The Bolsheviks

After they were expelled by the Germans in early 1918, Ukraine’s scattered and disorganized Bolsheviks had almost a year to prepare for their return. The most pressing issue before them was an organizational one: were they to form a separate Ukrainian Bolshevik party so as to broaden their appeal in Ukraine or should they become a “regional” branch of the Russian party as Lenin insisted and Russian centralist traditions dictated? At a party conclave held in April in Tahanrih, where the Ukrainian Skrypnyk and the so-called Kiev faction (which was more sensitive to the nationality issue) predominated, a vote was taken to form a separate Ukrainian party.

The fall of the Hetman government, evacuation of the Germans, and rise of the Directory provoked another debate among the Bolsheviks. One faction, led by Dmitrii Manuilsky and Vladimir Zatonsky, considered Bolsheviks in Ukraine to be too weak – in July 1918 they had a mere 4364 members – to attempt a takeover of the land. They argued for negotiating a peace with the Directory in order to gain time to strengthen their organization. But the group led by Piatakov and Antonov-Ovseenko pleaded with Lenin to support an immediate invasion so as not to allow the Directory to consolidate its hold. After much wavering, Moscow sanctioned the formation of another Ukrainian Soviet government on 20 November 1918. Initially, it was led by Piatakov but he was soon replaced by the Russified Bulgarian-Romanian Khristian Rakovsky. Almost all the important posts in the government were held by Russians.

At the outset, the Bolshevik forces, commanded by Antonov-Ovseenko, consisted of a few Red Army units and scattered irregulars. However, as they moved into Ukraine, one partisan formation after another abandoned the Directory and joined the invaders. On 3 January 1919, Kharkiv fell to the Bolsheviks and on 5 February they marched into Kiev. At this point, their troops numbered about 25,000. But in the next few weeks they more than doubled, when Ukraine’s two most important partisan leaders, Hryhoriiv and Makhno, joined them. With their support, by June the Bolsheviks managed to gain control of much of Ukraine.

The second Ukrainian Soviet government lasted about seven months. During this time, it showed that it was fully capable of making as many critical blunders as the other governments that had tried to govern Ukraine. Composed mostly of Russians, Jews, and other non-Ukrainians, it attempted to apply policies in Ukraine that had been developed in Russia, regardless of whether or not they fitted local circumstances. The Russian orientation was especially evident in the “grain crusade,” as Lenin called it. Because in 1919 Russian cities were in dire need of food, about 3000 workers from Moscow and Petrograd were dispatched to Ukraine to forage for grain and, much like the Germans had done a year earlier, to use force if necessary to get it. But the Bolsheviks compounded their error. They began an attack on the “bourgeois” principle of private property by introducing collective farms. As might be expected, these measures infuriated not only the kulaks but the middle peasantry as well.

Rakovsky’s government also managed to alienate the Ukrainian leftist intelligentsia, such as the Borotbists, by refusing to use the Ukrainian language in administration and ignoring the need for it in education and cultural activity. When criticism and resistance mounted, the Bolshevik response was to loosen the feared and hated Cheka, led by the Latvian Martin Latsis, to arrest and execute “class enemies” at will.

At this point, another invader moved into Ukraine. In June, the White armies led by General Denikin launched an offensive from the Don and by July captured much of the Left Bank. Meanwhile, Petliura’s reorganized army attacked on the Right Bank. As Bolshevik resistance collapsed, Lenin ordered the liquidation of the second Ukrainian Soviet government in mid August 1919, and most of its members returned to Moscow. Referring to this second failure in Ukraine in two years, Manuilsky, a member of the former government, remarked dejectedly: “Each spring we equip a successive troupe for the Ukraine which, after making a tour there, returns to Moscow in the autumn.”⁶

Map 21 Ukraine in 1917–20