpathian mountain passes, advancing into Transcarpathia. The new restrictions on Ukrainian organizations in the empire led to the attacks on Ukrainian activists in Austria-Hungary. The Russian occupation of Galicia and Bukovyna lasted until May 1915 — long enough to indicate the future that the Romanov Empire had in store for the Habsburg Ukranians. The occupying authorities raised the banner of the reunification and liberation of the pan-Russian nation, bringing the previously marginalized Russophiles back to the center of Galician politics. The Russian administration replaced Ukrainian with Russian as the language of instruction in the local schools and renamed Austrian and Jewish Lemberg — Polish Lwów and Ukrainian Lviv — as Russian Lvov.

While the Russians supported the Russophiles, the Austrians started persecuting them as soon as the war began. On September 4, 1914, the first Russophile activists rounded up arrived in an open field in the Thalerhof camp near the city of Graz in Styria. Thousands of arrested Russophiles and members of their families soon joined them. Many were community leaders — priests, educators, and members of the educated classes — but most were simple peasants. In the course of the war, close to 20,000 people were incarcerated in Thalerhof, which acquired a sad notoriety as the first concentration camp in Europe. Close to 3,000 prisoners died of cold and disease. Today, only the name of a road near Graz airport — Lagerstrasse, or Camp Street — reminds one of the tragedy of the Galician and Bykovynian Russophiles. Others were shipped to the prison camp of Theresienstadt (Terezin), a fortress in the present-day Czech Republic, which counted Gavrilo Princip as one of its inmates.

Unlike the Russophiles, the leaders of the Ukrainian movement in Austria-Hungary declared their loyalty to the monarchy. In that, they followed most of their peasant supporters, whose favorite song in the years leading up to the war was about the wife of Emperor Franz Joseph, Empress Elizabeth (Sisi), assassinated by an Italian anarchist in 1898. The song addressed Elizabeth as “our lady” and Franz Joseph as “our father.” With the start of the war, the Ukrainian activists formed a Supreme Ukrainian Council, whose name reflected that of the Supreme Ruthenian Council of the revolutionary year 1848. The council called into existence the first Ukrainian military formation in the Austrian army. Out of 10,000 volunteers, the authorities formed a corps of 2,500 called the Sich Riflemen — referring, of course, to the Zaporozhian Sich and the Dnieper Cossacks as an expression of the all-Ukrainian identity and aspirations of the Galician volunteers.

The Ukrainian politicians in Austria-Hungary had a twofold political program: to partition Galicia and achieve autonomy for its Ukrainian part and to form an independent Ukrainian state out of Russian-ruled Ukraine. To achieve the second goal, the Austro-Hungarian Ukrainians not only joined the imperial army but also embarked on the project of turning the Little Russians among the Russian prisoners of war into Ukrainians. Leading that effort was the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, formed in Vienna but staffed largely by émigrés from Dnieper Ukraine, who knew how to talk to their own people. Among them was the future father of the radical Ukrainian nationalism of the 1920s and 1930s, a native of southern Ukraine with a Russian surname: Dmytro Dontsov.

In the late spring and summer of 1915, a joint German-Austrian offensive allowed the Austrians to recapture most of Galicia and Bukovyna. As a result, the region was completely cleansed of Russophiles, who retreated eastward with the Russian army. “They went in whole households, led by their village heads, followed by their horses, cows, and the treasures they had managed to snatch up,” wrote the newspaper Kievskaia mysl’ (Kyivan Thought) about the Russophile exodus. Most of the refugees ended up in Rostov and the lower Don region on the Russo-Ukrainian ethnic border. It was the final chapter in the history of the Russophile movement as a major political force: those who had avoided Thalerhof were now leaving their land for Russia. In the spring and summer of 1916, the Russian army, led by the talented General Aleksei Brusilov, launched a major offensive that recaptured Volhynia, Bukovyna, and parts of Galicia. But it turned out to be the last hurrah of an empire close to economic and military exhaustion. The all-Russian idea would soon find itself under attack not only in Habsburg-ruled Ukraine but also in the realm of the Romanovs.

The Romanov dynasty, if not the empire itself, came to an end in early March 1917. In the previous month, food shortages in Petrograd (the war-era name of St. Petersburg) had sparked workers’ strikes and mutiny in the military ranks. The leaders of the Duma convinced Emperor Nicholas II, psychologically exhausted after years of war, to abdicate the throne. He passed the crown to his brother, who refused the honor — the Duma leaders predicted a new revolt if he were to agree. The dynasty was no more: pressure from the street, a soldiers’ revolt, and the skillful maneuvering of the formerly loyal Duma had put an end to it. The leaders of the Duma then stepped in to create a provisional government, one of whose tasks was to conduct elections for a constitutional assembly that would decide the future of the Russian state.

The Petrograd events, which became known in history as the February Revolution, took the embattled leaders of the Ukrainian organizations completely by surprise.

Few of Hrushevsky’s old colleagues from the moderate branch of the Ukrainian movement (now called the Society of Ukrainian Progressives) wanted to join the young revolutionaries: having experienced the Revolution of 1905, they knew that revolutions end in reaction and were prepared to exchange their loyalty to the regime for concessions in the cultural sphere. Making Ukrainian a language of educational instruction was their highest priority. Hrushevsky believed that they were wrong: the time had come not to ask for educational reform but to demand territorial autonomy for Ukraine in a reformed democratic Russian state. That sounded too ambitious to many veterans of the Ukrainian movement, if not downright unrealistic, given the difficult history of Ukrainian dealings with the imperial government. But Hrushevsky and his young, enthusiastic supporters thought otherwise.

They began their activities in March, working from a room in the basement of the Pedagogical Museum in downtown Kyiv. They created a General Secretariat — a government of autonomous Ukraine — headed by Volodymyr Vynnychenko, a leading modernist writer. Writing in both Ukrainian and Russian, Vynnychenko had become the first Ukrainian since Nikolai Gogol to acquire a significant readership in Russia proper. The new government claimed jurisdiction over a good part of today’s Ukraine, including the imperial gubernias of Kyiv, Podolia, Volhynia, Chernihiv, and Poltava. By July, the Provisional Government in Petrograd recognized it as the regional government of Ukraine.

How could all that happen? How could the Ukrainian idea, marginalized after the Revolution of 1905, emerge victorious in competition with visions of the future promoted by Russian liberals and social democrats, as well as by proponents of Great Russian nationalism from the ranks of “true Russian” patriots? In the revolutionary atmosphere of the time, the mixture of liberal nationalism and socialism offered by the young leaders of the Rada turned out to be an addictive ideology. The politically active public came to regard the territorial autonomy of Ukraine advocated by the Ukrainian parties as the only way out of the plethora of military, economic, and social problems besieging the country. The Central Rada led the way as the only institution capable of meeting the two main demands of the moment: land and peace.

The soldiers, who wanted to end the war as soon as possible, enthusiastically backed the Rada en masse. While the Provisional Government in Petrograd was busy launching a new offensive on the eastern front and pleading with soldiers to fight to the end alongside Britain and France, the Central Rada promised peace and became the only hope for it in Ukraine, which the fighting had devastated. The “Ukrainized” army units — detachments formed of recruits from the Ukrainian provinces and sent to the Ukrainian sector of the front in the course of 1917 — declared their loyalty to the Rada. There were altogether close to 300,000 recruits. These war-weary peasants in soldiers’ uniforms were not only eager to return home but wanted to get there in time for the redistribution of noble land, which the Central Rada promised to carry out despite strong opposition from the landowning classes. The Ukrainian peasantry, politically dominated by the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries, which happened to be the largest political party in the Rada, was solidly in the Rada’s corner.

During the summer of 1917, the Central Rada, originally little more than a coordinating committee of Ukrainophile political and cultural organizations, had turned into the country’s parliament as all-Ukrainian congresses of peasants, workers, and soldiers sent their representatives to it. The national minorities did likewise. Mykhailo Hrushevsky went out of his way to call on his supporters not to permit the repetition of the pogroms of 1905 and promised Jews, Poles, and Russians cultural autonomy in a self-governing Ukrainian republic federated with Russia. In return, the Jewish socialist parties joined the Rada and backed the idea of Ukrainian territorial autonomy. So did the left-leaning representatives of other minorities. The Rada’s membership exceeded eight hundred, and its leaders had to create a smaller standing body, the Little Rada, to coordinate the work of the new revolutionary parliament.

Dozens of prominent Ukrainians returned to Kyiv from Petrograd and Moscow, which the Bolsheviks had made the new capital of Russia in March 1918, to take part in building the new Ukraine. One of them, Heorhii Narbut, a talented artist with an international reputation, became a founder of the Ukrainian Academy of Fine Arts. He also became the principal designer of the Ukrainian coat of arms and the country’s first banknotes and stamps. The coat of arms included two historical symbols, a trident borrowed from the coinage of Prince Volodymyr of Kyiv, and the image of a Cossack: the new state claimed Kyivan Rus’ and the Cossack Hetmanate as its two predecessors. The two colors of the coat of arms, blue and yellow, came from Galicia, where they had been part of its coat of arms for centuries. The colors symbolized the unity of the Ukrainian lands on both sides of the eastern front in the world war.

Not everything was rosy in the newly created Ukrainian autonomy. The Rada had failed to establish a viable state apparatus or create reliable armed forces out of the hundreds of thousands of officers and soldiers who pledged their allegiance to it. Writers, scholars, and students, who found themselves at the helm of the new parliament, were busy living the romantic dream of national revolution and destroying the old state machine. The lack of a functioning government and a loyal army became an issue in the fall of 1917, when the Central Rada began to lose control of the situation on the ground because of its inability to fulfill its earlier promises. In the cities, where support for the Rada dropped between 9 and 13 percent (the only exception was Kyiv, with 25 percent), power was shifting toward the Bolshevik-dominated soviets (councils). The countryside was growing ever more restless as the Central Rada failed to deliver either land or peace. The peasants began seizing state and noble lands on their own initiative.

The Bolshevik coup in Petrograd, subsequently known as the October Revolution, had a major impact on the developments in Ukraine. In direct response to the coup, the Central Rada proclaimed the Ukrainian People’s Republic — a state in its own right, but one that would remain in federal union with Russia. It also claimed new territories in the east and south: the Kharkiv and Kherson gubernias, as well as parts of the Tavrida, Kursk, and Voronezh gubernias settled by ethnic Ukrainians. These actions spelled the end of the short-lived cooperation between the Central Rada and the Bolsheviks, who had joined forces in Kyiv to defeat the troops loyal to the Provisional Government. The confrontation between the Ukrainian government in Kyiv and the Bolshevik government in Petrograd had begun.

The Bolsheviks gained power in Russia by taking control of the soviets — a new form of government created by representatives of workers, peasants, and soldiers and contested by various political parties. The October coup, which brought down the Provisional Government, was rubber-stamped by the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which met in Petrograd during the coup and was dominated by the Bolsheviks and their allies. They tried the same tactic in Ukraine, calling a session of the Ukrainian Congress of Soviets to take place in Kyiv in December 1917. But most of the delegates turned out to be peasant supporters of the Central Rada: the planned Bolshevik coup in Kyiv failed.

That turned out to be a temporary setback. The Bolshevik organizers left Kyiv for Kharkiv, where a congress of soviets from the industrial east of the country met in late December. It declared the creation of a new state, the Ukrainian People’s Republic of Soviets, on December 24, 1917. At the beginning of January 1918, Bolshevik troops from Russia entered Ukraine and moved on Kyiv under the banner of the virtual state proclaimed in Kharkiv, which would eventually become the capital of Soviet Ukraine. Led by the Russian officer Mikhail Muraviev, they advanced by railroad and took control of major industrial centers, where workers’ detachments mobilized by the Bolsheviks backed them. The Central Rada had effectively lost control of the industrial towns, where it held sway over the liberal intelligentsia but not over the workers. It also had very few troops to protect itself against the Russian invasion. Those military units that declared support for Ukrainian independence in the summer of 1917 had been sent to the front. Now the leaders of the Central Rada found themselves constrained to declare their country’s complete independence of Russia, but they had no troops to defend it.

On January 25, 1918, the Central Rada issued its fourth, and last, universal — the Cossack-era word for decree — which proclaimed the political independence of Ukraine. “The Ukrainian People’s Republic hereby becomes an independent, free, and sovereign state of the Ukrainian people, subject to no one,” read the text. In introducing the bill to the Rada, Mykhailo Hrushevsky stressed its two immediate goals: to facilitate the signing of a peace treaty with Germany and Austria — only an independent country could do that — and to protect Ukraine from the Bolshevik invasion and the insurgency of the Red Guards, workers’ units organized by the Bolsheviks in the large industrial centers. But the historical significance of the Fourth Universal went far beyond its immediate objectives. It was Ukraine’s first open break with Russia since the times of Ivan Mazepa. The idea of an independent Ukrainian state, first formulated in Dnieper Ukraine only seventeen years earlier, had acquired broad political legitimacy. The genie of independence was now out of the imperial bottle.

“We want to live in peace and friendship with all neighboring states: Russia, Poland, Austria, Romania, Turkey, and others, but none of them has the right to interfere in the life of the independent Ukrainian republic,” read the universal. This was, of course, easier said than done. Russian troops were converging on Kyiv from the north and east, while in the city itself, the Bolsheviks staged a workers’ uprising at the Arsenal, the major military works whose buildings serve today as Kyiv’s art center and exhibition hall. There was a shortage of reliable troops, as Bolshevik promises of land, peace, and the revolutionary transformation of society had lured many away. The Rada called for mobilization. At the railway station of Kruty in the Chernihiv region, a detachment of approximately four hundred Ukrainian students and cadets engaged advancing Bolshevik forces consisting of sailors from the Baltic Fleet and a military unit from Petrograd. Twenty-seven of the Ukrainian fighters ended up in enemy hands and were shot in retaliation for the stubborn resistance they had put up to the Bolshevik advance for five long hours. In Ukrainian historical memory, they became celebrated as the first martyrs for the cause of national independence. More would follow.

On February 9, 1918, the Central Rada abandoned Kyiv and retreated westward. That night, in the town of Brest on today’s Polish-Belarusian border, its representatives signed a peace treaty with the Central Powers: Germany, Austria-Hungary, and their allies. Having refused to form a regular army in the summer and fall of 1917, the Central Rada now had no choice but to look beyond Ukraine’s borders for protection. The Ukrainian delegates asked for German and Austrian military assistance, which was granted immediately: exhausted by the long war, the armies and economies of the Central Powers needed agricultural products, and Ukraine already had a reputation as the breadbasket of Europe. The peace treaty spoke of “reciprocal exchange of the surplus of... more important agricultural and industrial products.” In exchange for Ukrainian grain, the Central Powers offered their well-armed and well-oiled military machine. It rolled into Ukraine within ten days after the signing of the treaty. By March 2, it had driven the Bolsheviks out of Kyiv, the Central Rada was back in the building of the Pedagogical Museum, and the students who died at Kruty had been buried with military honors at Askold’s Mound, the legendary burial place of the first Viking ruler of Kyiv.

The Bolsheviks were in retreat, and unable to stop the advancing German and Austrian troops (about 45,000 men) by military force, they tried to do so by diplomatic and legal means. They began to create on paper and declare the independence of virtual people’s republics in southeastern Ukraine. The Odesa People’s Republic and the Donets, Kryvyi Rih, and Taurida republics all declared independence in February and March. The Central Powers paid no attention. With the help of Ukrainian troops, they even took the Crimea — which the Central Rada had never claimed — but did not annex it to the Kyiv-based Ukrainian People’s Republic. Soon the Bolsheviks found themselves outside Ukraine, whose independence they were forced to recognize in order to conclude a peace treaty of their own with the Central Powers.

The new Ukrainian state was now independent of Russia not only de jure but also de facto. But its independence of the Central Powers, to whom the Central Rada had agreed to supply 1 million tons of grain, was anything but a given. This became perfectly apparent in late April 1918, when the German military authorities dissolved the Rada, not trusting its socialist-dominated government to fulfill their “pump out grain” agenda. The dissolution took place only a few days after the Rada agreed to supply its allies with the aforementioned million tons of grain, as well as significant quantities of other agricultural products. The coup engineered by the Germans brought to power the government of General Pavlo Skoropadsky, a descendant of an eighteenth-century Cossack hetman, deeply conservative in his views, who represented the interests of Ukraine’s landowning class. He declared himself hetman of the new state, appealing to the historical memory of the masses. In the tradition of the hetmans of old, he ruled as a dictator, his power limited only by foreign authority — the German and Austrian command.

A product of the Russian cultural milieu, Skoropadsky had undergone rapid Ukrainization in the revolutionary year 1917, when the Provisional Government put him in charge of its new Ukrainian military formations — a desperate attempt to continue the war by appeasing the nationalities. He embraced the Ukrainian idea first in autonomous and then in pro-independence form, remaining dedicated to it (and to his German backers) to the end of his life, which came in April 1945, when an Allied bomb killed him in Germany. Skoropadsky’s rule turned out to be a great boon for Ukrainian state and institution building. For the first time, the country got its own banks and a functioning financial system. The hetman recruited imperial-era officials to run ministries and establish local government offices, and the former imperial officers created military units. In the realm of education, Ukraine acquired its own Academy of Sciences, its first national library, and a national archives. It also got two new universities, one in Katerynoslav, another in Kamianets-Podilskyi. Although Skoropadsky never fully mastered the Ukrainian language, he helped fulfill the old dream of the Ukrainophile intelligentsia — the introduction of Ukrainian into the school system, which the Central Rada had initiated.

Whatever Skoropadsky’s achievements in the institutional sphere, his rule was anathema to the socialist leaders of the Central Rada. They refused to cooperate with the new regime, which they considered, often for very good reason, a creation of and safe haven for Russian conservatives driven out of Russia by the Bolshevik revolution. Many socialist leaders went underground and plotted a political comeback. An uprising against the hetman was in the air. The regime was anything but popular among laborers, whose working day it extended to twelve hours, or peasants, whose harvests the authorities confiscated. By the end of the summer of 1918, thousands of workers were on strike, and close to 40,000 peasants had joined armed detachments — post–World War I Ukraine now had no shortage of trained military personnel. The punitive expeditions carried out by German troops made things even worse. By early fall, the regime was in a death spiral. It tried to save itself by raising the banner of federalism with non-Bolshevik Russia, but this belated attempt to appease the Entente, which supported the idea of a united Russian state, backfired. The symbolic surrender of Ukrainian independence only angered the socialist leaders of the Central Rada, who were working actively to overthrow the hetman. But more than anything else, the end of the world war spelled the end of the Skoropadsky regime.

On November 11, 1918, in the forest of Compiègne north of Paris, representatives of the German military command signed an armistice with their French and British counterparts. The end of hostilities meant that the German and Austrian troops would leave Ukraine. Three days later, on November 14, the Directory, a revolutionary committee named after the government of eighteenth-century revolutionary France and chaired by Volodymyr Vynnychenko, former head of the Rada government, rose openly against the hetman. The Directory allowed the Germans and Austrian troops to leave, and on December 19 its troops, composed of rebel peasants and military units that had deserted the hetman, entered Kyiv. The Hetmanate was no more. A creation of the war, backed by one of the warring parties, it proved unable to survive on its own. The Ukrainian People’s Republic was back, gladly taking over the institutions created by its predecessor. But its control of Kyiv was by no means firm. The Bolsheviks, who had had to retreat before the German and Austrian advance earlier that year, were now preparing to retake Ukraine.

In Galicia, on the other side of the front line, the end of the world war precipitated the creation of another Ukrainian state that would soon be known as the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic. Its formation began in October, after the declaration of the new emperor, Charles I, on the federalization of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Ukrainian leaders claimed their ethnic territories of Galicia, Bukovyna, and Transcarpathia. Austria-Hungary was living out its final days: its last act, the signing of the armistice agreement with the Entente, now joined by the United States, took place on November 3, 1918. The nationalities ruled from Vienna and Budapest were eager to leave the imperial cage, but the fall of the Dual Monarchy, which did not survive the month of November, unleashed a flood of competing territorial claims. The Ukrainians and Poles in particular were at each other’s throats for control of Galicia. Despite numerous promises, the Vienna government had failed to divide the province into eastern and western parts, and now the Poles claimed all of it.

The Ukrainians struck first on the morning of November 1, 1918, taking control of Lviv — a city surrounded by a Ukrainian-populated countryside but itself largely Polish and Jewish in ethnic composition. They declared the independence of the brand-new Ukrainian state that day. The Poles fought back, reclaiming the city twenty days later. The leadership of the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic, headed by the prominent lawyer and civic leader Yevhen Petrushevych, had to move its headquarters eastward, first to Ternopil and then to Stanyslaviv (today’s Ivano-Frankivsk). It was the beginning of a prolonged and bloody Ukrainian-Polish war. On December 1, 1918, representatives of the two Ukrainian republics, eastern and western, decided to join forces and create a single state. They needed as much unity as they could muster. The future was by no means bright for either of them. World War I, which many hoped would end all wars, set off new ones the moment it ended.

The Great War had begun with Austria trying to maintain its hold on its Slavic nationalities and Russia, acting as the pan-Slavic protector of the Balkans, and trying to extend its pan-Russian identity into Austria-Hungary. Both imperial governments lost. In eastern and central Europe, the war weakened and then destroyed empires, while social revolution did away with the old order. Like the rest of Europe, Ukraine emerged from the calamities of war a very different place — shell-shocked and with a ruined economy, a diminished population, mobilized ethnic identities, and more antagonistic ideologies than ever before. But the collapse of empires gave Ukrainians a new identity, produced a Ukranian state with its own government and army, and placed Ukraine on the political map of Europe. The new politics born of war gave Ukrainians on both sides of the former imperial border a clear political goal — independence. Little more than a fantasy before the war broke out, it became part of an ideology shared by socialist leaders of the Rada, conservative backers of Skoropadsky, and the fighters of the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic in Galicia. More often than not, the cause of independence mobilized Ukrainians while antagonizing minorities and alienating neighbors. It was one thing to proclaim independence and quite another to achieve it. Ukrainians would have to fight for it on more than one front.