On November 11, 1918, in the forest of Compiègne north of Paris, representatives of the German military command signed an armistice with their French and British counterparts. The end of hostilities meant that the German and Austrian troops would leave Ukraine. Three days later, on November 14, the Directory, a revolutionary committee named after the government of eighteenth-century revolutionary France and chaired by Volodymyr Vynnychenko, former head of the Rada government, rose openly against the hetman. The Directory allowed the Germans and Austrian troops to leave, and on December 19 its troops, composed of rebel peasants and military units that had deserted the hetman, entered Kyiv. The Hetmanate was no more. A creation of the war, backed by one of the warring parties, it proved unable to survive on its own. The Ukrainian People’s Republic was back, gladly taking over the institutions created by its predecessor. But its control of Kyiv was by no means firm. The Bolsheviks, who had had to retreat before the German and Austrian advance earlier that year, were now preparing to retake Ukraine.
In Galicia, on the other side of the front line, the end of the world war precipitated the creation of another Ukrainian state that would soon be known as the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic. Its formation began in October, after the declaration of the new emperor, Charles I, on the federalization of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Ukrainian leaders claimed their ethnic territories of Galicia, Bukovyna, and Transcarpathia. Austria-Hungary was living out its final days: its last act, the signing of the armistice agreement with the Entente, now joined by the United States, took place on November 3, 1918. The nationalities ruled from Vienna and Budapest were eager to leave the imperial cage, but the fall of the Dual Monarchy, which did not survive the month of November, unleashed a flood of competing territorial claims. The Ukrainians and Poles in particular were at each other’s throats for control of Galicia. Despite numerous promises, the Vienna government had failed to divide the province into eastern and western parts, and now the Poles claimed all of it.
The Ukrainians struck first on the morning of November 1, 1918, taking control of Lviv—a city surrounded by a Ukrainian-populated countryside but itself largely Polish and Jewish in ethnic composition. They declared the independence of the brand-new Ukrainian state that day. The Poles fought back, reclaiming the city twenty days later. The leadership of the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic, headed by the prominent lawyer and civic leader Yevhen Petrushevych, had to move its headquarters eastward, first to Ternopil and then to Stanyslaviv (today’s Ivano-Frankivsk). It was the beginning of a prolonged and bloody Ukrainian-Polish war. On December 1, 1918, representatives of the two Ukrainian republics, eastern and western, decided to join forces and create a single state. They needed as much unity as they could muster. The future was by no means bright for either of them. World War I, which many hoped would end all wars, set off new ones the moment it ended.
The Great War had begun with Austria trying to maintain its hold on its Slavic nationalities and Russia, acting as the pan-Slavic protector of the Balkans, and trying to extend its pan-Russian identity into Austria-Hungary. Both imperial governments lost. In eastern and central Europe, the war weakened and then destroyed empires, while social revolution did away with the old order. Like the rest of Europe, Ukraine emerged from the calamities of war a very different place—shell-shocked and with a ruined economy, a diminished population, mobilized ethnic identities, and more antagonistic ideologies than ever before. But the collapse of empires gave Ukrainians a new identity, produced a Ukranian state with its own government and army, and placed Ukraine on the political map of Europe. The new politics born of war gave Ukrainians on both sides of the former imperial border a clear political goal—independence. Little more than a fantasy before the war broke out, it became part of an ideology shared by socialist leaders of the Rada, conservative backers of Skoropadsky, and the fighters of the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic in Galicia. More often than not, the cause of independence mobilized Ukrainians while antagonizing minorities and alienating neighbors. It was one thing to proclaim independence and quite another to achieve it. Ukrainians would have to fight for it on more than one front.
chapter 19
A Shattered Dream
In Kyiv, Wednesday, January 22, 1919, turned out to be a fine winter day, with some frost but no snow. We know this because a film crew was in the city that day for one of the first filmings of a public event in the capital of Ukraine. A year had passed since the Central Rada’s proclamation of Ukrainian independence in its Fourth Universal. Now back in power, some of its former leaders used the occasion for another important proclamation—the unification into one independent state of the former Russian- and Austrian-ruled parts of the country. They built a triumphal arch leading from Volodymyr Street to St. Sophia Square, choosing the Kyivan Rus’–era cathedral as the backdrop for a mass rally, church service, and military parade—elaborate formalities to celebrate what had seemed a few months earlier nothing more than the dream of a small circle of Ukrainian intellectuals on both sides of the Russo-Austrian border.
As the bells of St. Sophia began to ring the noon hour, the camera captured images of happy faces, women holding flowers, and crowds of men in military uniforms. At the center of attention were the members of the Directory—the new revolutionary government—led by a tall man with a goatee wearing a dark leather overcoat and sporting a broad-brimmed wool hat. This was the head of the Directory and the former premier of the Central Rada government, Volodymyr Vynnychenko. To his right marched the representatives of western Ukraine, authorized by the popular assemblies of Ukrainian lands formerly under Habsburg rule to conclude the unification of the two Ukrainian states. But neither Vynnychenko nor Lev Bachynsky, the deputy chairman of the parliament of the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic, attracted most of the cameraman’s attention. The greatest amount of “air time” went to a middle-aged man of medium build wearing a sheepskin hat of the kind worn by most of the officers around him. At one point he was filmed standing next to Vynnychenko and smoking a cigarette, then fixing his belt and attire. This was Symon Petliura, the chief otaman, or commander in chief, of the Directory’s army.
Born in the city of Poltava in 1879, Petliura was thirty-nine years old at the time of the filming. Like Joseph Stalin, who was half a year older, Petliura began his revolutionary activities as a student at a theological seminary. He rose through the ranks to become one of the leaders of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Labor Party. After the defeat of the Revolution of 1905, he edited a number of Ukrainian journals and newspapers, first in Kyiv, then in St. Petersburg and, from 1912, in Moscow. In 1917, as head of the Ukrainian General Military Committee and then as the Central Rada’s general secretary for military affairs, he led the formation of Ukrainian units in the ranks of the Russian army. The imperial authorities would entrust one such unit to the command of future hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky.
The film made in Kyiv on January 22, 1919, shows Petliura standing together with Volodymyr Vynnychenko but not conversing with him. There was no love lost between the two politicians. Their rivalry went back to prewar times, when both were leading members of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Labor Party. Vynnychenko, who had strong pro-Bolshevik sympathies, blamed Petliura for provoking the Bolshevik invasion of Ukraine. In December 1917, on the verge of that invasion, Petliura was forced to resign from the government. Although Petliura and Vynnychenko teamed up to lead the uprising against the hetman, their rivalry continued within the Directory. By March 1919, Vynnychenko, whose attitude was still pro-Soviet and pro-Bolshevik, would be out of the Directory, out of Ukraine, and pretty much out of politics. In early May 1919, Petliura would be elected head of the Directory with dictatorial powers.
There were important political and military reasons for the rise of Petliura at a time when not only Vynnychenko but also Mykhailo Hrushevsky, another major figure of 1917, went into the emigration. Petliura gained prominence as his offices of government secre
tary for military affairs and then commander in chief became critically important, with the Ukrainian revolution passing from its parliamentary to its military stage. By early 1919, with Ukraine once again under Bolshevik attack, Petliura was the government’s key minister. On February 2, 1919, less than two weeks after celebrating the Act of Union, the Directory was forced out of Kyiv. It moved first to Vinnytsia and then established its headquarters in Kamianets-Podilskyi, once close to the former Russo-Austrian border and now on the border with the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic.
There was no alternative to retreat because the Ukrainian army was again in disarray. The peasant detachments that Petliura had led in the last months of 1918 against Hetman Skoropadsky had all but evaporated: out of 100,000 peasant soldiers, only a quarter stayed with Petliura, while others departed for their villages, believing that they had accomplished their mission and the rest was up to the government they had helped to install. Most of those who stayed were led by otamans—a Cossack-era word for commanders now applied to independent warlords. Petliura’s title of chief otaman reflected a sad reality: he presided over a group of unruly warlords, not a disciplined army. Petliura and his officers never managed to make the transition from an insurgent force to a regular army. Successful rebels, the Ukrainian politicians turned out to be amateurs at building a state and organizing armed forces.
The only reliable units in the service of the Ukrainian People’s Republic were those composed of Galician soldiers—Ukrainians in the Austrian service captured by the Russian army during World War I who joined the forces of the republic after the February Revolution of 1917. They turned out to be the most disciplined formations of a number of successive Ukrainian governments. In July 1919, Petliura got new reinforcements from Galicia. The Ukrainian Galician army, 50,000 strong, crossed the Zbruch River, which had earlier divided the Habsburg and Romanov empires, and joined Petliura’s troops in Podolia. The unity of eastern and western Ukraine, declared half a year earlier in Kyiv, seemed to be bearing its first fruits. But the circumstances of unification were dire indeed—both Petliura’s forces and the Galician army were on the verge of defeat, with the latter being driven out of Galicia by the advancing Polish army.
How and why did that happen? Despite losing Lviv to the Poles in November 1918, the western Ukrainian government had managed to establish effective control over most of Ukrainian-populated eastern Galicia. It created a functioning administrative system, proposed a set of reforms that included the redistribution of land, which benefited the peasantry, and mobilized the Ukrainian population around the idea of independence from Poland. The turning point in the Polish-Ukrainian war was the arrival in Galicia in April 1919 of an army of 60,000 led by General Józef Haller von Hallenburg. It had been formed in France out of Polish prisoners of war (they had originally fought on the Austrian side) and armed by the Entente. Part of the army’s officer corps was French. The army was sent to the eastern front to fight the Bolsheviks, but Haller deployed it against the Ukrainian troops in Galicia. The French protested and sent telegrams to that effect, while the Poles, driving the ill-equipped Ukrainian army eastward, assured the French that the Ukrainians were all Bolsheviks. In the summer of 1919, the Ukrainian Galician army retreated to the Zbruch and crossed it to join Petliura’s forces in Podolia.
Between the 50,000-strong Galician army, 35,000 troops loyal to Petliura, and some 15,000 men fighting under the leadership of allied otamans, the Ukrainian armed forces constituted a major fighting force. The arrival of the Galicians gave Petliura a chance to reclaim territories lost to the Bolsheviks in central and eastern Ukraine. But the unity of the two Ukraines turned out to be less firm than imagined. The conservative leadership of the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic had difficulty making common cause with the leftist members of the Directory government, the Galician commanders could not comprehend the lax discipline of the former insurgents, and the two groups looked in different directions for possible allies.
Not only the Ukrainian government in Kyiv but also nationalist governments in other parts of the empire, especially the Baltics and the North Caucasus, resisted the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd in October 1917. In southern Russia, former imperial officers and the Don Cossacks joined forces to create the White Army, which fought for the restoration of the pre-Bolshevik political and social order. The Western powers, including Britain and France, threw their support behind the White Army under the leadership of General Anton Denikin, who began an offensive against the Bolsheviks in Ukraine in the early summer of 1919. The appearance of Denikin in southern Ukraine and his northward drive posed a new question for the Ukrainian government and its military forces. Should they ally themselves with Denikin against the Bolsheviks or shun him, since he aimed not only to undo the social revolution advocated by the Ukrainian leaders but also to restore the one and indivisible Russian state?
The Galicians and the Dnieper Ukrainians responded differently to that question. The westerners saw no problem in allying themselves with the anti-Bolshevik and anti-Polish White Army. The easterners, for their part, regarded the Poles, whom the Galicians despised, as potential allies against the Bolsheviks and the Whites, while the otamans were not above joining the Red Army. Brought together by ideology and circumstance, the two sides were still fighting their own wars. In August, when the Whites and the Galician units simultaneously entered Kyiv, the Galicians graciously retreated, leaving the city to the Whites, causing a major conflict between Petliura and the Galician commanders. A complete rupture came about in November 1919, when a major epidemic of typhus all but wiped out both armies, forcing the remaining Galicians to join the Whites, while Petliura made a deal with the Poles.
The year 1919, which had begun on a high note, with great hopes for the two Ukrainian states, was ending in disaster. By the end of the year, the Ukrainian armed forces were no more, and with them went statehood. The eastern Ukrainians were defeated because they were politically divided and ill organized, whereas the Galicians lost because, outnumbered and outgunned, they got no help from their eastern brethren. The unification of the two states and armies had resulted more in a military alliance than in the creation of a united state or armed force. A long period of existence in separate states under different political and social orders had strongly affected the political and military cultures of the two Ukrainian elites and their followers, who believed that they belonged to the same nation. Despite the disasters of 1919, they were not prepared to give up that idea.
As the Ukrainian armies left the battlefield and the idea of Ukrainian independence seemed to be fading away, three major forces clashed in the fight for control of Ukraine. The Polish armies, driven by the vision of reestablishing a Polish state with borders as close to those of the prepartition commonwealth as possible, held sway over Galicia and moved into Podolia and Volhynia. The White armies, backed by the Entente, pushed northward from southern Ukraine into Russia with the goal of reestablishing the one and indivisible Russian state of tsarist times. Then there were the Bolsheviks, whose long-term goal was world revolution, while their immediate imperative was military survival. They could achieve neither without Ukrainian coal and bread, as Vladimir Lenin openly admitted.
Of all the regimes and armies that fought in Ukraine in 1919, the Bolsheviks left the largest footprint and kept Kyiv in their hands longest—from February to August, and then again in December. But holding the capital and controlling the large industrial cities of the Ukrainian steppe did not mean controlling Ukraine as a whole. The countryside was in revolt against the new Bolshevik masters. Their rule antagonized Ukrainian liberals and socialists, many of whom were prepared to welcome Soviet power in principle but not at the expense of their nation-building program. The same was true of the peasants, who took Bolshevik promises to give them land at face value, only to have their crops requisitioned at gunpoint. Led by a variety of warlords, the peasants rebelled, and their revolts became as much a factor in the Bolshevik
loss of Ukraine as the White armies of Denikin and the Galician and eastern Ukrainian armies of Petliura. After the defeat of Denikin and the recapture of Kyiv in December 1919, the Bolsheviks decided to learn from their mistakes of the previous year.
Vladimir Lenin himself spelled out the “lesson of 1919” for his followers. According to Lenin, the Bolsheviks had neglected the nationality question. Consequently, the Bolshevik army returned to Ukraine in late 1919 and early 1920 under the banner of the formally independent Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic and tried to address the Ukrainians in their native language. Russification was out; cultural accommodation of the national revolution in Ukraine was in. In a move reminiscent of imperial co-opting of local elites, the Bolsheviks opened their party’s door to the Ukrainian leftists; these former Socialist Revolutionaries had accepted the idea of a Soviet organization of the future Ukrainian state and became known as Borotbists after the title of their main periodical, Borot’ba (Struggle). Accepted into the Bolshevik Party on an individual basis, they provided the Bolsheviks with badly needed Ukrainian-speaking cadres and a cultural elite. Peasants, too, were finally accommodated and given the land they had been promised for so long: in the spring of 1920, the Bolsheviks postponed their plans for establishing big collective farms on lands confiscated from the nobility and allowed the peasants to divide the land of their former masters.
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