What happened in the Ukrainian lands during the revolutionary turmoil of 1917-1920?
When the multinational empires in Eastern and Central Europe collapsed at the end of World War I, the leaders of their constituent nationalities attempted to reorganize the postwar political space according to the principle of national self-determination, which the victorious Allies endorsed.
In practice, Ukrainians became a major exception to this principle, as the Allies resolved to incorporate the Ukrainian lands of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire into several new Eastern European states that were to serve as a cordon sani- taire against the Bolshevik menace. The Bolsheviks, in turn, sought to keep as much of the former Russian imperial territory as they could, while also realizing the need for federalization, or at least its appearance.The unexpected collapse of the Russian monarchy in the spring of 1917 allowed the Ukrainian national movement to come out in the open, quickly capturing the sympathies of the peasant and soldier masses. Prolonged negotiations took place between the Ukrainian revolutionary parliament, the Central Rada, and the Russian Provisional Government concerning the provinces that should come under the authority of the newly proclaimed Ukrainian People's Republic and what the extent of this authority should be. Meanwhile, by the year's end, the Bolsheviks took power in the imperial capital and promptly initiated peace talks with the Central Powers. The Bolsheviks also proclaimed their own Ukrainian Soviet Republic and brought its representatives to the negotiation table, just as their troops were marching on Kyiv.
However, the Germans and the Austrians preferred to settle separately with Soviet Russia and the independent Ukrainian People's Republic, which they hoped to use as a breadbasket for their starving populations. The Brest-Litovsk Peace, signed in early 1918, forced the Bolsheviks to recognize the former Russian Ukraine as an independent state in its ethnographic borders (without the Crimea and the Ukrainian lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire).
A large German and Austrian occupation force marched into the Ukrainian People's Republic to ensure the collection of foodstuffs, which was spelled out in a secret protocol. The Germans soon replaced the leftleaning Ukrainian republican government with the more congenial conservative, monarchist regime of General Pavlo Skoropadsky, who was proclaimed “hetman.” However, in the fall of 1918, the Central Powers lost the war and had to evacuate Ukraine, taking their puppet monarch with them.The defeat of the Central Powers also meant the disintegration of Austria-Hungary, allowing the Ukrainian activists to proclaim the Western Ukrainian People's Republic in eastern Galicia. However, the newly reconstituted Polish state also laid claim to eastern Galicia. A Ukrainian-Polish war broke out there, in which the Ukrainians eventually suffered defeat when fresh Polish forces marched in (the Allies had originally trained and equipped them for use against the Central Powers). Still, the Western Ukrainian People's Republic lasted long enough to solemnly declare its union with the Ukrainian People's Republic, by then restored in the east.
In 1919 the Ukrainian lands of the former Russian Empire became a bloody battlefield in the Russian civil war between the Bolshevik Reds and the anti-Bolshevik Whites, with the Ukrainian republican troops fighting against both by turns. It was a Ukrainian civil war as well, because ethnic Ukrainians fought in all of these armies for their respective visions of “Ukraine," which many of them still saw as inseparably linked to Russia. This period also saw the collapse of civic order, marked by the free reign of peasant bands in the countryside that sometimes grew into real armies. For example, the anarchist leader in southern Ukraine, Nestor Makhno, commanded a force of 40,000 and fought alternately with or against the Bolsheviks. The collapse of authority in the countryside also led to bloody pogroms against Jews in the provinces west of the Dnipro, claiming an estimated 50,000 lives.
All the armies marching through the land committed them, but peasant gang leaders loosely affiliated with the Ukrainian republican government were apparently responsible for the largest share, even though the helpless Ukrainian leaders issued appeals against the pogroms.4 In the Ukrainian south, Mennonites also became victims of violent pogroms.In 1920 the Bolsheviks finally defeated the Whites in mainland Ukraine, although the latter still held out in the Crimean Peninsula until the fall, and pushed the Ukrainian army into Polish-controlled territory in the west. The Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin saw the main cause of the Ukrainian national movement's growth in the failure of successive Russian governments to economically placate the peasantry, which he construed as petty landowners susceptible to nationalist agitation. In order to disarm the peasantry's suspicions, the Bolsheviks organized a massive distribution of the land and also declared that Ukraine would remain a separate republic in federation with Soviet Russia. After the brief Soviet-Polish war in 1920 ended in an impasse, the Bolsheviks squeezed the Whites out of the Crimea. The period of revolutionary wars in the former Russian Empire ended.
Agreement was also reached about the former Austro- Hungarian territories. Frightened by the Bolshevik threat in the east, the Allies sacrificed the principle of national self-determination in favor of security. They assigned eastern Galicia to Poland, northern Bukovyna to Romania, and Transcarpathia to the new state of Czechoslovakia. The Ukrainian population in the former Austro-Hungarian lands actually became the largest national minority in interwar Europe.