A Choice Delayed

For many residents of Ukraine, the establishment of a Ukrainian state and its conflict with the Russian Reds and Whites squarely posed the question of choice of political loyalty and national allegiance.

As our sources attest, however, this challenge of the time was generally ignored in southern Ukraine. Alekseev and Zamrii (who later developed a pan-Russian orientation) considered that the Civil War, which all the authors regarded as an internal political conflict within the Russian Empire, had begun with the conflict between the Ukrainian government and the Bolsheviks. Post factum, both authors identified the Central Rada, formed in Kyiv in the spring of 1917 and dissolved by the German military in the spring of 1918, with Symon Petliura, the head of the Ukrainian state in 1919-20, but their evaluation of events was somewhat different. If Zamrii, as noted earlier, accused Petliura and his supporters of attempting to divide Russia, Alekseev was inclined to represent the conflict more in political and regional colours than in national ones. He wrote that in January 1918 rumours reached his village to the effect 'that in Kyiv there was organized - in a word, in Ukraine - Petliura, and in the north the Red Guard after October, still in the year [19]17, and the Civil War was beginning.'²⁸

A different assessment of events was given post factum by Mykola Molodyk, who was an elementary-school pupil in 1917. He associated the beginning of the conflict with the illegal Bolshevik seizure of power and the rising of all other parties (among which the author enumerates the Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, and monarchists) against them. In the developing conflict, Molodyk clearly sympathizes with the Ukrainian side, and with the Central Rada above all. He is the only author who does not reduce the Ukrainian Revolution to Petliura and Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky, the head of the Ukrainian state in 1918, but also mentions the names of Mykhailo Hrushevsky and Volodymyr Vynnychenko, the leaders of the Central Rada.

Molodyk welcomes the formation of the Ukrainian state and the introduction of Ukrainian as the official language, as well as Ukrainian currency. Writing in the 1960s, he constructs his account of those times as an explicit antithesis to the dominant Soviet historical narrative. While accepting certain tenets of that narrative, such as its negative attitude to the hetman and the German occupation (with the reservation that the Germans initially behaved correctly towards the population), Molodyk represents the Central Rada, not the Bolsheviks, as the major positive force behind revolutionary developments. In his view, it was not the Central Rada but the Soviet government that 'handed Ukraine over to the Germans.' According to Molodyk, the Central Rada and Petliura, who was in charge of its military forces, fought the Germans, who overthrew the Rada and forced Hrushevsky and Vynnychenko to emigrate.²⁹ This assessment of events from late 1917 to mid-1918 runs counter to historical fact and finds no parallel in the other sources published in the Zaporizhia collection. Nevertheless, it should not be rejected as a purely historiographic construction of a later time. After all, as Molodyk says, his family and the whole village voted for the Socialist Revolutionaries - the leading political force in the Central Rada - in the elections of 1917 to the Constituent Assembly, and Molodyk's later evaluation, in all likelihood, reflected the feelings and attitudes of his fellow villagers in 1917 and early 1918.

For the peasants of southern Ukraine, as the material published in the Zaporizhia collection makes apparent, the outbreak of the Russo- Ukrainian war at the beginning of 1918 remained no more than a distant rumour and was marked only by the introduction of a new military census. Life went on as before until the arrival of German and Ukrainian units in the spring of that year.³⁰ Judging by Yaroshenko's diary, the Ukrainian-German alliance aroused no particular objection on the part of the peasants.

His native village had just undergone the rule of anarchists and Red Guards, which was marked by pogroms and public executions of Jewish petty entrepreneurs and their families. The peasants were clearly awaiting the arrival of a firm authority, and the Germans met that demand in full. The first to arrive in the village at the beginning of 1918 were Ukrainian Cossack-style military detachments, generally known as haidamakas, who were welcomed with bread and salt on the church square. Yaroshenko, who generally avoided any evaluation or show of political sympathies, described the ceremony in detail in his diary. Breaking temporarily with the Russian language, which he used to keep his records, Yaroshenko used Ukrainian to relate the welcoming speech in honour of the arriving soldiers, delivered by the local teacher Karas, and the reply by the haidamaka commander (a former deputy to the Constituent Assembly from the town of Nyzhniodniprovsk), Romanchenko. The haidamakas were thanked for establishing order, and they promised to maintain it, agitated for an independent Ukraine, and called for struggle against the Bolsheviks.³¹ The change of language and the detailed account of the arrival of the haidamakas in Yaroshenko's generally laconic diary may indicate that he was receptive to some of the Ukrainian soldiers' appeals, but he was loyal above all not to party or nation but to his village, where he was a member of the self-defence force. On 9 December 1918 Yaroshenko noted in his diary: 'At the moment we are in such a state that we do not know where to go and why. The hetman has mobilized the officers and Petliura the junior officers, and they are going one against the other, brother against brother. The hetman is a Cadet [member of the Constitutional Democratic Party], so they say, and Petliura is a republican, and [Nestor] Makhno is an anarchist, and the

Russians are Bolsheviks, and each is against the other, and they are killing one another.

It is terrible to see this sad story. When the end will come, I do not know.'³²

A characteristic feature of the situation in southern Ukraine reflected in our sources was that neither the Ukrainian nor the Russian national idea was a major factor in the peasants' choice between the warring sides. Just as the Ukrainian idea could not shake Yaroshenko's primary loyalty to his village, so the pan-Russian idea proved of secondary importance to the ethnic Russian Alekseev. If at the end of 1918 Yaroshenko clearly associated the Russians only with the Bolsheviks, 1919 brought a new Russian force to southern Ukraine - General Anton Denikin's Volunteer Army. But Alekseev was clearly opposed to the 'Cadets' - the forces that fought initially under Denikin and then were led by Petr Wrangel, whom he also called 'masters' (gospoda) in his records. In spite of his distaste for the 'bosses,' he also was not enthused by the Bolsheviks. At times, but by no means invariably, he associated himself with the Makhnovites, who included a good many of his fellow villagers and friends, but for the most part he kept to his own village. To some extent, the 'hear nothing, see nothing' approach of most of our authors to the conflict reflected the attitudes of the specific demographic group to which they belonged - the peasants who had fought in the First World War and, on their return, had married and established families. They considered that their fighting days were over and that they should now concentrate on their families and homesteads. Loyalty to their native village and participation in local selfdefence forces were fully in accord with that hierarchy of values.

The most substantial characterization of peasant attitudes of the revolutionary epoch appears in the memoirs of Molodyk, for whose fellow villagers the true beginning of the conflict came with the pillaging and bloody depredations of the Makhnovites. He writes, 'The first lesson that the peasants learned was not to get involved in that fight.

Let them fight one another if they want, but we should keep our families alive, if possible, and save what we can of our property. With a few insignificant exceptions, that was the policy adhered to by the peasants of every village until the end of the Civil War. No one from our village fought in the ranks of Makhno, Petliura, the Red armies, or the Whites. They took shelter... The following forces fought one another in Ukraine: the Makhnovites, the Petliurites, the Red Army, the Deni- kinites, various bands and, finally, the Wrangelites. Between 1917 and 1920, all the above-mentioned participants entered the village more than once and took whatever they needed from the peasants - horses, cattle, grain, and even clothing... Towards the end, people became so sick and tired of the frenzy that they were glad to get it over with - whoever the authorities might be, let them be, as long as they did not make war or engage in robbery.'³³ Other authors attest that significant numbers of their fellow villagers (especially in Alekseev's case) did in fact fight in the ranks of all the above-mentioned factions, but the general assessment of peasant attitudes given by Molodyk is corroborated by the records of the selfsame Alekseev, Yaroshenko, Zamrii, and even Rubel, who makes only occasional mention of revolutionary events in the village.

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Source: Plokhy S.. Ukraine and Russia: Representations of the Past. University of Toronto Press,2008. — 412 р.. 2008

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