Conclusion
The cumulative repercussions of the First World War, Russia’s February Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, German occupation, the disintegration of the Russian, Ottoman, German, and Austro-Hungarian empires, and the emergence of new nation-states from this political debris “radically dislocated existing social organization(s), strengthening old antagonisms between groups and inaugurating new ones.”95 Each of these convulsive events comprised a small, but integral part of the Great War and its post-war consequences.96
Ten years of mass violence destroyed the old social order and launched an unprecedented era of revolutionary upheaval.
In the course of the war, revolutions, and social upheavals, Ukraine evolved from an imprecise territorial designation to an officially recognized Ukrainian homeland with distinct boundaries. In response to the fierce resistance the Bolsheviks encountered in the Ukrainian provinces, the Russian Communist Party’s leadership approved the establishment of the Soviet Ukrainian state, possessing clear borders (separating it from the Russian and Belarusian republics) and claiming control over a well-defined, contiguous territory. This new political entity included the nine (not five, as the Provisional Government claimed in August 1917) former tsarist provinces where Ukrainians constituted the majority of the population. The Ukrainian SSR emerged as an interactive compromise on the shoals of social antagonisms, nationalist aspirations, Bolshevik visions, and political realities. It included both the overwhelming populous agricultural regions as well as the less-populous, smaller industrial regions, including the breakaway Krivoi Rog- Donetsk and Soviet Odessa Republics.In addition to its importance as a granary, a region with natural resources, and a major industrial area, Ukraine occupied a pivotal geographical location in East Central Europe.
Situated at its eastern end, a pro-Bolshevik Ukraine could help ignite the much-anticipated international civil war against Western imperialism. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the unexpected birth of the Hungarian Soviet Republic (March-August 1919), the Red Army’s drive against Poland in 1920, and the Soviet-directed stirrings of “international revolution” in Germany in the early 1920s only reinforced Ukraine’s geopolitical importance to Lenin’s party.97Bolshevik leaders in effect created the Ukrainian SSR within the parameters declared by the UNR’s Third Universal. They reluctantly recognized this territory with its agricultural and industrial regions as the homeland of the Ukrainians and implicitly acknowledged the leading role of Ukrainians in it. At the same time, they also granted the equality of all nations within the borders of Soviet Ukraine. This equality coincided with the views of Hrushevsky and the other leaders of the Central Rada, as exemplified by the law on national-personal autonomy.
Despite the outward appearance of a state, the Ukrainian SSR (like the other republics) remained more of a quasi-state rather than a true “sovereign” one. Soviet Ukraine’s communist party and government did not completely control those who lived within the newly delineated entity, which possessed one primary and unspoken mission: to win over the Ukrainian peasants to the Bolshevik cause. Lenin’s ideas prevailed; the communist leadership recognized the legitimacy of a separate Ukrainian identity (which the tsarist government had never done) and institutionalized it within the framework of a Soviet Republic, a constituent member of the federated Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In spite of “the suspicious attitude of the significant majority... the working class and, at the beginning, even of part of the peasantry,” the Ukrainian SSR emerged, but with many political, national, and social contradictions.98 These shortcomings would haunt the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (and independent Ukraine) over the next century.