The February 1917 Revolution swept away the Romanov dynasty

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

W.B. Yeats¹

The February 1917 Revolution swept away the Romanov dynasty, brought the Provisional Government to power, and generated waves of mass expec­tations and political demands throughout Russia. But the new government could not simultaneously end the Great War, increase food supplies, im­prove working conditions in the cities, introduce a more equal distribution of the land in the countryside, or authorize non-Russian autonomy. Its members, moreover, viewed themselves as temporary stewards of Russia’s fragile democracy, preparing the way for the elections to the Constituent Assembly, which they believed would tackle society’s conflicting demands.

In response to the Provisional Government’s slow, legalistic procedures, popular dissatisfactions multiplied and spread across the country. As a con­sequence, by the end of that summer, the Provisional Government lost power to the Petrograd Soviet, which also arose after Nicholas Il’s abdica­tion and attracted Russia’s leftist parties. By summer’s end, the enthusiastic and ever-growing support for radical Bolsheviks within this body destroyed the authority of the moderate Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary parties.

The Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd in October 1917 with the support of workers and under the cloak of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets did not necessarily foreshadow their ultimate victory. After October 1917 this political party (overwhelmingly urban, working class, and largely Russian) took another three and a half years to win pow­er in a predominantly rural, peasant, and non-Russian society encompass­ing approximately 22 million square kilometres (8.5 million square miles).

Three different, but interdependent mass revolutions - in the cities, in the countryside, and in the non-Russian areas - tore Russia apart. Between 1917 and 1921 each of these spontaneous revolutions evolved indepen­dently, but converged in a number of ways. Each attacked different rem­nants of the old political order, challenged the institutionalized inequalities of the past, and introduced unique alternatives. Building on the old impe­rial identity and on official designations of identity during the war, various groups promoted new national and social identities that expressed distinct interpretations of individual dignity and group interests and envisioned a broader sense of equality and democracy.

Conflicts over these identities and their parameters fuelled the urban, rural, and non-Russian revolutions. Although these national and social identities competed with each other, their contest also mutually rein­forced each other.³ Inasmuch as the “national question” in the new demo­cratic Russia reflected the enormous social inequalities among national groups, all non-Russian national movements combined the national and the social struggles to become a single, “almost unstoppable democratic force.”⁴ “Social democracy” in its broadest sense and the “right of na­tional self-determination” became the most repeated revolutionary slo­gans of the day. The men and women who assembled under their different banners sought to institutionalize these political catchwords. These ef­forts provoked a bitter conflict in the Ukrainian provinces, where revolu­tionary euphoria inspired efforts to create a new political order. What did this newly introduced democracy mean in practice, specifically for the Ukrainian-speaking population? Would popular sovereignty coincide with national sovereignty? Or class sovereignty? Most importantly, what were the contours of these sovereignties and where were the boundaries between them?