The Central Rada and Its Successors

On 7 March 1917 (Old Style), barely a week after Tsar Nicholas Il’s abdica­tion and the emergence of the Provisional Government in Petrograd, a small party of Ukrainian intellectuals with moderate political views established the Ukrainian Central Rada (Ukrains’ka Tsentral’na Rada) in Kiev.

As these provinces contained a nationally heterogeneous population, the Ukrainian movement sought to come to terms with the non- Ukrainians. The newly elected head of the Rada, historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, as­serted that the new body respected “all the civil and political rights of the national minorities which inhabit the Ukraine and recognize the Ukrainian people as the masters of the Ukrainian territory and [those] who desire to join them as equals.”⁵ Hrushevsky referred to the numerical superiority of the Ukrainian-speaking population in the nine provinces. In the new era of revolutionary democracy, he declared, non-Ukrainians now had to take Ukrainians into account. In a new democratic order, these men and wom­en now sat at the newly expanded political table and constituted the major­ity of the population.

When the Rada claimed the right to represent all Ukrainian-speaking majority-populated territories, its leaders included the non-Ukrainian- speaking urban areas within their jurisdiction.

The Rada needed to address this issue, but only after mobilizing its peas­ant base. In order to confirm its self-appointed mandate in the spring and summer of 1917, the Rada called on all Ukrainian organizations to meet to discuss the present and future political status of the nine Ukrainian-speaking provinces. With the inclusion of delegates from various cooperative, peas­ant, pedagogical, military, and political organizations, the Rada’s member­ship increased to 600 by the end of July. At that point in time, the Rada included only Ukrainians and defined itself as “the representative body of the entire organized Ukrainian population” in the nine provinces.⁹

Members of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (UPSR) emerged as the largest, most representative, and most enthusiastic sup­porters of the Central Rada’s efforts to secure political autonomy from the Provisional Government. This pro-peasant political party espoused land reform and political decentralization. Although related to Russia’s Socialist Revolutionary Party (PSR), the UPSR had different agrarian goals than the Russian party’s.

The UPSR, like the other Ukrainian political parties, advocated promo­tion of the Ukrainian language within the educational and bureaucratic systems of the nine provinces, an issue of enormous importance to the peasants. According to Orlando Figes,

The nationalist struggle for language rights was also a liberation movement for the peasants. Unless the peasants could understand the language of the government and the courts, they had no direct access to political or civil rights. Unless they could learn to read in their own tongue, they had no hope of social betterment. And unless they could understand their priests, they had reason to fear for their souls. The public use of their native language was not just a matter of necessity, however. It became the issue of personal pride and dignity for the Ukrainian peasant, and this gave the nationalists a profound base of emotional support.¹¹

In this revolutionary situation, the Ukrainian national movement prom­ised the peasant the political, social, economic, and cultural means to achieve the dignity he desired, if the Provisional Government would agree.

In order to reach an agreement with Russia’s Provisional Government, the Rada sent a delegation of ten members to Petrograd at the end of May. These envoys petitioned the Provisional Government to recognize the au­tonomy of Ukraine and the authority of the Rada, to allow the formation of separate Ukrainian units within the military, and to permit the Ukrainization of the educational system and the civil and ecclesiastical administration. The Ukrainian demands did not include national-personal autonomy, an issue that representatives of Jewish communities and cul­tural institutions raised for the first time on 23 May 1917.¹²

Shortly after the delegation’s arrival, the Provisional Government reject­ed the Ukrainian petition, claiming that it expressed “the will of an organi­zation which, because of the manner of its establishment, cannot claim the right to represent the entire population of Ukraine.”¹³ Here, Russia’s new government opposed the idea of the Rada solely representing Ukrainian national interests.

In response to this criticism, on 10 June 1917, the Rada issued its First Universal, a declaration modelled on the charters of the seventeenth­century Cossack hetmans, whom the leaders of the Ukrainian national movement claimed to be the founders of the early modern Ukrainian na- tion.¹⁴ The proclamation defined the Ukrainian people as a “nation of peasants, workers, and toilers” and affirmed its political allegiance to the revolutionary Russian state. At the same time, the organization asserted that the Ukrainians possessed the right of national self-determination and that it would work with non-Ukrainians and the All-Russian Constituent Assembly to create an autonomous Ukraine.

Despite this promise, many non-Ukrainians expressed anxiety about the Rada’s concept of autonomy and feared that important political decisions would be made without their participation. The Southern Bureau of the General Jewish Labor Bund of Lithuania, Poland and Russia (the most prominent secular Jewish socialist party), for example, conveyed the fear that the Universal “places the Ukrainian national movement on the road to a break with revolutionary democracy and establishes the conditions for the intensification of the internal friction among the population of the Ukraine.”¹⁵ The Bureau’s resolution asserted that the Central Rada could not become the sole political authority in the Ukrainian provinces, as it relied exclusively on the Ukrainian people. The Bund recommended that the Provisional Government call an all-Ukrainian territorial conference, with the participation of the Rada and other non-Ukrainian revolutionary organizations. This meeting would establish the territorial autonomy of Ukraine, guaranteeing minorities the right to national-cultural autonomy.

Until 24 June 1917, the Central Rada, the Small Rada (the Central Rada’s executive committee), and the General Secretariat (the Rada’s Council of Ministers) acted only on behalf of the Ukrainian people. Then, in reaction to the objections from the Provisional Government and the Bund, the General Secretariat began to reconstitute the Rada into a provisional, mul­tinational territorial parliament that would represent the entire revolution­ary democracy in the Ukrainian provinces. The leaders of the Secretariat envisaged the inclusion of delegates from the national minorities, propor­tionate to their population, into the Rada and not the incorporation of the Rada into a non-Ukrainian territorial organization, as the Bund proposed. The Rada’s General Secretariat also appointed a commission of Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians to draft a constitution for the new political entity.

Preoccupied with a barrage of pressing issues, the Provisional Government ignored the Rada’s requests. But with the proclamation of the First Universal, Russia’s revolutionary leaders realized that they needed to reach an under­standing with the Ukrainians, who occupied the territories bordering the shifting military front. After negotiations, the Provisional Government agreed to recognize Ukraine’s autonomy and the competency of the Rada and the Secretariat. In turn, the Secretariat would create a more representa­tive government by giving non-Ukrainians eighteen seats in the Small Rada (out of fifty-eight members), 30 per cent of the seats in the Great Rada, and four ministries (trade, food, justice, and posts and telegraph). On 3 July, the Second Universal acknowledged this new accord, which promised that the General Secretariat would represent the interests of the entire population, not just the Ukrainians.¹⁶

Despite this settlement, the leaders of the Provisional Government soon changed their minds. Strengthened by their victory over the Bolshevik grass­roots uprising in Petrograd in July, they rejected the Rada’s draft of the pro­posed Ukrainian constitution one month later.¹⁷ The Provisional Government recognized the competency of the Secretariat in only five provinces (Kiev, Volhynia, Podolia, Poltava, and Chernigov) and restricted the composition of this body to nine members, four of whom non-Ukrainians would select.

In order to avoid further conflict with the Provisional Government, the Rada reluctantly accepted the Provisional Government’s limitation of its authority and enthusiastically integrated the minorities into the structure of the Rada, the Small Rada, and the Secretariat. By early November the Central Rada included 848 members: 636 Ukrainians and 212 non­Ukrainians.¹⁸ Minorities constituted one-quarter of the membership of the Rada, a figure almost proportionate to their population in the Ukrainian provinces.

The Provisional Government and the Central Rada represented moder­ate political organizations, which cooperated closely during 1917. But their goals did not coincide.

In an unstable revolutionary situation, the Rada sought to channel the diverse, often-conflicting aspirations of the Ukrainian population towards autonomy within the evolving post-tsarist Russian political structure. At the same time, the Provisional Government aimed to recover the lands the Russian imperial state lost (if not to expand them) and to restore the au­thority of the central government. The Rada often served as the Provisional Government’s agent in Ukraine until September and October 1917, when chaos, radicalization, and the upsurge in support for the Bolsheviks and non-Russian nationalists throughout Russia fatally undermined the au­thority of the Provisional Government. Most members of the Rada did not mourn its passing.

The Bolshevik victory in Petrograd in late October 1917 and the disap­pearance of the Provisional Government’s authority in the borderlands encouraged non-Russian secessionists. Lenin’s new Council of People’s Ministers (Sovnarkom) issued a flurry of decrees: the Decree on Peace, which demanded an immediate peace among the war’s belligerents, a truce without annexations or indemnities, an end to secret diplomacy, and the publication of all secret treaties; the Decree on Land, which confiscated state and church lands without compensation and placed them in the hands of “workers who cultivate them”; and the Declaration of the Rights of the Nations of Russia, granting the non-Russian peoples the right of national self-determination, including the freedom to separate from Soviet Russia and to form independent states.¹⁹

These decrees reflected the rapid erosion of Russia’s cohesion in 1917. At the insistence of the non-Ukrainian minorities, who believed that the Bolsheviks betrayed the February Revolution, the Small Rada issued the Third Universal on 7 November 1917, two weeks after the Bolshevik take­over. The document established a Ukrainian National Republic tenuously

federated with the Russian Republic, but in reality independent of it. With the disappearance of the Provisional Government, the political future of the Ukrainian provinces became an open question.

The first two Universals issued by the Central Rada did not define the borders of Ukraine. Only with the Third Universal did the Rada assert that the nine provinces with Ukrainian majorities belonged to the Ukrainian National Republic (Ukrains’ka Narodna Respublika, or UNR). The Third Universal, moreover, claimed that the final demarcation of the borders of the UNR as well as the annexation of parts of the Kursk, Kholm/Chefm, and Voronezh provinces, where the Ukrainians constitut­ed the majority of the population, “will be determined in agreement with the organized will of the people.”²⁰ The Rada pledged to defend the free national development of all national groups living in Ukraine and prom­ised a law on national-personal autonomy for the Russian, Jewish, Polish, and other peoples.²¹

Shortly after the Third Universal, the UNR established diplomatic rela­tions with France, Great Britain, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire. (Even the United States, which sought to main­tain a “Russia, one and indivisible” after the Bolsheviks assumed power in late October, opened a consulate in Kiev in December 1917.) The French and British emissaries sought to persuade the UNR to join their alliance against the Central Powers. But the UNR leaders refused. They sought to adhere to their position of peace without annexations and indemnities; a just peace with all the belligerents; and a determination to stay neutral.²²

On 30 November 1917 the Soviet Russian Republic recognized the UNR, but shortly afterwards Petrograd’s Sovnarkom accused the Rada of undermining Ukraine’s soviets, disrupting the common front against the Germans and Austrians by recalling Ukrainian soldiers (until March 1918, both Russia and Ukraine were in a state of war with the Central Powers), and by aiding the Don Cossack “counterrevolutionaries” in South Russia. Shortly after the Central Rada rebutted these charges, the Petrograd gov­ernment declared war on the Rada. Joseph Stalin, Sovnarkom’s Commissar of Nationalities, claimed that the Bolsheviks supported the universal right of national self-determination, but that the Rada’s policies opposed the interests of Soviet Russia and represented a counter-revolutionary orien­tation. As such, these measures delegitimized this Ukrainian institution.²³ Sovnarkom then shifted its support to the newly established Soviet Ukrainian government, the People’s Secretariat, headquartered in Kharkov.

With the Bolshevik army’s invasion of Ukraine from the north and east, the Rada passed its Fourth Universal, on 25 January 1918 (New Style), proclaiming the independence of the UNR within the boundaries delin­eated by the Third Universal. The post-February 1917 mobilization of Ukrainians now became a war of nationalist secession, justified as the best way to defend the political and cultural rights of all Ukrainian speakers in the nine southwestern provinces. The Rada’s declaration of independence, however, alienated the non-Ukrainian minorities, who aspired to partici­pate in a federated Russian state. With the exception of the Poles, all of the non-Ukrainian parties within the Rada abstained or voted against the Fourth Universal.²⁴ Despite this setback, the Ukrainians within the Rada promised that all nations residing in the Ukrainian National Republic would enjoy the right of national-personal autonomy, promulgated by the law of 24 January 1918.²⁵ Nonetheless, many Ukrainian supporters of the Rada felt betrayed by their non-Ukrainian compatriots.

The leaders of the Ukrainian movement possessed not only theoretical and moral reasons for supporting the law on national-personal autonomy, but pragmatic ones as well. By supporting the rights of the non-Ukrainian minorities, they hoped to overcome the national differences between the cities and the countryside. Realizing that they could not immediately rec­oncile these two groups, they aspired to mitigate their weaknesses and the antagonism, if not the outright hostility, of the minorities towards the Ukrainian demand for national-territorial autonomy. The revolutionary events in the Ukrainian-speaking provinces, however, only exacerbated these divisions.

The results of the various elections (with direct, equal, and secret ballots) held in the nine Ukrainian-speaking provinces in late 1917 and early 1918 supported the Rada’s Universals and actions. According to one source, Ukrainian political parties led by the pro-peasant Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (UPSR) won 80 per cent of the vote in the elec­tions to the provincial and county assemblies.²⁶ In elections to the All­Russian Constituent Assembly on 12 November 1917, they garnered (largely separately, but also on joint lists with other parties) 5.5 million votes, or 67.3 per cent, of the total vote in the eight Ukrainian provinces excluding Taurida (see table 3.1).²⁷ In the elections to the Ukrainian Constituent Assembly on 9 January 1918 - held in areas not controlled by the Bolsheviks - voters selected 171 of the 301 designated representatives.²⁸

The urban populations, however, did not recognize the authority of the Rada or the Secretariat. The results of the elections to the city councils in the summer of 1917 and to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly in November demonstrated the political impotence of the Ukrainian move­ment in the urban areas. In Kiev, Ukrainian parties received approximately

Table 3.1. Votes Won by Ukrainian Political Parties to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, 1917

*Joint list of Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian political parties.

Source: Oliver H. Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls: The Election to the All-Russian Con­stituent Assembly, 1917 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), table 1, 148-51.

21.4 per cent of the vote in the summer of 1917 and in the elections to the Constituent Assembly in November 1917 - approximately 26 per cent.²⁹

Although these results do not necessarily provide evidence of the hostil­ity of the non-Ukrainians to the Ukrainian movement, they do demon­strate that, in this period, nationally and politically conscious urban Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians could not agree on a common political platform. The socialist programs of the majority of the Ukrainian political parties must also have aggravated the small urban Ukrainian middle class. Thus, the countryside provided the bulk of the vote for the Ukrainian par­ties to the Constituent Assembly, but even here not all the peasants voted along national lines.³⁰

Non-Ukrainian opposition to the Ukrainian national movement’s goals exemplified the most important problem in the struggle for majority rule in multi- ethnic societies, especially in societies where the minorities possess a disproportionate share of the country’s political and socio-economic re­sources.³¹ According to one scholar, “Majority rule works only when the minority has such confidence in the ultimate reasonableness of the major­ity and minority interests that it can afford to respect the right of the ma­jority to rule without undo obstruction.”³² But trust and a common pool of interests between the Ukrainians and the non-Ukrainians in this revo­lutionary environment barely existed.

During the revolutionary fervour of early 1917, the leaders of the Ukrainian movement naively believed that they would attract the necessary administrators from the assimilated Ukrainian intelligentsia. “Our Russified intelligentsia will join us,” Volodymyr Vynnychenko, the head of the General Secretariat, predicted. “We will rouse them, shame them, sensitize them, inspire them and draw them to work with us.”³³ But in the course of 1917 and 1918, this expectation did not bear fruit. As a result, the Rada’s bureaucracy attracted politically inexperienced journalists, teachers, and lawyers, and a small group of political emigres from Galicia.³⁴ The Ukrainian movement engaged in two different courses of action at once - nation build­ing and state building - and could not master both simultaneously.

The Ukrainian movement’s nation-building project had to complete the transition from Hroch’s mass cultural phase to the mass political phase, in order to create a single imagined community of Ukrainians from a group of people who possessed the same language and culture, but experienced diverse histories, religions, and levels of Russification. At the same time, the movement’s state-building project had to expand the capacity and ef­fectiveness of the Provisional Government’s institutions and consolidate the Ukrainian-speaking territories. The first process developed in an envi­ronment of constant flux, especially within an uncertain revolutionary situation. The second’s success ultimately depended on persuasion, on the establishment of a monopoly of violence, or a combination of the two. Since it attracted only a small number of individuals qualified for both activities, the Ukrainian movement sought to emphasize only one - nation building - and to draw non-Ukrainians into the state apparatus.