Polarization and Collapse

Although the overwhelming majority of those living in the countryside supported Ukrainian political parties, the elections of 1917 and early 1918 did not inaugurate a new era of political stability.

The first group craved land, and they wanted it immediately. Peasant demands for agrarian reforms and the Rada’s appeal for political autono­my converged in the spring and summer of 1917, but frayed in the fall and in the winter-spring of 1918. The peasants sought an agrarian revolution in the countryside and assessed all governments, even the Ukrainian ones, by that standard.³⁵ If a government did not satisfy these pleas, then the peas­ants retreated into a state of economic self-sufficiency, abandoning any effort to feed the cities or the various armies advancing into the steppe.

Despite the Rada’s best efforts to meet peasant claims, it encountered oth­er issues competing for attention.³⁶ In any case, to solve the contentious land question in the most densely populated region of the Russian Empire by providing each homestead with enough land to survive would be a daunting task. The peasants expressed clearly what they required, and they did not want to hear about difficulties or demographic constraints. Expropriate the land of the nobles and the bloated holdings of the Orthodox Church and redistribute the properties of the wealthy peasants (the so-called “kurkuls,” also known as “kulaks” in Russian), they demanded.

The support of Ukrainian soldiers also became problematic. The army, as mentioned earlier, came predominantly from the countryside. Its members also wanted land and an end to the war. Approximately one-third of the troops on the southwestern and Romanian fronts, those camped out on Ukrainian-speaking territories, voted for Ukrainian socialist parties.³⁷ But this backing remained volatile. Within the context of a very divided society, the interests of the senior officers, junior officers, and rank-and-file soldiers came into conflict, and not just over the future of the war. Many Ukrainian­speaking junior officers (oftentimes teachers from the villages) and soldiers hoped to create units composed of their compatriots. These national mili­tary formations would introduce the Ukrainian language as the language of command and as a means of communication with central headquarters. (Most senior officers opposed this demand, claiming correctly that it un­dermined the effectiveness of an already overstrained Russian army). Perhaps intoxicated by their possession of weapons and their knowledge of how to use them, these Ukrainian-speaking warriors pressured the Rada to embrace more radical positions when dealing with Petrograd.³⁸

According to one scholar, as “long as the Ukrainian formations re­mained at the front, they were loyal to the Rada; but the longer the Rada delayed with concrete social and political measures that addressed the needs of the peasants and soldiers, the more that soldier support melted away.”³⁹ Soldiers began to desert in large numbers after the Provisional Government’s disastrous June 1917 campaign, emasculated the national military formations they had clamoured to create earlier, and radicalized the entire political environment by destabilizing the authority of both the Provisional Government and the Central Rada.⁴⁰ Revolvers and rifles brought them heretofore unimaginable power in the countryside as they joined their friends and neighbours in seizing land across the Ukrainian­speaking provinces.

By December 1917, nearly all of the soldiers in garrisons on the territory the Rada claimed would not fight either on the Bolshevik or the anti­Bolshevik side. Millions of soldiers who had earlier enthusiastically embraced the Ukrainian cause “neutralized” themselves.⁴¹ They chose the reality of land over the abstraction of political autonomy. When the Bolsheviks began their 1917-18 winter drive, the Rada did not enjoy widespread popular sup­port among the peasants nor did it command an adequate military force to resist them.⁴²

Urban residents generally endorsed the Russian political parties; the work­ers increasingly rallied around the Bolsheviks, who won only 10 per cent of the vote in the elections to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly in the nine Ukrainian provinces. Since most Bolsheviks did not believe that peasant en­thusiasm for the Ukrainian political parties represented true revolutionary democracy, they did not respect the vote’s outcome. In early December 1917, the Bolsheviks in Ukraine sought to undermine the Central Rada by creating a separate, Soviet Ukrainian government in Kharkov and by enthusiasti­cally greeting Bolshevik military units from Soviet Russia to bolster it.

In response to these events, the Central Rada negotiated a separate peace with the Central Powers on 9 February 1918. At the first Treaty of Brest- Litovsk, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire recognized the UNR within the borders proclaimed by the Fourth Universal and “the frontiers which existed between the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and Russia, prior to the outbreak of the war.”⁴³ The Austro- Hungarian authorities transferred the disputed Polish-Ukrainian district of Kholm/Chelm to Ukraine and promised in a secret agreement to create a separate province out of Eastern Galicia and Bukovina in the near future.⁴⁴

At the second Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the agreement signed between Soviet Russia and the Central Powers one month later, the Central Powers forced Russia to recognize its loss of Ukraine.⁴⁵ The first Treaty of Brest- Litovsk defined Ukraine’s western borders with Austria-Hungary, the second one determined Ukraine’s boundaries with Soviet Russia.

These two treaties recognized the UNR and the Central Powers as the new state’s patrons and protectors. By March 1918 the German and Austrian military forces quickly pushed into the Ukrainian provinces and eliminated the Bolshevik threat to the Central Rada. They divided Ukraine into two occupational zones, one German, the second Austrian, making the new country a “political ward of the Central [Powers].”⁴⁶

The German and Austrian governments supported the Ukrainian na­tional cause primarily due to their desperate need for grain to feed their starving populations. Imperial Germany had already rationed bread as early as January 1915.⁴⁷ Over the course of the war, Germany’s and Austria’s agricultural production had decreased by at least 40 per cent, food rations became smaller, and nearly 500,000 civilians in both countries died as a re­sult of the British naval blockade. Discontent grew; anti-governmental demonstrations broke out.⁴⁸ The availability and affordability of food on the home front became a pressing national security issue.

From the perspective of the German and Austrian political and military leaders, this peace treaty constituted a “bread peace,” a necessary alliance with, if not actual occupation of, Europe’s most important granary. The two allies quickly lost their patience with their Ukrainian clients, who could not deliver the promised grain. In their eyes, food security at home justified their violations of Ukrainian sovereignty, culminating in the dis­persal of the Central Rada and their sponsorship of a new government (the Hetmanate) under General Pavlo Skoropadsky, one of Ukraine’s richest landowners, on 29 April 1918. Shortly afterwards, Skoropadsky introduced new agricultural policies, which sought to dismantle the Rada’s limited land reforms, undo peasant expropriations, and re-empower the wealthy land­lords in the countryside.

German and Austrian forces intervened to end the uprisings but could not secure the situation in the country or accumulate the grain they needed at home. Shortly after the armistice with the Entente in November 1918, they withdrew their nearly one-million-man occupational force, plunging Ukraine into total chaos. A new Ukrainian nationalist organization, the Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic, swept Skoropadsky’s re­gime aside in December 1918 and sought to restabilize the situation in Ukraine. But the Bolsheviks in Ukraine as well as the Soviet Russian gov­ernment also hoped to retake political control of the Ukrainian provinces. After the Ukrainian nationalists lost the protection of Austria and Germany, the international situation turned against the UNR.⁵⁰

On 22 January 1919 the Directory and the government of the West Ukrainian National Republic proclaimed the unification of all Ukrainian territories in East Central Europe (with the exception of Transcarpathia). But this coalition fell apart shortly afterwards, as both sides sought to an­chor their political future in their own territories and ally themselves with the enemies of their fellow compatriots. Symon Petliura, the Directory’s minister for military affairs, joined the Poles against the Bolsheviks, and the Galicians united themselves with White Russian General Anton Denikin, however temporarily.

In the course of 1919, the post-revolutionary chaos in the Ukrainian provinces reached its peak. Nine different governments with nine different sets of armies competed to gain control of the region’s population and resources.

Although the Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic claimed control in early January, advancing Bolshevik armies swept them away by February.

In this period, Ukrainian nationalists lost public support and became politically powerless. They competed not only with the local agencies of the Provisional Government, local soviets, and Soviet Russia, but also with a more competent enemy - anarchy. Perceiving the breakdown of all au­thority, the peasants, demobilized soldiers, and those “considered to be a part of Ukrainian, Red, or White armies” sought to alleviate their anxieties, frustrations, and rage over their perceived socio-economic inferiority by expropriating the land and participating in pogroms against local Jews.⁵¹ In 1918-19, according to one source, 1,236 pogroms took place in the Ukrainian provinces.⁵² In this chaotic period, approximately 40 per cent of the recorded pogroms - more than in any other area - took place on the territories nominally controlled by the Directory.⁵³ Here, unorganized drunken mobs and anti-Semitic marauders carried out the majority of this anti-Jewish violence, which spread like an epidemic from village to village, from region to region.⁵⁴ Despite Vynnychenko’s and Petliura’s condemna­tion of these pogroms, little could be done in the chaos to curb these hor­rific crimes.⁵⁵ The UNR lacked authority. This whirpool of anti-Jewish violence tarnished the international reputation of the Ukrainian National Republic and its commander-in-chief, Petliura.

Estimates of the number of those massacred during the pogroms of 1917-21 run in the tens and even hundreds of thousands. In 1920 Jewish organizations in Soviet Russia issued a report estimating the total number of victims from all pogroms throughout the former Russian Empire committed by Whites, Ukrainian nationalists, anarchists, invading Polish forces, and Bolsheviks at approximately 150,000.⁵⁶ This, most likely, un­dercounts the number of victims. In Ukraine, according to one leading American scholar, fifty to sixty thousand Jews were killed in this period, although - as he admits - these calculations may be “very conservative.”⁵⁷ The high number of Jews killed in the Ukrainian-speaking provinces re­flects not only the inter-communal tensions aggravated by the post­revolutionary chaos and the breakdown of law and order, but also the fact that these overcrowded provinces served as the epicentre of the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement until 1915. This institutionalized inequality created a highly dysfunctional relationship between the Jews and their Christian neighbours, which exploded after 1917.