From Local to National
It was only the February Revolution of 1917 and the swift politicization of the army that brought about the activization of hitherto suppressed ethnic loyalties and the actualization of Ukrainian national identity and its alternatives in the army.20 This change came too late to affect the letters of Andrii Rubel, who fell near Kovel on 25 September 1916.
Nevertheless, it was reflected at various levels and in a number of ways by authors who survived the First World War. Yaroshenko, who attended a demonstration on Cathedral Square in Katerynoslav on 12 March 1917, saw Ukrainian flags among the other banners displayed there.21 Alekseev later recalled the transfer of Ukrainians from the northern to the southern front and the dispatch of 'northerners' from the 'Ukrainian' to the northern front but left that report without comment.22 An author who did comment on the formation of Ukrainian units at the front was Oleksandr Zamrii, who, judging by his memoirs, was transferred from Pskov to Brovary near Kyiv and dispatched to the front from there. Like other Ukrainians, Zamrii first went to Petrograd, where a soldiers' meeting decided to dispatch natives of the southern gubernias to Ukraine. Zamrii later regretted having obeyed that decision, for he left Pskov without even stopping to examine its historical monuments. One reason for his dissatisfaction was that he had to abandon the peaceful post of quartermaster, far from the front, and set out on the 'untrodden way' that led to the front. But that was not his only reason to be dissatisfied.23Looking back on those events from the perspective of the 1960s, Zamrii considered that the soldiers in Petrograd were poorly versed in politics and had been duped by agitators sent by Symon Petliura, the organizer of the Ukrainian army and later head of the Ukrainian state.
'As we understood later and today, that was the voice of Petliura and his stooges; it was they who wanted to tear Russia apart and did so,' wrote Zamrii in his memoirs. For our purposes, it is extraordinarily important to determine what the author understood 'then' and what he accepted post factum under the influence of later events, his own experiences, and Soviet propaganda. Recalling the events of 1917, Zamrii wrote that one of the officers had advised him not to 'follow the abovementioned clique,' as 'they will simply involve you in a fight and you will beat one another, that is, Ukrainians will beat Russians and vice versa.' Post factum, Zamrii considered that the officer had been right, noting that 'the same thing is now going on in African countries, in the Congo and Laos, where blood is being shed as it was shed among us during the Civil War - not only nation against nation but also brother against brother.' That was later, but in the summer of 1917 Zamrii clearly yielded to the call of the national idea and allowed the national awakeners in the army to mobilize and prioritize his ethnic identity, even contrary to considerations of his own peace and security. He also accepted the new national identity and the new national designation with regard to his compatriots from Tavriia. 'The soldiers among us are more Siberians and Permians. Of the Tavriians - or, rather, Ukrainians - there is no more than one around each gun. And even so, they were gunners and gun commanders,' wrote Zamrii in the 1960s about the events of 1916.24Regional loyalty, based on the origin of soldiers from certain gubernias, now became a building block in the structure of the new national identity. This was fairly simple in practice, considering that both the Central Rada in Kyiv and those who formed Ukrainian units at the front defined Ukraine and Ukrainian identity in terms of gubernias. Nevertheless, the Tavriia gubernia, with the Crimea as one of its constituent parts, posed a special problem, for as of August 1917 (by which time Zamrii had already decided to return to Ukraine) the Provisional Government in Petrograd would not hear of recognizing the authority of the Central Rada over 'New Russia,' which was considered to include the Tavriia gubernia.25 That gubernia (not including the Crimea) was only proclaimed a constituent part of the Ukrainian People's Republic in November 1917, when the Central Rada issued its Third Universal.26 The status of the Crimea, separate from the rest of the Tavriia gubernia, which became part of Ukraine, was registered in Alekseev's memoirs: recalling the events of December 1917, he not only wrote of transfers from one front to another and the demobilization of the Ukrainians but also made separate mention of the demobilization of 'the Crimeans.' He celebrated Christmas 1917 with a friend from Simferopol, Fedor Lysykh, who stopped in Alekseev's native village on his way home.27 It would appear that all the authors of the Zaporizhia collection who wrote about the events of 1917, including the ethnic Russian Alekseev, found their newly acquired Ukrainian identity and the definition of their villages as part of Ukrainian territory completely natural.