The Directory

After the expulsion of Skoropadsky, the Directory began transforming itself from a successful insurrectionary committee into a government of the newly resurrected Ukrainian National Republic (UNR).

On 26 December 1918 the Directory issued its Declaration or statement of goals, which indicated that an attempt would be made to strike a balance between revolution and order. A preference for the former was quite apparent, however. One of the main features of the Declaration was the promise to expropriate state, church, and large private landholdings for redistribution among the peasants. Another was the government’s commitment to act as the representative of the workers, peasants, and “toiling intelligentsia” – and its intention to disenfranchise the landed and industrial bourgoisie. To this end it called for a Congress of Workers that would function as the representative and legislative body of the state.

But the new government was able to attain few of its goals before both internal and external problems overwhelmed it. The key internal issue was the split that developed between and within Ukrainian political parties as to whether the government should be a parliamentary democracy (as the moderate socialists wanted) or a Ukrainian variant of the soviet (council) system (as the radical left desired). Led by Vynnychenko, the radical left argued that Ukrainians must pay as much attention to social transformation as to national liberation and that if they adopted the soviet system, they would steal the Bolsheviks’ thunder. The more nationalistic moderates, with whom Petliura sympathized, responded that it was exactly this obsession with socialist experiments and the resulting neglect of the army and other state institutions that brought down the Central Rada and that this mistake should not be repeated.

This fractious conflict spilled over into the area of foreign relations. In December 1918 the Entente, primarily the French, landed a force of about 60,000 men in Odessa and other Black Sea ports. This unexpected development was brought on by the victorious Western powers’ decision to block the spread of bolshevism. Their intention was to lend direct military support to the anti-Bolshevik White forces that were preparing to launch a campaign from the Don in hopes of restoring “one, indivisible Russia.” Meanwhile, in the north, there were growing indications that the Bolsheviks were planning to repeat their invasion of Ukraine. The Directory obviously could not confront both intruders and had to come to an understanding with one of them. As might be expected, Vynnychenko and his colleagues from the radical left favored an alliance with Moscow, while the moderates and the army insisted on an agreement with the Entente. However, the issue was decided by the Bolsheviks when – as their representatives conducted peace negotiations with the Directory – their troops attacked Kharkiv. The second Bolshevik invasion of Ukraine

As the Bolsheviks advanced, the Directory acted in a manner similar to that of the Central Rada a year earlier. In the last desperate days before the fall of Kiev, the Directory engaged in several symbolic demonstrations of sovereignty. On 22 January 1919 it celebrated the union of the Ukrainian National Republic with the newly formed West Ukrainian National Republic (ZUNR) in Galicia, a union that the Ukrainian intelligentsia, in both the east and west, had dreamed of for generations. However, with both governments fighting desperately for survival, their future prospects looked bleak. Furthermore, both governments still retained separate administrations, armies, and policies.

Militarily, the performance of the Ukrainian government’s troops was as disappointing as it had been a year earlier. Even before the second Bolshevik invasion, the hordes of peasant soldiers who had participated in the overthrow of the hetman returned to their villages, convinced that they had removed the main threat to their well-being and unconcerned about the fate of the Directory. Given the strong pro-Soviet tendencies that were evident in the Ukrainian government itself, Bolshevik agitators were even more successful than before in drawing many of these men to their side. Therefore, the Directory’s army, which had numbered well over 100,000 weeks before, had dwindled to about 25,000. And a large part of this force still consisted of otamany and their partisans whom the commander-in-chief, Petliura, could barely control. As the military situation deteriorated further, on 2 February the Directory abandoned Kiev and moved west to Vinnytsia. By spring, after a series of military defeats, it was barely able to hold on to a small stretch of territory around Kamianets-Podilskyi.

Once again the hopes of the Ukrainian government rested on another foreign power, France, whose seemingly invincible troops were ensconced in Odessa. In order to appear more acceptable to the French, the Directory purged itself of the radical, pro-Soviet elements. In mid February Vynnychenko resigned and Chekhivsky’s socialist cabinet was replaced by moderates led by Serhii Ostapenko. Petliura now emerged as the most influential individual in the government. Soon it became evident that the French, influenced by their White Russian allies – who hated Ukrainian “separatists” as much as Bolsheviks – had no intention of offering aid or recognition to the Directory. By early April the entire issue became moot when the French forces, pressed by Hryhoriiv, one of Petliura’s partisan commanders who had just gone over to the Bolsheviks, departed from Ukraine as abruptly as they had arrived.

Under pressure from military defeats and diplomatic disappointments, the ideological conflict among the Ukrainians came to a head. In the two major political parties, the Social Democrats and the Socialist Revolutionaries, small but influential factions on the radical left broke off, constituted themselves as separate parties, adopted a Soviet platform, and joined the Bolsheviks. They took along with them such powerful otamany as Anhel, Zeleny, Sokolovsky, Tiutiunnyk, and Hryhoriiv. Among the Social Democrats the secession of the left occurred in January 1919; the Borotbists, who took their name from their newspaper, Borotba (The Struggle), and numbered about 5000, broke off from the Socialist Revolutionaries at about the same time. The pogroms

One of the worst aspects of the anarchy that gripped Ukraine in 1919 was the widespread pogroms. During the revolution, among the anti-Bolshevik forces, both Ukrainian and Russian, old animosities towards the Jews were heightened by the widespread impression that Jews were pro-Bolshevik. Actually most Jews were apolitical and those who were Marxists usually favored the Mensheviks. But it is a fact that Jews were also disproportionately prominent among the Bolsheviks, notably in their leadership, among their tax- and grain-gathering officials, and especially in the despised and feared Cheka (secret police). Therefore, in the chaos, Jews became the targets of old resentments and new frustrations.

Historians estimate that in Ukraine between 35,000 and 50,000 Jews were killed in pogroms in 1919–20.³ Peter Kenez, a specialist on the Civil War in Ukraine and south Russia, notes that

before the advent of Hitler, the greatest modern mass murder of Jews occurred in Ukraine, during the Civil War. All the participants in the conflict were guilty of murdering Jews, even the Bolsheviks. However, the Volunteer Army [the Whites or anti-Bolshevik Russians] had the largest number of victims. Its pogroms differed from mass killings carried out by its competitors; they were the most thorough, they had the most elaborate superstructure, or to put it differently, they were the most modern … Other pogroms were the work of peasants.

Although the White Volunteer Army – which moved into Ukraine from the Don in the summer of 1919 – was primarily responsible for the pogroms, the Directory’s forces (especially the otaman-led irregulars) also perpetrated a series of pogroms. The most serious occurred in Proskuriv, Zhytomyr, Cherkasy, Rivne, Fastiv, Korosten, and Bakhmach. Of these the most savage was instigated by Otaman Semesenko in Proskuriv in February 1919, when several thousand Jews perished.

In general, the Ukrainian pogroms differed from those of the Whites in two ways: in contrast to the premeditated, systematic undertakings of the Russians, they were spontaneous outbursts of demoralized and often drunken irregulars, and they were committed against the express orders of the high command. Unlike the White Russian generals such as Anton Denikin, the Ukrainian socialists, especially the Social Democratic party to which Petliura belonged, had a long tradition of friendly relations with Jewish political activists. Therefore, the Directory renewed Jewish personal-cultural autonomy, attracted prominent Jews such as Arnold Margolin and Solomon Goldelman into its government, appropriated large amounts of money for pogrom victims, and even negotiated with the famous Zionist leader Vladimir Zhabotin-sky about the inclusion of Jewish police units into its army.

But while Petliura’s attitudes towards the Jews might have been well in-tentioned, he was unable to control the otamany (the court-martial and subsequent execution of Semesenko and other partisan leaders did not improve the situation), and their dreadful deeds were associated with his government. And because many Jews considered themselves to be Russians, they found it easier to lay all the blame for the pogroms on Petliura and the Ukrainians rather than on Denikin and his Russian generals.⁵