Inside the city one of the few policies that the Directory ‘not only declared but carried out’, in the snide words of one memoirist, was the removal of Russian-language signs in Kyiv and their replacement with Ukrainian ones: ‘Russian wasn’t even allowed to remain alongside Ukrainian.’ Allegedly, this wholesale change was ordered because many of the Directory’s troops came from Galicia, spoke very little Russian, and were horrified to find themselves at sea in a Russian-speaking city. The result was that ‘for a few jolly days, the whole city was changed into an artists’ workshop’, and the deep connection between language and power was driven home to the residents of Kyiv once again.25
Outside the capital, Petliura controlled very little territory. Bulgakov described the Kyiv of this era as a city that had ‘police … a ministry, even an army, and newspapers of various names, but what was going on around them, in the real Ukraine, which was bigger than France and had tens of millions of people in it – no one knew that’.26 Richard Pipes writes that in Kyiv ‘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’.27
By the end of 1919 the national movement, launched with so much energy and hope, was in disarray. Hrushevsky, forced out of Kyiv by the fighting, would soon go abroad.28 Ukrainians themselves were profoundly divided along many lines, between those who supported the old order and those who did not; those who preferred to stay linked to Russia and those who did not; those who supported land reform and those who did not. The competition over language had intensified and become irreconcilably bitter. The refugees from Moscow and St Petersburg were already moving on to Crimea, Odessa and exile.29 But the greatest political divide – and the one that would shape the course of the subsequent decades – was between those who shared the ideals of the Ukrainian national movement and those who supported the Bolsheviks, a revolutionary group with a very different ideology altogether.
At the beginning of 1917, the Bolsheviks were a small minority party in Russia, the radical faction of what had been the Marxist Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party. But they spent the year agitating in the Russian streets, using simple slogans such as ‘Land, Bread and Peace’ designed to appeal to the widest numbers of soldiers, workers and peasants. Their coup d’état in October (7 November according to the ‘new calendar’ they later adopted) put them in power amidst conditions of total chaos. Led by Lenin, a paranoid, conspiratorial and fundamentally undemocratic man, the Bolsheviks believed themselves to be the ‘vanguard of the proletariat’; they would call their regime the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. They sought absolute power, and eventually abolished all other political parties and opponents through terror, violence and vicious propaganda campaigns.
In early 1917 the Bolsheviks had even fewer followers in Ukraine. The party had 22,000 Ukrainian members, most of whom were in the large cities and industrial centres of Donetsk and Kryvyi Rih. Few spoke Ukrainian. More than half considered themselves to be Russians. About one in six was Jewish. A tiny number, including a few who would later play major roles in the Soviet Ukrainian government, did believe in the possibility of an autonomous, Bolshevik Ukraine. But Heorhii Piatakov – who was born in Ukraine but did not consider himself to be Ukrainian – spoke for the majority when he told a meeting of Kyiv Bolsheviks in June 1917, just a few weeks after Hrushevsky’s speech, that ‘we should not support the Ukrainians’. Ukraine, he explained, was not a ‘distinct economic region’. More to the point, Russia relied on Ukraine’s sugar, grain and coal, and Russia was Piatakov’s priority.30
The sentiment was not new: disdain for the very idea of a Ukrainian state had been an integral part of Bolshevik thinking even before the revolution. In large part this was simply because all of the leading Bolsheviks, among them Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Piatakov, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin, were men raised and educated in the Russian empire, and the Russian empire did not recognize such a thing as ‘Ukraine’ in the province that they knew as ‘Southwest Russia’. The city of Kyiv was, to them, the ancient capital of Kyivan Rus’, the kingdom that they remembered as the ancestor of Russia. In school, in the press and in daily life they would have absorbed Russia’s prejudices against a language that was widely described as a dialect of Russian, and a people widely perceived as primitive former serfs.
All Russian political parties at the time, from the Bolsheviks to the centrists to the far right, shared this contempt. Many refused to use the name ‘Ukraine’ at all.31 Even Russian liberals refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Ukrainian national movement. This blind spot – and the consequent refusal of any Russian groups to create an anti-Bolshevik coalition with the Ukrainians – was ultimately one of the reasons why the White Armies failed to win the civil war.32
In addition to their national prejudice, the Bolsheviks had particular political reasons for disliking the idea of Ukrainian independence. Ukraine was still overwhelmingly a peasant nation, and according to the Marxist theory that the Bolshevik leadership constantly read and discussed, peasants were at best an ambivalent asset. In an 1852 essay Marx famously explained that they were not a ‘class’ and thus had no class consciousness: ‘They are consequently incapable of enforcing their class interest in their own names, whether through a parliament or through a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.’33
Although Marx believed that peasants had no important role in the coming revolution, Lenin, who was more pragmatic, modified these views to a degree. He thought that the peasants were indeed potentially revolutionary – he approved of their desire for radical land reform – but believed that they needed to be guided by the more progressive working class. ‘Not all peasants fighting for land and freedom are fully aware of what their struggle implies,’ he wrote in 1905. Class-conscious workers would need to teach them that real revolution required not just land reform but the ‘fight against the rule of capital’. Ominously, Lenin also suspected that many farmers of small-holdings, because they owned property, actually thought like capitalist smallholders. This explained why ‘not all small peasants join the ranks of fighters for socialism’.34 This idea – that the smallest landowners, later called kulaks, were a fundamentally counter-revolutionary, capitalist force – would have great consequences some years later.
The Bolsheviks’ ambivalence about nationalism also led them to be suspicious of Ukraine’s drive for independence. Both Marx and Lenin had convoluted and constantly evolving views of nationalism, which they sometimes saw as a revolutionary force and at other times as a distraction from the real goal of universal socialism. Marx understood that the democratic revolutions of 1848 had been inspired in part by national feelings, but he believed these ‘bourgeois nationalist’ sentiments to be a temporary phenomenon, a mere stage on the road to communist internationalism. As the state faded away, so, somehow, would nations and national sentiments. ‘The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster.’35
Lenin also argued for cultural autonomy and national self-determination, except when it didn’t suit him. Even before the revolution, he disapproved of non-Russian language schools, whether Yiddish or Ukrainian, on the grounds that they would create unhelpful divisions within the working class.36 Although he theoretically favoured granting the right of secession to the non-Russian regions of the Russian empire, which included Georgia, Armenia and the Central Asian states, he seems not to have seriously believed it would ever happen. Besides, recognition of the ‘right’ of secession didn’t mean that Lenin supported secession itself. In the case of Ukraine, he approved of Ukrainian nationalism when it opposed the tsar or the Provisional Government in 1917, and disapproved of it when he thought it threatened the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian proletariat.37
To this complicated ideological puzzle, Stalin would add his own thoughts. He was the party’s expert on nationalities, and was initially far less flexible than Leni
n. Stalin’s essay, ‘Marxism and the National Question’, had argued in 1913 that nationalism was a distraction from the cause of socialism, and that comrades ‘must work solidly and indefatigably against the fog of nationalism, no matter from what quarter it proceeds’.38 By 1925 his thoughts had evolved further into an argument about nationalism as an essentially peasant force. National movements, he declared, needed peasants in order to exist: ‘The peasant question is the basis, the quintessence, of the national question. That explains the fact that the peasantry constitutes the main army of the national movement, that there is no powerful national movement without the peasant army …’39
That argument, which clearly reflected his observation of events in Ukraine, would become more significant later. For if there is no powerful national movement without the peasant army, then someone who wished to destroy a national movement might well want to begin by destroying the peasantry.
In the end, ideology would matter less to the Bolsheviks than their personal experiences in Ukraine, and especially of the civil war there. For everyone in the Communist Party, the civil war era was a true watershed, personally as well as politically. At the beginning of 1917 few of them had much to show for their lives. They were obscure ideologues, unsuccessful by any standard. If they earned any money, it was by writing for illegal newspapers; they had been in and out of prison, they had complicated personal lives, they had no experience of government or management.
Unexpectedly, the Russian revolution put them at the centre of international events. It also brought them fame and power for the very first time. It rescued them from obscurity, and validated their ideology. The success of the revolution proved, to the Bolshevik leaders as well as to many others, that Marx and Lenin had been right.
But the revolution also quickly forced them to defend their power, presenting them not just with ideological counter-revolutionaries but with a real and very bloody counter-revolution, one that had to be immediately defeated. The subsequent civil war forced them to create an army, a political police force and a propaganda machine. Above all, the civil war taught the Bolsheviks lessons about nationalism, economic policy, food distribution and violence, upon which they later drew. The Bolsheviks’ experiences in Ukraine were also very different from their experiences in Russia, including a spectacular defeat that nearly toppled their nascent state. Many subsequent Bolshevik attitudes towards Ukraine, including their lack of faith in the loyalty of the peasantry, their suspicion of Ukrainian intellectuals, and their dislike of the Ukrainian Communist Party, have their origins in this period.
Indeed, the experience of the civil war, especially the civil war in Ukraine, shaped the views of Stalin himself. On the eve of the Russian Revolution, Stalin was in his late thirties, with little to show for his life. He had ‘no money, no permanent residence, and no profession other than punditry’, as a recent biographer has written.40 Born in Georgia, educated in a seminary, his reputation in the underground rested on his talent for robbing banks. He had been in and out of prison several times. At the time of the February revolution in 1917, he was in exile in a village north of the Arctic Circle. When Tsar Nicholas II was deposed, Stalin returned to Petrograd (the name of St Petersburg, the Russian capital, had been Russified in 1914, and would be changed to Leningrad in 1924).
The Bolshevik coup d’état in October 1917 unseated the Provisional Government and brought Stalin his first, glorious taste of real political power.41 As the People’s Commissar for Nationalities, he was a member of the first Bolshevik government. In that role he was directly responsible for negotiating with all the non-Russian nations and peoples who had belonged to the Russian empire – and, more importantly, for convincing, or forcing, them to submit to Soviet rule. In his dealings with Ukraine he had two clear and immediate priorities, both dictated by the extremity of the situation. The first was to undermine the national movement, clearly the Bolsheviks’ most important rival in Ukraine. The second was to get hold of Ukrainian grain. He embarked on both of those tasks only days after the Bolsheviks took power.
Already in December 1917, in the pages of Pravda, Stalin was denouncing the Central Rada’s Third Universal, the manifesto that had proclaimed the Ukrainian People’s Republic and laid out the borders of Ukraine. Who, he asked rhetorically, would support an independent Ukraine:
Big landowners in Ukraine, then Aleksei Kaledin [a White Army general] and his ‘military government’ on the Don, i.e. Cossack landowners … behind both lurks the great Russian bourgeoisie which used to be a furious enemy of all demands of the Ukrainian people, but which now supports the Central Rada …
By contrast, ‘all Ukrainian workers and the poorest section of the peasantry’ opposed the Central Rada, he claimed, which was hardly the truth either.42
Stalin followed up his public denunciations of the Central Rada with what would later be termed ‘active measures’, intended to destabilize the Ukrainian government. Local Bolsheviks tried to establish so-called independent ‘Soviet republics’ in Donetsk-Kryvyi Rih, Odessa, Tavriia and the Don province – tiny, Moscow-backed mini-states, which were of course not independent at all.43 The Bolsheviks also attempted to stage a coup in Kyiv; after that failed, they created an ‘alternative’ Central Executive Committee of Ukraine and then a ‘Soviet government’ in Kharkiv, a more reliably Russian-speaking city. Later, they would make Kharkiv the capital of Ukraine, even though, in 1918, only a handful of Kharkiv Bolshevik leaders spoke Ukrainian.44
As the Bolsheviks consolidated their rule in Russia, the Red Army kept pushing south. Finally, on 9 February 1918, even as the Central Rada leaders were negotiating in Brest-Litovsk, Kyiv fell to Bolshevik forces for the first time. This first, brief, Bolshevik occupation brought with it not only communist ideology but also a clearly Russian agenda. General Mikhail Muraviev, the commanding officer, declared he was bringing back Russian rule from the ‘far North’, and ordered the immediate execution of suspected nationalists. His men shot anyone heard speaking Ukrainian in public and destroyed any evidence of Ukrainian rule, including the Ukrainian street signs that had replaced Russian street signs only weeks before.45 The 1918 Bolshevik bombardment of the Ukrainian capital deliberately targeted Hrushevsky’s home, library and collections of ancient documents.46
Although the Bolsheviks controlled Kyiv for just a few weeks, this first occupation also gave Lenin a taste of what Ukraine could bring to the communist project. Desperate to feed the revolutionary workers who had brought him to power, he immediately sent the Red Army to Ukraine accompanied by ‘requisition detachments’, teams of men instructed to confiscate the peasants’ grain. He named Sergo Ordzhonikidze, a leading Georgian Bolshevik, as ‘extraordinary plenipotentiary commissar’ in charge of requisitioning Ukrainian grain.47 Pravda’s editorial board trumpeted these soldiers’ success, and assured its urban Russian readers that the Soviet leadership had already begun to take ‘extraordinary measures’ to procure grain from the peasants.48
Behind the scenes, Lenin’s telegrams to the Ukrainian front could hardly have been more explicit. ‘For God’s sake,’ he wrote in January 1918, ‘use all energy and all revolutionary measures to send grain, grain and more grain!! Otherwise Petrograd may starve to death. Use special trains and special detachments. Collect and store. Escort the trains. Inform us every day. For God’s sake!’49 The rapid loss of Ukraine to the German and Austrian armies in early March infuriated Moscow. A furious Stalin denounced not only the Ukrainian national movement and its recalcitrant peasant supporters but also the Ukrainian Bolsheviks, who had fled Kharkiv and set up another messy ‘Soviet Ukrainian government in exile’ just over the Russian border in Rostov. Instinctively, he disliked the idea of ‘Ukrainian Bolsheviks’, and felt they should give up their efforts to create a separate party. From Moscow, he attacked the Rostov group: ‘Enough playing at a government and a republic. It’s time to stop that game; enough is enough.’50
In response, one of the few Ukrainian speakers in Rostov sent a protest
note to the Council of People’s Commissars in Moscow. Stalin’s statement, wrote Mykola Skrypnyk, had helped ‘discredit Soviet power in Ukraine’. Skrypnyk did believe in the possibility of ‘Ukrainian Bolshevism’ and was an early champion of what would later be called ‘national communism’, the belief that communism could have separate forms in separate countries and was not incompatible with national sentiment in Ukraine. He argued that the brief rule of the Central Rada had created a real desire for Ukrainian sovereignty, and proposed that the Bolsheviks should recognize and incorporate that desire too. The Soviet government, he argued, should not ‘base their decisions on the opinion of some people’s commissar of the Russian federation, but should instead listen to the masses, the working people of Ukraine’.51
In the short run, Skrypnyk won this exchange, but not because the Bolsheviks had decided to listen to the masses or the working people. In the wake of his first defeat in Ukraine, Lenin had simply decided to adopt different tactics. Using the methods of what would (much later, though in a similar context) be called ‘hybrid warfare’, he ordered his forces to re-enter Ukraine in disguise. They were to hide the fact that they were a Russian force fighting for a unified Bolshevik Russia. Instead, they called themselves a ‘Soviet Ukrainian liberation movement’, precisely in order to confuse nationalists. The idea was to use nationalist rhetoric cynically, in order to convince people to accept Soviet power. In a telegram to the Red Army commander on the ground, Lenin explained:
Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine Page 4
