The Directory. Civil War, and. the Bolsheviks

With the fall of Skoropads’kyi’s Hetmanate government and the reestablishment of the Ukrainian National Republic under the leadership of the Directory, Dnieper Ukraine entered the third and final phase of its revolutionary era.

The year 1919 in Ukraine was a period of complete anarchy. The entire territory fell apart into innumerable regions isolated from each other and the rest of the world, dominated by armed bands of peasants or freebooters who looted and murdered with utter impunity. In Kiev itself governments came and went, edicts were issued, cabinet crises were resolved, dip­lomatic talks were carried on - but the rest of the country lived its own existence where the only effective regime was that of the gun. None of the authorities which claimed Ukraine during the year following the deposition of Skoropads’kyi ever exercised actual sovereignty. The Communists, who all along anxiously watched the developments there and did every­thing in their power to seize control for themselves, fared no better than their Ukrainian nationalist and White Russian competitors.¹

This description of 1919 also can be applied to most of 1920, although that year the internal anarchy was made even worse by external invasions by Soviet Russian, White Russian, and Polish forces. Because of the complexity of this third and last phase of the revolutionary era in Dnieper Ukraine, it would be difficult to provide a straightforward chronological survey of events. A thematic approach therefore seems preferable. Although the following themes or factors unfolding during this period are interrelated and impinge upon one other, for purposes of discussion each will be treated separately and in isolation from what is an extremely complex historical mosaic.

The Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic

The Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic, which came to power in Kiev in mid-December 1918, had few concrete plans for governing the country. The five-member Directory was headed by Volodymyr Vynnychenko, who in practice shared power with the head of the republic’s armed forces, Symon Petliura. Rela­tions between the two men were strained from the very beginning, however, and this only contributed to the overwhelming difficulties faced by the Directory in its attempt to establish authority over territories that it claimed as belonging to the Ukrainian National Republic.

The political program initially proclaimed by the Directory reflected the pref­erences of Vynnychenko, a left-wing socialist who spoke vaguely about the need to create a state based on workers’ councils (soviets). For many it sounded like Bolshevism, and while Vynnychenko was indeed sympathetic to many Bolshevik goals, he was opposed to their authoritarian methods. Vynnychenko was also a Ukrainian patriot and therefore a supporter of the Directory’s call for Ukrainian as the state’s official language and autocephaly (jurisdictional independence) for the Orthodox Church in Ukraine.

Clearly, the political spectrum proposed by the Directory in late 1918 reflected a sociopolitical disposition that had swung away from Skoropads’kyi’s Hetmanate and back to the left. Therefore, the Directory restored much of the legislation adopted by the Central Rada before April 1918, including the redistribution of lands that had been returned by the Hetmanate government to the large land­owners and the church.

The first discrepancy between proclamations and reality had to do with the very territory that allegedly comprised the state. The Directory-led Ukrainian National Republic claimed even more territory than had Skoropads’kyi’s Hetmanate (com­pare maps 32 and 33), although in fact it had effective control over very little - and much of the time none - of that territory. From the standpoint of Ukrainian nationalism, the Directory’s most important act was the declaration of union with the West Ukrainian National Republic. Chapter 41 will elaborate on the fate of the independent West Ukrainian National Republic, which came into being in November 1918 in Austrian Galicia. Of significance here is that the Galicians and Dnieper Ukrainians proclaimed the unity (sobornist') of all Ukrainian lands in a sol­emn ceremony held in Kiev on 22 January 1919, exactly one year after the original declaration of Ukrainian independence in the Dnieper-Ukrainian lands. This act was confirmed by the Labor Congress meeting at the time in Kiev. With its nearly 400 delegates (including 36 from the West Ukrainian Republic) the congress took on the character of a Ukrainian legislative assembly.

While the 22 January 1919 declaration of Ukrainian unity may have been sol­emn, it was little more than that. The Galician and Dnieper Ukrainians were to follow distinct and, often, conflicting political and military policies. Even more ominous was the fact that the Directory was surrounded on all sides by enemies, and within two weeks it was to be driven out of Kiev. On 5 February the Directory set up the first of its numerous and short-lived headquarters in Vinnytsia. Then for the rest of 1919 and 1920, it moved from place to place throughout the Right Bank, always under imminent threat of capture by its various enemies. The most serious of those enemies were the Bolsheviks.

The Bolsheviks

Chapter 38 showed how the Bolsheviks initially cooperated with the Central Rada in November 1917. Soon after, they formed a Soviet Ukrainian government and, with Bolshevik Russian help, drove the Central Rada out of Kiev. Bolshevik control of the city lasted for only three weeks in February 1918, until the German Army forced them out of Kiev and, shortly after, out of Dnieper Ukraine entirely. Now the scenario was to be repeated. This time it was the Directory that in Novem­ber 1918 cooperated with the Bolsheviks in driving out Skoropads’kyi. As soon as that was accomplished, the Ukrainian Bolsheviks and their Russian Bolshevik supporters prepared to invade Dnieper Ukraine a second time and to unseat their short-lived Directory ally.

Since their first efforts at ruling Dnieper Ukraine back in February 1918, Ukraine’s Bolsheviks had had time to reassess the situation. No consensus ever developed, however, and the party remained divided into several conflicting fac­tions. The basic division concerned the relationship of Ukraine’s Bolsheviks to the all-Russian Bolshevik party. One Ukrainian faction favored an independent party policy, the other preferred subordination to the all-Russian leadership, which itself in March 1918 had moved the capital to Moscow and had renamed the party the All-Russian Communist (Bolshevik) party.

Internal factionalism came to a head soon after Ukraine’s Bolsheviks were pushed entirely out of the country by the German Army and its ally, Hetman Skoropads’kyi. They regrouped in Taganrog, on the far eastern shores of the Sea of Azov, where on 18 April they dissolved their own Soviet Ukrainian government and replaced it with a coordinating committee that was to direct the struggle against the German occupier. The varying factions now clashed over long-term policy as well as short­term tactics. The left-wing “independentists,” mostly from Kiev (Georgii Piatakov, Mykola Skrypnyk, Volodymyr Zatons’kyi), called for the creation of a separate Ukrainian Bolshevik party, while the right-wing “internationalists,” mostly from Kharkiv and Katerynoslav (Emmanuil Kviring and lakiv Epshtein), opposed any idea of a separate Ukrainian party. In the end, the two groups compromised. On 19-20 April 1918, the distinct Communist party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine - (CP(b) U) was established, although it was to become increasingly subordinate to the All­Russian Communist party. The factions still remained divided over tactics: the left­wing “independentists” favored an alliance with the peasantry and an immediate uprising against Skoropads’kyi and the Germans; the right-wing “internationalists” preferred to depend on the leadership of the industrial proletariat and to wait for the supposedly imminent world revolution while in the meantime following the directives of the All-Russian Communist party.

In addition to the two factions within the Communist party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine, there were other, non-Bolshevik Communists in Ukraine. These were former Ukrainian Socialist-Revolutionaries, who in May 1918 formed the non­Bolshevik Ukrainian Socialist-Revolutionary party of Communist Fighters, or the Borotbists for short, who rejected the idea of the monolithic party governmental system demanded by the Bolsheviks. The Borotbists remained in Dnieper Ukraine throughout 1919 and even formed a separate government with support from the peasant army of Otaman Matvii Hryhoriiv.

During the period of the Hetmanate the Communist party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine virtually ceased to exist on Ukrainian territory: it had only 4,300 mem­bers by mid-1918. The leadership moved its place of exile from Taganrog to Mos­cow. There, in the Soviet capital, Lenin put pressure on the various factions until the CP(b)U, for all practical purposes, became subordinate to the All-Russian Communist party. Internal dissension nonetheless continued between the left- and right-wing Ukrainian Bolsheviks, and it became especially critical after the fall of Skoropads’kyi in mid-December 1918. The left-wing Ukrainian Bolsheviks were ever anxious to act, independently of instructions from Moscow if neces­sary. They were, in fact, already close to the Ukrainian border at Kursk, where on 28 November 1918 they secretly formed a “provisional” Soviet Ukrainian govern­ment (Tymchasovyi Robitnychno-Selians’kyi Uriad Ukrainy) with the intention of marching into Dnieper Ukraine. These plans were unfolding at the very time Sovi­et representatives from Moscow (Khristiian Rakovskii and Dmytro Manuil’s’kyi) were assuring Vynnychenko that they would cooperate with the Directory and rec­ognize a restored Ukrainian National Republic in a post-Skoropads’kyi Ukraine.

In the end, the Ukrainian Soviet government in Kursk launched an attack on the Directory. The invasion began in mid-December and proceeded rapidly, with the result that by February 1919, less than two months after it had come to power, the Directory and forces of the Ukrainian National Republic were driven out of Kiev. In their stead, the Bolsheviks installed a “provisional” government, which was soon renamed the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Ukrains’ka Radians’ka Sotsialistychna Respublyka). This second Bolshevik presence in Kiev proved to be longer than the first, lasting from February to August 1919, and it was more suc­cessful than its predecessor in establishing its authority.

The Ukrainian Soviet Republic was Ukrainian in the territorial, not the nation-

al, sense. It was headed by Khristiian Rakovskii, a Russophile of Bulgarian-Roma­nian origin, whose administrative apparatus was dominated for the most part by Russian or russified Ukrainian Bolsheviks with little or no sympathy for Ukrainian cultural aspirations. Even more problematic was the crude approach the Ukrain­ian Soviet government took to the volatile land question. Instead of distributing land to the peasants, a project which had been enshrined in a Bolshevik slogan from the time of Lenin’s return to Russia in April 1917, the Ukrainian Soviet government confiscated all landed estates and then undertook to transform them into communally held state farms. This policy provoked deep displeasure and resulted in uprisings on the part of the peasantry, which grew into what has been called the “green revolution” or Ukrainian peasantjacquerie.

The peasant revolution

Despite all the political concerns of the numerous social and national factions, the land question remained the major issue in Dnieper Ukraine as well as throughout much of the former Russian Empire. During Ukraine’s revolutionary era, each of the governments in power - the Ukrainian National Republic of the Central Rada and later Directory, the Hetmanate, and the Bolsheviks - attempted to resolve the land question. But in an era of revolutionary change and the general breakdown of authority, the peasants were not about to wait long for their land hunger to be satisfied. When, in April 1918, the socialist-oriented government of the Cen­tral Rada was replaced by the more conservative Hetmanate, the peasants reacted immediately to what they saw as an attempt to turn back the social clock in favor of the large landowners.

Between April and June 1918 alone, numerous peasant uprisings, especially against the forces of the occupying Central Powers, broke out and were respon­sible for an estimated 15,000 deaths among the German military. The peasants were committed to removing Skoropads’kyi and his German protectors, and they joined en masse the 100,000-strong army that nominally represented the Ukrainian National Republic and that backed the Directory in its coup against the Hetmanate. This army, while clearly the largest of any in Dnieper Ukraine at the time, was hardly a united force responsible to orders from the Directory’s military chief, Symon Petliura. Rather, it was a motley assortment of peasants and some village elders and schoolteachers, led by self-proclaimed partisan command­ers (otamany) and their followers, whose only real common bond was opposition to Skoropads’kyi’s rule. Subsequently, when the peasants thought the Directory incapable of fulfilling their needs, they deserted it and joined the advancing Bol­sheviks in the early months of 1919.

It was in fact Ukrainian peasants, under the partisan commanders Matvii Hry- horiiv and Nestor Makhno, who made up the vast majority of the so-called Red Army that was led by the Bolshevik commander Antonov-Ovseenko and launched against Kiev in late 1918 by the Bolshevik government, then based in Kursk. Despite their cooperation with the “Reds,” the partisan commanders (otamany), let alone the masses of recruits, had little sense of what Bolshevism really was. Instead, the commanders perceived themselves as descendants of the Zaporozhi- an Cossacks and haidamaks who had a duty to liberate the people from all those they considered their oppressors, whether they be representatives of the former Russian imperial regime, Ukrainian nationalists, Jews and other suspect groups (especially Black Sea Germans and Mennonites), or even Bolsheviks. More often than not, local commanders were little more than marauders who, taking advan­tage of the power vacuum in Dnieper Ukraine, pillaged and robbed at will wealthy landowners, merchants and artisans, and well-to-do and even poor peasants whose villages happened to be along their ever-changing “military” paths.

If the peasants were displeased with the Central Rada and, in particular, with Skoropads’kyi’s Hetmanate, it was not long before they came to scorn the Bolshe­viks as well. The Ukrainian Soviet Republic’s policy of rule by Bolshevik-control­led councils (soviets), the creation of communal farms, and the forced confisca­tions of grain for Soviet Russia’s Red Army quickly alienated the peasantry. By April 1919, peasant uprisings were again common, and the following month both Hryhoriiv and Makhno, who had fought along with the Bolsheviks, now turned against them. Murders of Bolshevik officials, pogroms against Jews, Germans, and other well-to-do elements (1,236 pogroms were recorded in 1918-1919), and attacks on towns became the order of the day. Anarchy pure and simple reigned throughout the Ukrainian countryside.

In a real sense, it was the peasantry, or, more precisely, the various peasant armies, who by the summer of 1919 controlled most of Dnieper Ukraine. At best, Bolshevik rule was limited to the cities, but even there it was to be challenged. In August, the Bolsheviks were driven a second time out of Kiev and once again entirely out of Dnieper Ukraine. Unlike in early 1918, when the German Army pushed out the Bolsheviks, it was White Russians from the east and forces loyal to the Ukrainian National Republic from the west who did the job this time.

The White Russians

Who were the White Russians, and what relationship did they have with Dnieper Ukraine? Despite the conditions in Petrograd that gave rise to the February/ March 1917 revolution and the abdication of the tsar, large segments of the empire’s population were oblivious to political changes or actively opposed to the liberal-democratic orientation of the Provisional Government and, in particular, to radical socialism as proposed by the Bolsheviks. Among the most conservative forces (many of whom favored a return of the tsar) were generals in the former imperial army, which by December 1917 had ceased hostilities against the Ger­mans.

During 1917, the size of the army was significantly reduced as recruits anx­ious to go home left its ranks, but by the spring of 1918 the numbers had grown once again. This time the army attracted an assortment of diverse elements who had one thing at most in common: opposition to the Bolsheviks. Because of their antagonism to the Bolsheviks, or Reds, they came to be known as the White Rus­sians, or Whites. (This is a political term that should not mistakenly be associ­ated with the ethnic Belarusans, who are also sometimes designated in English as White Russians.) In May 1918, White generals took control of most of the periph­eral areas of the former Russian Empire and clashed immediately with the Bolshe­viks’ newly organized Red Army under the direction of Lenin’s revolutionary col­laborator, Leon Trotskii. The Russian Civil War had begun.

The strength of the Whites was based primarily in the Baltic region (General Nikolai ludenich), in Siberia (General Aleksander Kolchak), and in the Don Cos­sack Lands (General Anton Denikin). Wherever they were in power, the Whites established governments which claimed to be the legal representation for all Rus­sia according to its former imperial boundaries. White influence reached its peak in the summer of 1919, when the movement almost succeeded in driving the Soviet government out of Moscow.

In Dnieper Ukraine, the most important White Russian movement was that led by General Anton Denikin, whose Volunteer Army, as it was known, was based in the neighboring Don Cossack Lands. The Don Cossacks themselves had enjoyed a favored position as a military caste with a high degree of self-rule during tsar­ist times. Their essentially autonomous status was abolished, however, by the Bol­sheviks. The Don Cossacks responded by proclaiming an independent republic (16 May 1918) and by joining the White forces of General Denikin en masse. Moving north and west from his base in the Don Cossack Lands, Denikin’s Volun­teer Army by September 1919 had driven the Red Army out of Dnieper Ukraine and was well on the way to Moscow.

The Allied Powers

The growing success of the Whites in 1919 was related to another phenomenon - intervention in Russia and Ukraine by the Allied Powers. While World War I was still in progress, the Allies landed troops in Russia (in at least one instance with the agreement of the Soviet government) in order to keep munitions from falling into the hands of the Germans. After the outbreak of civil war, however, the Allies decided to intervene. They clearly intended to give support to the Whites, whose generals had fought on the side of the Allies during the war and who were now fighting to rid themselves of what was already regarded in the West as the “plague of Bolshevism and world revolution.” Accordingly, Britain, France, and the Unit­ed States landed troops in northern Russia, and Japan and the United States did the same along the Pacific coast of far eastern Siberia. In December 1918, an expeditionary force from France (together with units of soldiers of another ally, Greece) landed in Odessa, and, in cooperation with the local Whites proceeded to control Dnieper Ukraine’s Black Sea coast between the mouths of the Dniester and Dnieper Rivers.

Meanwhile, the Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic, which had retreated from Kiev before the Bolshevik-led assault in February 1919, recon­stituted itself in various cities - depending on the military situation - notably in Podolia (Vinnytsia, Kam’ianets’-Podil’s’kyi) and Volhynia (Rivne). Vynnychenko resigned and was replaced by Symon Petliura, who became simultaneously head of the Directory and commander of the Ukrainian National Republic’s armed forces. Petliura had three goals: (i) to continue the struggle against the Bolshe­viks, (2) to reach an accord with the victorious Allies, and (3) to cooperate with the Galicians from the West Ukrainian National Republic. In all three areas, he failed. In fact, in only one area was the Petliura government successful: it reached an accord with the new government of Poland.

In his negotiations with the Allied Powers, the Petliura government soon learned that certain western European powers, especially France, with its troops along the Black Sea near Odessa, remained committed to the idea of a unified Russia. The Allies were opposed, therefore, to an independent Ukrainian state and urged Ukrainians to cooperate with the anti-Bolshevik White Russians. This proved unacceptable, however, since General Denikin, like other White Russian generals, defended the idea of a unified Russia and was completely opposed to the aspirations of the nationalities. By August 1919, Denikin had gained control of most of Dnieper Ukraine’s Left Bank and had driven the Soviet Ukrainian gov­ernment out of Kiev. During the next two months, White Russian political convic­tions were underlined by their actions: the arrest of Ukrainian nationalist and Bolshevik sympathizers, the return of property to large landowners, and pogroms against Jews. These policies hardly endeared the Whites to the local population or made them potential allies for Petliura’s struggling Ukrainian nationalist govern­ment.

The West Ukrainian National Republic and Dnieper Ukraine

Relations between Petliura and the West Ukrainian National Republic, with which the Ukrainian National Republic had united on 22 January 1919, proved no bet­ter than relations with the Whites. The West Ukrainian National Republic, based in former Austrian Galicia and led by Ievhen Petrushevych, had its hands full. Since November 1918, the West Ukrainians had been engaged in a bitter war with the Poles for control of Galicia (see chapter 41). Finally, in July 1919 the Galician-Ukrainian forces and government were driven from the province. With his well-trained Ukrainian Galician Army, Petrushevych joined forces with Petliura in Podolia. But the personalities and goals of the two leaders turned out to be diametrically opposed. The Galicians, who had expected to receive aid from the Allied Powers, not unexpectedly favored cooperation with General Denikin, the White Russian ally of the West. Petliura, on the other hand, who anticipated no help from the Allies, favored cooperation with Poland - the mortal enemy of the West Ukrainian National Republic.

Petliura went ahead anyway in his negotiations with Poland. Within the space of a year, he signed an armistice (June 1919), agreed on boundaries (Decem­ber 1919), and approved a treaty of mutual cooperation signed in Warsaw (April 1920). For its part, the Ukrainian Galician Army, although without any authoriza­tion from Petrushevych, signed its own agreement in November 1919 with Gen­eral Denikin. As a result, the Galician-Ukrainian forces became part of Denikin’s “Armed Forces of the South of Russia.” Thus, the solemn declaration of union between the Galician and Dnieper Ukrainians reached at the beginning of 1919 proved meaningless once the two groups actually tried to work together. Internal controversies arising from policy differences and personality clashes, combined with an unfavorable constellation of international forces, brought about a com­plete breakdown in cooperation between the Petliura-led Ukrainian National Republic and the Petrushevych-led West Ukrainian National Republic.

Nonetheless, by the end of 1919 the tragic discord between the two Ukrain­ian nationalist bodies had become a moot issue. General Denikin’s administra­tion had aroused the ire of Dnieper Ukraine’s population; peasant armies led by Nestor Makhno and Danylo Zelenyi, among others, were once again on the move; and by December 1919, the Red Army had returned and was rapidly taking over most of Dnieper Ukraine. Before the end of the year, General Denikin had retreated to the Crimea and the Black Sea coast; Petliura’s remaining Ukrainian National Republic forces had fled to the northwest corner of Volhynia; and in January 1920, whatever was left in Podolia of the Ukrainian Galician Army, which had only recently fought on the side of the Whites, joined the Bolsheviks as the Red Ukrainian Galician Army. This chaos resulted in a political vacuum, which by February 1920 allowed most of Dnieper Ukraine to come under the control of the Red Army. Protected by the Red Army, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic under the direction of the Communist party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine was restored. This marked the final Bolshevik advance, because with the exception of some ter­ritory briefly ceded in a war with Poland, Dnieper Ukraine was from February 1920 to be ruled by a Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in the closest alliance with Soviet Russia.

Poland and Dnieper Ukraine

On 9 November 1918, an independent republic of Poland was proclaimed, and it was immediately considered one of the victorious Allied and Associated Powers. The new country’s eastern boundaries were not yet fixed, however. Poland’s lead­ers had different views on how to resolve the border problem. Many, including the country’s first head of state, Marshall Jozef Pilsudski, hoped to incorporate lands at least as far east as the Dnieper River, which had been part of Poland before the partitions that obliterated the old Commonwealth in the late eighteenth century.

By July 1919, the Poles had secured all of Galicia following a bloody war with the West Ukrainian National Republic (see chapter 41). Much more problem­atic for Poland were the other lands of the former Commonwealth (present-day Lithuania, Belarus, and most of Ukraine), since they were also claimed by the Soviet government in Moscow. As early as February 1919, Polish forces clashed with Red Army units in western Belarus. Skirmishes alternating with political negotiations continued throughout the rest of the year as part of a drawn-out struggle between Poland and Soviet Russia for control of a broad swath of terri­tory, extending virtually from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south. All efforts to reach and armistice between the two states proved unsuccess­ful, including an Allied proposal for a temporary boundary (December 1919). The proposal was later presented to the Soviet government over the signature of the British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon (July 1920), and henceforth came to be known as the Curzon Line (see map 35).

In the course of the Polish-Soviet war, the Poles sought to engage the support of Ukrainians, in particular during its large-scale eastward offensive that began in the spring of 1920. For its part, the beleaguered Ukrainian National Republic, which by then was faced by a Polish advance from the west and a Bolshevik (lat­er, a White Russian) advance from the north and east, decided to negotiate with the Poles. In April 1920, a treaty was concluded in Warsaw between the Petliura- led Ukrainian National Republic and Poland. Among other points, the Treaty of Warsaw recognized Poland’s control of all of Galicia as well as western Volhynia. Not surprisingly, this agreement completely alienated the West Ukrainian leaders from Petliura.

Soon after the Treaty of Warsaw was signed, Petliura’s troops joined the Poles in an invasion of Dnieper Ukraine. Their rapid advance brought them within a month (May) as far as Kiev. The joint Polish-Ukrainian advance proved to be short-lived, however, because the Soviet Red Army, supported especially by its cav­alry under Semen Budennyi, mounted a successful counteroffensive. On 11 June, the Red Army drove the Poles out of Kiev and began a rapid advance westward. It was in the course of that advance that, on orders from Moscow, the Galician Socialist Soviet Republic was formed on 15 July. With its seat in Ternopil’, the Rev­olutionary Council of the new Soviet republic controlled for about seven weeks most of Galicia east of L’viv.

Confident of its success, the Soviet government rejected the armistice and the Curzon Line proposed by the Allied Powers (11 July) and ordered its Red Army to move on farther westward. By mid-August the Red Army had reached the outskirts of Warsaw and threatened to take Poland’s new capital. Under the direction of Marshall Pilsudski, the Polish forces managed to regroup and to push back the Soviets. Within a month peace talks began in the Latvian town of Riga that resulted in an armistice (18 October 1920) and a temporary border - significantly farther east of the Curzon Line - that became finalized when a formal Polish-Soviet treaty was signed a few months later. According to the armistice and the Treaty of Riga of March 1921, Poland agreed to recognize the “independence” of Soviet Ukraine.

It was during the spring and summer of 1920 that the civilian population of central and western Ukraine, whether ethnic Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, Czechs etc., suffered extensive loss of life and property. As the warring armies moved back and forth, rural and urban residents could never be certain which week, day, or even hour they might be subject to attack by forces loyal either to Poland, the Soviets, the Ukrainian National Republic, or to marauding troops loyal only to themselves. The chaotic nature of these months in Ukraine were captured in dispatches com­piled by a Red Army correspondent, Isaak Babel, which were later published in Russian in what became the well-known book, The Red Cavalry (Konarmiia, 1926).

As the Polish-Soviet war entered its last phase, the Soviet Ukrainian govern­ment re-established itself and by late November 1920 Soviet troops succeeded in driving out the last remaining forces loyal Ukrainian National Republic, together with its government headed by Petliura across the Riga armistice line into eastern Galicia. Petliura still hoped to dislodge the Bolsheviks, and small units loyal to the Ukrainian National Republic conducted raids from Poland in the northwest­ern borderland regions of Soviet Ukraine until November 1921. But these never posed any serious threat to Soviet rule. As for Petliura, he continued to head the Ukrainian National Republic’s government-in-exile from various places in Poland until 1923, after which he left that country and eventually ended up in Paris.

Thus, by October 1920 the third and last phase of the Ukrainian revolution came to an end. It was marked by military invasions at various times by the Bolsheviks, the White Russians, the Allies, and Poland. Throughout the period, peasant uprisings and marauding anarchist forces dominated the countryside, while iso­lated in various cities or in mobile railway cars the government of the Ukrainian National Republic tried in vain to reach accords with their Galician counterparts and, at times, with one or more of the foreign invaders. In the end, the country was exhausted, and only the Ukrainian Bolsheviks, backed by Soviet Russia, were able to establish a lasting government. The non-Bolshevik Ukrainians - whether supporters of the Central Rada, the Hetmanate, or the Directory-led Ukrainian National Republic - were forced into exile, where from countries in central and western Europe they continued to maintain the trappings of government (with cabinets, hetmans or presidents, and diplomatic missions) in the hope that some day they might return home to rule.