Ukraine Under the Soviets
CLARENCE A. MANNING
_Associate Professor of Slavic Languages
Columbia University_
Ukraine Under the Soviets
BOOKMAN ASSOCIATES
_New York_
_Copyright, 1953, by Clarence A. Manning_
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PRINTED BY RECORD PRESS, N. Y. C.
Foreword
It was not many months after the downfall of the tsarist regime in
Russia in 1917 that that great empire began to disintegrate. The
subject peoples began to demand their own states and showed themselves
willing to fight for them. The significance of this was lost upon most
of the leaders of the Western democratic powers and they tried to
explain it as some new device of the German General Staff, instead of
recognizing it as a part of a democratic procedure.
Three and a half years of war had then passed and the attention of the
democracies was focussed on the Western Front. They were aware of the
contribution in manpower the Russian Empire had made to the common
cause and they looked forward with apprehension to the campaign of 1918
without the aid of the imperial Russian army. They had greeted the
disappearance of the tsars in a bloodless revolution as a sign of the
triumph of democracy and they were ill prepared to face the strange
events that followed the fall of the Romanovs.
They could not believe that the government of Lenin and the Communists
who seized control of the city of Petrograd late in 1917 could long
endure. Its methods they could not understand and they sought to
interpret them in terms with which they were familiar. They did not try
to fathom the reasons why, within a few months, the Russian Empire fell
apart and they sought instinctively to bring it once more together.
They watched without understanding the downfall of the Ukrainian
National Republic, the rise of Soviet rule in Ukraine and elsewhere,
the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and
the events of the next years. The rise of Nazism seemed to them the
all-important menace and the opening of World War II convinced them of
this even more strongly. The sudden understanding between the Soviets
and the Nazis and then the equally sudden attack of the Germans upon
the USSR still did not clear up the situation. The West aided the
Soviets and, despite one difficulty after another, they willingly
conceded the Soviet demands as a contribution to a common victory
and sought in the United Nations a common meeting place for all
anti-Fascist states. With some misgivings they admitted the Ukrainian
Soviet Socialist Republic and the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist
Republic as independent states to the United Nations.
In the meanwhile, as Soviet armies pushed westward into the heart
of central Europe, they spread out what has since been termed the
iron curtain to mask from the eyes of the world the nature of their
government. Step by step, information from the Baltic Republics of
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, from Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia,
from Rumania and Bulgaria has grown increasingly difficult to secure.
When China and North Korea passed within the same veil, the world began
to awake.
The scanty reports from Ukraine today receive more attention than did
the neglected information of thirty-five years ago. Yet that is still
not enough.
It is no exaggeration to say that the Russian Communists have used
the Ukrainian land and the Ukrainian population as the laboratory for
their future conquests. It is there, among the Ukrainian people, that
Lenin and his associates worked out their program of disintegration,
infiltration, conquest, exploitation and russification that they have
employed so successfully since the end of World War II. It has cost the
Ukrainians dearly to serve as this laboratory. By the millions they
have perished of starvation, execution, and deportation, and the other
peoples of central and eastern Europe are meeting the same fate.
The object of this work is to study that process, insofar as it can
be known. Other books have told the story of the Ukrainian struggle
for independence, the efforts of the Ukrainian people to set up their
own free and independent state. That story is not retold here, for
this book is concerned with the reverse of the picture--the efforts
of the Ukrainian people to protect themselves, their mode of life and
their culture, against the extension of the Soviet Russian influences,
against that system which, starting from a declared policy of
internationalism, has turned into a rigid, Russian imperialistic policy
which weighs heavily upon every form and department of life.
It is not only a study of the past. What happened in Kiev and Kharkiv
is happening to-day in Warsaw, in Budapest, in Bucharest and Sofia,
in Ulan Bator, Peking and Pyongyang. It is the story of a process and
it is from that point of view that we must view the developments in
Ukraine and the methods of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Once that is grasped, much that is obscure in the history of the last
years will become clear and we can see the process in its development
and in its completed form. We will know what to expect and what methods
can best be devised to check this creeping paralysis of civilization
and bring back to mankind its hope for a civilized future.
Acknowledgments
This volume is primarily based upon a series of detailed studies
of Ukraine under the Soviets, which were prepared by a group of
Ukrainian DP professors in Europe. They were selected by the Shevchenko
Scientific Society and supported during their work by the Ukrainian
National Association, which has provided the means for publication.
They were:
_Dm. Sv._--The Partisan Struggle in Ukraine
_Ivan Koval_--The Ukrainian Communists
_Ivan Koval_--The Russian Communists in Ukraine
_Kost Pankivsky_--Western Ukraine under Bolshevik Rule, 1939-1941
...--The Ukrainian Lands under Bolshevism up to World War II
_Ol. Yurchenko_--The State Legal System
_Mykola Vasiliyiv_--The Soviet Economic System
...--The Agricultural Exploitation of Ukraine
_V. Marchenko_--Social and Economic Conditions
_K. Kononenko_--The Agricultural Economy
...--Changes of Population in Ukraine
_Y. Sherekh_--Principles and Steps of the Soviet Linguistic Policy
_M. Hlobenko_--Ukrainian Literature
_Ol. Ohloblyn_--The Humanities under the Soviets
_M. Mishchenko_--Ukrainian Medicine
_Ev. Olensky_--Ukrainian Music
_N. Makhiv_--The Natural Sciences in Ukraine
_Iv. M._--Ukrainian Religious Life
Contents
PAGE
+Foreword+ 5
+Acknowledgments+ 9
+Chapter+
I. The Background of the Communist Triumph 15
II. The Foundation of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic 25
III. The Period of Militant Communism 35
IV. The New Economic Policy 45
V. Ukrainization 57
VI. The Literary Renaissance 65
VII. The Scholarly Revival 73
VIII. Mykola Khvylovy 79
IX. The Five Year Plan 85
X. The Famine 93
XI. The Famine, The Soviets and The World 103
XII. The Early Trials 109
XIII. The Turning of the Cultural Tide 115
XIV. The Debacle 121
XV. The Thirties 131
XVI. Ukraine in the Late Thirties 141
XVII. The First Occupation of Western Ukraine 149
XVIII. The Western Ukrainian Reaction 159
XIX. The Soviets and the Ukrainians in Rumania 165
XX. The German Attack on the Soviets 167
XXI. The Return of the Communists 175
XXII. Soviet Ukraine During World War II 181
XXIII. Ukraine After World War II 185
XXIV. The Soviet Cultural Policy in Ukraine After the War 195
XXV. The Soviet Religious Policy 205
+Conclusion+ 215
+Index+ 221
Ukraine Under the Soviets
CHAPTER ONE
The Background of the Communist Triumph
No idea could be more erroneous than that the triumph of Communism in
Ukraine and the destruction of the Ukrainian National Republic, which
had declared its independence on January 22, 1918, was the choice of
the Ukrainian people themselves. It did not suit their desires or their
interests, and the methods which Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin adopted to
master Ukraine were essentially the same as those by which the iron
curtain has been pushed steadily to the west. Ukraine was the testing
ground for the development of the Communist methods of conquest, just
as it has been the testing ground for all the Communist methods of
control of their helpless satellites.
From the moment when he arrived in Petrograd in April, 1917, Lenin
commenced a policy of disintegration. The collapse of tsarist Russia
had destroyed all of the organized forces of law and order throughout
the empire, and it was no easy task to restore these in an area
where there had not been allowed for centuries a popular government
resting upon the will of the people and staffed by experienced
democratic administrators. Under such conditions, Lenin’s propaganda of
self-determination for all the peoples of the empire fell upon ready
ears, as did his efforts to promote class conflict on every hand. At
the same time his promises to the Great Russians constantly called,
under one guise or another, for the restoration of Russian unity even
while his talk of internationalism and the Communist International
seemed to imply a world Communist regime in which all peoples would
be equal. It was this policy of lying and deceiving until the moment
for successful armed intervention came that gave him the dominating
position.
He enjoyed an immense advantage in the fact that the civil war between
the Whites and the Reds was largely fought on Ukrainian territory and
thus compelled the young Ukrainian government to fight upon two fronts
throughout the entire period, while for some time the new republic was
forced also to oppose the Poles in the west. Lying as Ukraine did on
the shore of the Black Sea, the armed forces of General Denikin, who
was heading the effort to create an anti-Communist monolithic Russian
government, could only reach Moscow by crossing Ukrainian territory. It
was only across Ukrainian territory that the supplies sent to him by
the Western nations after the ending of World War I could be delivered
and it was his policy to allow no manifestation of Ukrainianism in any
form, for he intended to continue that denial of Ukrainian existence
that had characterized the old tsarist regime.
His efforts in this direction were aided by the unfortunate failure
of the Western democratic powers which had triumphed in the war to
understand either the nature of Bolshevism or the desires of the
various national movements. At the same time his success was rendered
impossible by the refusal of the West to back him in his efforts
to restore all or most of the social and political order which had
vanished with the abdication of the Tsar.
Thus with the White Russians and the Ukrainians locked in a desperate
struggle, the way was open for Lenin to move with relative freedom on
his path of disintegration and of conquest. He did not fail to take
advantage of every opportunity, and the advances and retreats during
the period from 1917 to 1920 and even later were but a preliminary for
the later tactics of Communism.
On the other hand it cannot be denied that there existed in Ukraine
certain factors which also worked to his advantage. The political and
social system prevailing up to 1917 had not given any training in
self-government to the Ukrainian people and in the midst of war and
revolution they had to start on the most elementary tasks of popular
education, while at the same time they corrected fundamental abuses
in the economic situation and created and administered a government.
Let us, therefore, look briefly at the outstanding elements of the
situation as they were at the beginning of the revolution.
From the time of the organization and Christianization of the Kievan
state at the end of the tenth century to the eighteenth century,
Ukraine, whether independent, or subject to Poland-Lithuania, or to the
Russian Tsars, had remained as a political unit, even though divided.
However, in 1775 Catherine II destroyed the Zaporozhian Sich, the
centre of the Ukrainian Kozaks, and in 1783 she abolished all Ukrainian
political institutions and privileges. From that time the area was
divided into _gubernias_ as the rest of the Russian Empire and the full
Russian methods of administration were introduced.
From that moment, too, the Russian government spared no efforts to
destroy every vestige of Ukrainian national and cultural consciousness.
The Ukrainian language was treated as a peasant dialect of Russian; the
name Ukraine was forbidden and even the substitute Little Russia was
treated as a generic term for the area north of the Black Sea, but it
did not figure on the political map of the Russian Empire as a distinct
entity. The Ukrainian revival in the nineteenth century beginning with
the publication of Kotlyarevsky’s parody of the _Aeneid_ in 1798 was
confined to the cultural sphere and could offer little or nothing in
the way of administrative experience to the Ukrainian people. Those
Ukrainians who entered the Russian service were usually sent to distant
areas, while the administrative personnel in Ukraine was chiefly
Russian in origin and feeling.
The great estates were largely owned by Russians or by Poles and even
many Ukrainian landowners who had succeeded in retaining their holdings
were so thoroughly Russianized that they felt little sense of kinship
with the peasants on their estates. Ukrainian life was lived chiefly
in the villages. The Ukrainian language was not taught in the schools
or used in the courts, for all education and administration were in
the Russian language. Still the peasants continued their own manner of
living with their own traditions and their own tastes and desires.
The cities of Kiev, Kharkiv and Odesa had a large Russian population.
The administrative, commercial and financial institutions were largely
in Russian hands and the directors and leaders of these, whatever
their political disagreements, were united in opposing the efforts
of the Ukrainians to secure even that minimum of rights that they
were guaranteed by Russian imperial law. The Russian element in
Ukraine, radical or conservative, acted as a unit during the fateful
years 1917-1920. On the other hand, the miners and workers in the
Donets basin and Kryvy Rih, the centre of the Ukrainian coal and iron
industry, were in very large part likewise Russian and the ideology
of St. Petersburg, especially in its radical aspects, was dominant
throughout this part of the Ukrainian territory. Many of the most
bitter opponents of Ukrainian rights were, in fact, Russian radical
miners and workers from this area.
The Jewish population of Ukraine, a large minority, was little
interested in the Ukrainian problem. Insofar as they were not actively
sharing in the movement for special Jewish institutions, the majority,
with certain conspicuous exceptions, were strong supporters of Russian
unity, either conservative or radical or, like Leon Trotsky, they were
at the service of any government which was opposed to the Ukrainian
demands.
Thus in 1917 the strength of the Ukrainian movement was to be found in
the villages. Here Ukrainian life was lived, Ukrainian thoughts and
ambitions were sponsored and it was here that the vision of an old and
a future independent Ukraine found its chief support. Even so, that
population was itself divided, not according to the class principle but
on an ideological pattern which included members of all classes and
walks of life.
When the revolution broke out in 1917 or, to be more precise, when the
tsarist regime collapsed, there were four main divisions in Ukrainian
society and they were made clear within a very few months.
The first of these were the nationalists and the advocates of the
restoration of order in the country. At the very beginning of the
century Mykola Mikhnovsky had issued a call for an independent
state and for a while he had exerted a strong influence upon such
future Ukrainian leaders as Symon Petlyura, Volodymyr Vynnychenko and
Volodymyr Chekhovsky, but his ideas of placing national liberation in
the forefront seemed too extreme for his adherents and by 1917 many of
these had in a sense fallen away from his advanced position.
On the other hand, two and a half years of war had shown to many of
the Ukrainian officers and men in the Russian army the need of a
disciplined force to uphold the national cause. Some of the Ukrainian
regiments had early joined the forces of the Revolution, had adopted
the Ukrainian flag and introduced Ukrainian as the language of command.
Now at the Military Congresses which were held in Kiev in 1917, they
took a strong stand in their demands that the Ukrainian National
Rada adopt a firm policy toward St. Petersburg and the Provisional
Government and they were willing to go much further than the Rada in
the setting up of independent governmental machinery.
Opposed to this group were the great mass of the peasants. They were
little aware of the involved task of governing or even maintaining
order. It would be hardly fair to say that they were anarchistic in
temperament. They had rather maintained almost unconsciously their
Ukrainian character. Few of them had been further from their villages
than the nearest administrative centre and they could not see the
necessity of substituting another regime on a broad scale for the
fallen tsarist system. For decades they had attributed all their
hardships and difficulties to the tsar, the bureaucrats and the police,
and with all three vanished, they had no desire to replace them. It
seemed to them that the land was intended by God for their use, and
once the landlords were dispossessed, they were ready to forget the
past and live in peace and quiet with their neighbors. Two and a half
years of war had taught them the folly of organized destruction and
they willingly accepted the position that a new world had come into
being in which there was no need for complicated forms of government,
for the collection of taxes and the enforced maintenance of order.
They believed that the Revolution had almost automatically given them
all that they desired--the right to use their own language, to have
that language placed on a par with Russian and the right to secure
their own land and to live peacefully upon it.
Between these two groups stood the bulk of the Ukrainian intellectuals
grouped in the Social Revolutionist and Social Democratic Parties, each
of which was modelled on its Russian equivalent. Yet we must not delude
ourselves into thinking that these were political parties in any sense
known to the Western world and America, where there has been a long
record of political activity. They were before the Revolution rather
conspiratorial and debating groups, busied with theorizing about all
manner of political questions and (except where they had an opportunity
to take part in the work of the zemstvos) without practical experience.
A few of their members had served in the First Duma in 1906 but this
had been dissolved within a couple of months by Tsar Nicholas II and
each succeeding duma had become less representative. Thus the number of
those intellectuals who had had practical political experience even in
the conduct of elections was very small, while the debaters, students,
theoreticians, etc. in these parties cared more for the proper solution
of ideas than for their application to practical life.
Neither of these groups existed as distinct Ukrainian parties. They
tended largely to follow the leadership of the similar Russian
groups; they had learned to employ the same methods, listened to the
same leaders, and their demands as Ukrainians were loosely connected
with their social and political theories. They were conscious, but
only potentially active, nationalists and at the moment when it was
necessary to make rapid decisions, they hesitated and splintered on the
importance which they assigned to national and to economic and social
measures.
The Social Revolutionists, largely intellectuals from the villages,
were at first the more important. They were populists and non-Marxian
socialists who voiced the desires of the peasants for the ownership
of their land. They called for the confiscation of the large estates,
for they did not believe that any one should have larger holdings
than he and his family could work. Since the land in Ukraine was held
individually and the village community was only a figment of Russian
law, they differed sharply from the Russian Social Revolutionists who
stressed the existence of the community with an emphasis on the almost
annual redistribution of land. Finally, they set themselves up as a
Ukrainian party but still grouped around the journal _Narodnya Volya_
(The People’s Will), the traditional name for a Social Revolutionist
paper.
By the autumn of 1917 this party had definitely split. The left, which
stressed the economic and social aspects of the party, established
another journal _Borotba_ (The Struggle). This was soon followed by
a formal schism and the creation of a new Social Revolutionist Party
(Borotbisty) with the name taken from their paper. It was only natural
that the relations between this group and the Bolshevik Great Russians
tended to become closer as radical ideas gained strength in the country.
The numerically smaller Social Democratic Party was purely Marxian and
it spoke primarily for the Ukrainian factory workers. Like the Russian
Party, it was divided between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, with
the latter drifting steadily toward the Social Revolutionists and even
some of the bourgeois groups. On the other hand, the efforts of the
Ukrainian Bolsheviks to establish their own party met with continual
opposition. The Marxian theories of the withering away of the state
had long been used by Lenin and some of the German Social Democratic
leaders as weapons against the Poles in both the Russian Empire and
Germany, and the same ban was now applied to the Ukrainian Bolsheviks.
If they wished approval by the central authorities, they were told
to become merely a Ukrainian section of the Russian Party. If they
persevered in their efforts, they were read out of the party which in
Ukraine was dominated by the Russian factory workers and the Russian
miners from the Donets basin and Kryvy Rih.
The position of the Ukrainian Social Democrats and especially the
Bolsheviks was thus much more difficult than that of the less organized
and more spontaneous Social Revolutionists. Strict party discipline
hampered them at every turn and ardent Ukrainians as Mykola Skrypnyk, a
personal and trusted friend of the Russian Bolshevik leaders, refused
to make any schism in the party, even though he and his Ukrainian
friends quite regularly appealed for recognition as a separate party,
especially after the Bolsheviks recognized the existence of an
independent Ukrainian Soviet Republic.
He, as an old Bolshevik, however, refused to cooperate with those
Ukrainian Bolsheviks who dared to risk a fight with the central
committee in Moscow and who finally tried to set up a Ukrainian
Communist Party.
The greatest weakness of both of these intellectual groups was their
lack of appreciation of the importance of foreign policies. It was
with great hesitation that their representatives in the Central Rada
in the summer of 1917 approached the Russian Provisional Government to
include a Ukrainian representative in all Russian diplomatic missions.
They had had few or no representatives in the pre-revolutionary
Russian diplomatic service; relatively few of them had been abroad,
even to Western Ukraine under the Austro-Hungarian Empire; they had no
distinguished Ukrainian emigrants abroad who could speak to the world
with the great authority of Ignace Jan Paderewski, Thomas G. Masaryk
or Michael I. Pupin and during the crucial early months they largely
neglected any consideration of foreign policy.
They wasted precious time in futile negotiations with the Russian
Provisional Government over questions of federalism and they turned
rather slowly toward the idea of independence. At each move of the
more nationally conscious toward this goal, a certain portion of the
more leftist members drew away toward the appropriate Russian camp in
the name of internationalism and thus became the unconscious tools by
which both the Provisional Government and later the Bolsheviks hoped to
retain their control of the wealth of Ukraine.
It was this vagueness on the part of many of the intellectuals which
kept them from being true intermediaries between the nationalist
and military groups and the great mass of the peasants. It weakened
the energy and zeal of some of the Ukrainian regiments which had
declared for the Ukrainian cause immediately after the outbreak of the
revolution and facilitated the development of pacifist opinion in the
rank and file. So when, at the end of 1917, actual fighting started
between the Russian Communists and the Ukrainian Central Rada, the
armed forces of the new state were not as well prepared as they had
been some months previously, and it was necessary to start again under
almost new and more unfavorable conditions.
The pressure of events and the necessity for defense against the
Red and the White invaders brought together the more consciously
nationalist elements, first to declare the independence of Ukraine and
then to organize, but the economic and social divergences were never
solved. The dissolution of the Central Rada by the Germans and their
support of a conservative government only embittered the political
feuds and encouraged the rise of peasant leaders who were content to
operate in their own areas and switched sides as questions of the
moment moved them. All this weakened the sounder forces of the state
and created the bewildering succession of such forms of government as
the Rada, the Hetmanate of Skoropadsky and the Directory under Petlyura
and gave the struggle at times a bizarre appearance as the different
forces raised by the different political groups now combined against
one or other of the invaders, only to separate when the other became
the more pressing danger.
Under such conditions the central authority was finally over-whelmed
and those people who were most strongly committed to a free and
independent Ukrainian state withdrew from the country. The Soviet
regime was able to take control. This did not, however, end the
difficulties for there soon came a revelation that all was not yet well
and harmonized. The peasants continued to be restless. The guerilla
leaders did not at once cease their activity. Above all, the country
was ruined but the relations between the Russians and the Ukrainians
were not yet solved.
CHAPTER TWO
The Foundation of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic
As the power of the Provisional Government in Petrograd declined
and more and more responsibility was assumed by the Central Rada in
Kiev, relations between Petrograd and Kiev grew rapidly worse and the
conception of Ukrainian independence gained strength in all circles,
except among the Russian population of Ukraine. The seizure of power in
Petrograd by Lenin could not fail to hasten the progress of separation.
During the summer and autumn of 1917 Lenin had advocated the widest
application of the principle of self-determination and encouraged
the non-Russian peoples to demand separation from the Provisional
Government. He and his friends had hardly come into power, when he
showed at once the cynicism and hypocrisy of his entire policy. The
Central Rada in Kiev and the vast majority of the soviets in Ukraine
repudiated the demand for the confiscation of all property, the
expropriation of the land and the turning over of the control of
all industry to the workers, although in the Third Universal it did
provide for “state control over production in the interests of Ukraine
and Russia” and declared that all land not worked directly by the
owners was to become the property of the workers. For all intents and
purposes, the Third Universal which was issued on November 20, 1917,
did its best to separate Ukrainian affairs from Bolshevik control
without as yet resorting to a declaration of formal independence.
This produced a very unsatisfactory situation, for the Bolsheviks
attacked the efforts of the Secretary of the Rada for Military Affairs
to effect an understanding with the old Russian Army Headquarters
at Mohylev and with the other national groups which were rapidly
making common cause with the Central Rada in their opposition to the
extreme measures of the Petrograd Soviet. The Council of Commissars in
Petrograd claimed to speak for the whole of the former Russia in its
efforts to make peace with the Germans. When the Rada denied this and
approached the other non-Russian peoples, the Bolsheviks in Petrograd
formally accused the Rada of withdrawing Ukrainian troops from the
front, of disarming Bolshevik units in Ukraine and of allowing the Don
Cossack forces to retire to their homeland across Ukrainian territory.
On December 17, it hypocritically recognized the right of Ukraine to
independence but threatened war on the Rada if it did not meet the
conditions of the Council of People’s Commissars.
At the same time the Bolsheviks in the Kiev Soviet arranged an
All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets in the hope of putting pressure on
the Rada. The attempt missed fire for the Congress proved to be under
the influence of the anti-Bolshevik parties and adopted resolutions
declaring that the Ukrainians had not thrown off the power of the Tsar
to accept the domination of the Commissars. The Bolshevik spokesman
Zatonsky was unable to make himself heard above the opposition and only
80 members supported the Soviet demands.
As a result of this failure Vasili Shakhray and Zatonsky left Kiev for
Kharkiv where they joined a Congress of Soviets largely from the Donets
basin and Kryvy Rih. There, on December 20, they established a new
Ukrainian Rada under Russian Communist control and set up a Ukrainian
Soviet Republic. They were joined by a group of Ukrainian Bolsheviks
including Neronovych and George Kotsyubynsky, the son of the well-known
Ukrainian author who had been a friend of Gorky.
The so-called Ukrainian army loyal to this new regime was composed
almost exclusively of Russian troops and was under the open command
of a Russian officer, Michael A. Muravyev. This force occupied Kiev
on February 7, 1918 and held the city for about three weeks. Its
actions showed clearly the nature of the government. Under the pretext
of liberating the Ukrainians from the control of the Ukrainian
bourgeoisie and the Rada, it abolished all Ukrainian newspapers and
its disorderly elements not only executed members of the Ukrainian and
Russian bourgeoisie but also Ukrainian Communists and radicals who used
the Ukrainian language in their hearing.
In the meantime the Bolsheviks had opened negotiations with the Germans
in Brest-Litovsk where Trotsky claimed to speak for the entire former
Russian Empire. To circumvent this, the Rada formally declared the full
independence of Ukraine and sent delegates to the peace conference.
As a balance to this, Trotsky introduced into the conference the
representatives of this new Ukrainian Soviet Republic who claimed to
be the spokesmen for the Ukrainian peasants and proletariat. Their
arguments did not convince the Germans and Austrians, who saw greater
possibilities of profit by recognizing the Ukrainian National Republic,
so as to secure without fighting a large part of the Ukrainian grain
supplies. The Ukrainian National Republic signed this agreement with
misgivings, for, in fact, it threw the Rada into the power of the
Germans and ended all chance of assistance from the Allied democratic
powers which had previously regarded Lenin as the tool of the German
General Staff. Now, with the conclusion of this peace, they extended
their ill-will to the Ukrainian Central Rada.
The immediate result was German assistance to the Rada and the Soviet
forces were quickly forced out of Ukraine and back into Great Russian
territory. The leaders of the Ukrainian Soviet government were members
of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and could not raise the
question as to whether or not their new state was actually independent,
and whether it could be, if it did not have its own Communist
Party associated on a par with the Russian Party in the Communist
International.
This brief Communist interlude in Ukraine should have been most
instructive to both the Allied powers and the Germans, but neither drew
the true lessons from it. The Allies, who were still opposed to the
principles of Bolshevism and were annoyed by the speeches of Zinovyev
and Chicherin, became more friendly disposed to the Russian Whites
and gave up their efforts to win through invoking the democratic
principles of self-determination the support of any of the non-Russian
peoples. The Germans, on the other hand, after aiding the Rada to
return, dispersed it on the ground that it was too radical, but when
a more conservative regime was set up under Hetman Skoropadsky, they
did not give this honest support. They sought only for Ukrainian
supplies and by their actions they weakened the power of the Hetman and
strengthened discontent against his regime without allowing him to do
anything that would weaken the power of the Communists.
The situation became almost ridiculously complicated. Germany, anxious
to secure troops for the Western Front, was, by the spring of 1918, at
peace with both the Commissars of Moscow and the government of Ukraine.
It was therefore opposed to both the White Russians and the Ukrainian
Soviet Republic. Even the Czechoslovaks on their way to Vladivostok,
thanks to the negotiations between President Masaryk and Muravyev, were
on friendly terms with the Ukrainian Communists and had difficulties
with the Ukrainian government and the Germans. As soon as they crossed
into the Russian Soviet Republic, they had difficulties with the
Russian Communists and the Germans and found their support among a part
of the White Russians. It was the same situation as in the far north
where the Germans backed the White Finnish forces under Mannerheim
against the red Finns who were the favored party of their friend and
associate, Moscow. Yet all the time there was no Ukrainian Communist
Party, for the Ukrainian Communists owed their prime allegiance to the
Russian Communist Party which was, in theory at least, on the opposite
side in the general disturbed situation.
To the Communists, as Skrypnyk, Shakhray and George Pyatakov who
had played an important role in the Communist occupation of Kiev,
this seemed a serious gap and at a meeting in Tahanrih in April they
triumphed over the Communists from Katerynoslav who had insisted upon
remaining merely a part of the Russian Communist Party. Their victory
was of short duration, for when there came an organization meeting in
Moscow on July 5, the Russian authorities definitely made it clear
that they would not tolerate the existence of a Ukrainian Communist
Party. Bela Kun warned that in the international civil war that was
to be begun, great efforts were to be made not to allow it to assume
anything of a national character, but to keep it restricted and fought
on class lines. They were also informed that they could in this new
struggle have no relations with Mensheviks or any Ukrainian Social
Revolutionists or Social Democrats. A few months later Stalin was
elected to the Central Committee of the Ukrainian branch of the Russian
party as a symbol of the dependence in which the party was to be kept.
The first people to appreciate fully the dilemma in which the Ukrainian
Communists found themselves were the Ukrainian Communist leaders who
had established, with Russian help, the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. They
were quickly taught that as long as the control of their Party was not
in their own hands, they were completely helpless and at the mercy of
the Russians.
Shakhray, who had endeavored to argue at Kiev in December, 1917 that
the Ukrainian Communists were to be counted as Ukrainians, very soon in
Russia became so disgusted that he resigned from the Russian Communist
Party and retired to Saratov to establish a Ukrainian Communist Party
of Bolsheviks. He criticized the extreme policy of centralization
carried on by the Russian Communists.
Along with S. Mazlakh, he published a book entitled _The Wave--What is
being done in Ukraine and with Ukraine_. This book, which was often
quoted later by Skrypnyk and his associates, was the theoretical basis
for Ukrainian Communism. Shakhray tried to foster discontent against
the regime of Hetman Skoropadsky by stressing his relations with both
the German forces in Ukraine and the White Russian refugees who had
taken shelter in that country. He declared that Ukrainian independence
could only be consistently won by the Ukrainian Communists, for they,
as the Ukrainian proletariat, were the only people who could advocate
and carry through a real revolution in view of the treachery of the
bourgeoisie. On the other hand, he attributed the Communist failure in
Ukraine to the fact that the Party was entirely under Russian control
and looked at the cause of the Communists through the eyes of the
Russian colonists in Ukraine who were, in accordance with the Russian
imperialistic tradition, working not for Ukraine but for Moscow.
He soon left Saratov for Kuban and here he was captured and killed by
the Denikin forces. Mazlakh, who had remained a member of the Russian
Communist Party, was later shot by them for nationalism. The third
Commissar for War, Neronovych, became disillusioned and on the entrance
of German troops into Ukraine he gave up politics but he fell into the
hands of the Ukrainian National Army and was shot. Thus, the first
attempts of the Russian Communist Party to seize Ukraine and expel the
Ukrainian National government ended disastrously and relatively few of
the early leaders survived. Most of them paid the penalty for their
actions to one of the contending forces, with the Bolsheviks executing
then or later the larger number.
During the summer of 1918 while Hetman Skoropadsky remained in power,
the chief work which the Communists could hope to do in Ukraine was
through their mission in Kiev under the leadership of D. Z. Manuilsky.
This was ostensibly engaged in negotiations for a definite peace treaty
between the Ukrainian National Republic and the Russian Socialist
Federated Soviet Republic. In reality, Manuilsky was almost openly
intriguing with the tacit consent of the Germans who had no desire to
see their own position in Moscow jeopardized, as their armies were
being driven back on the Western Front. Manuilsky was also able to
notice the constant splitting of the leftist Ukrainian parties, which,
in their hostility to the policies of the Hetman, tended to move nearer
to the Communist position.
The disintegration in both the Social Revolutionist and the Social
Democrat ranks became steadily more marked during the summer of 1918.
When the German armies collapsed and the Hetman could no longer retain
his post, a Directory of five men, including Petlyura and Vynnychenko,
set themselves up at the news of the abdication of the German Emperor
and they soon recovered Kiev. At the same time the left wing of the
Social Revolutionists (Borotbisty) refused to recognize the new
Directory and drifted rapidly toward the Bolshevik position.
The Kremlin, sensing the great change in the Ukrainian situation, at
once refurbished the idea of a Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Its real head
was now Christian Rakovsky, a Rumanian with Bulgarian citizenship who
had never been in Ukraine, but its nominal leaders were Pyatakov and
George Kotsyubynsky. These moved from Kursk along the railroad lines
into Ukraine at the end of December but Chicherin, in his telegrams to
the Directory, categorically denied that the Russians were supporting
this movement in any way. He laid all the responsibility upon the
Ukrainian Communists. The ruse did not work and finally on January 16,
1919, the Directory, in which Vynnychenko’s star was sinking, declared
war.
This was opposed by the left wing of the Social Democrats who were
very influential in the Directory. On January 10-12, the two wings
definitely parted and the left adopted the name of the Ukrainian
Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Independent) and insisted upon the
establishment of a non-Communist Soviet Republic. The right wing, in
view of the weakness of the Ukrainian proletariat, advocated instead
a Congress of Workers which would include both peasants and the city
proletariat. When war actually started, the left wing split again
between those who were willing to stand for an independent Ukraine and
those who refused to act against Russia under any circumstances. The
latter took the name of USDRP (Independent Lefts).
It was not long before the Borotbisty and the USDRP (Independent Lefts)
began negotiations for merging. Both were convinced of the superiority
of the Soviet form of democratic government and both were convinced
that any Communist government would inevitably recognize the essential
rights of the Ukrainian people. In this respect they were far more
naive than were the leaders of the first Ukrainian Communist regime who
had already become completely disillusioned at the contrast between the
theories and the practice of Lenin and his associates. They refused to
cooperate with Petlyura and the Directory and, in effect, they withdrew
from its support a considerable section of the Ukrainian intellectuals
at a crucial moment.
On the other hand, with their own armies they fought against the White
Russians of Denikin, because they saw in these merely an attempt
to restore the old order. Yet they declined to be included in the
organized army of the Directory and by their independent actions they
made more difficult the burden of the army commanders. They encouraged
the formation in the country of independent military bands which added
to the growing chaos. To emphasize their position they again changed
their name to the Ukrainian Communist Party (Borotbisty) and constantly
sought to ingratiate themselves with the Ukrainian branch of the
Russian Communist Party which had again succeeded in reoccupying Kiev
and in forcing the Directory to flee.
On the other hand, the USDRP (Independents), almost as true admirers of
the Soviet system but far more critical of the Russian influence, did
merge their forces for the fighting against Denikin with the forces of
the Directory. In the summer of 1919, this group, under the influence
of the Khmelevtsevs of Kobilyaky in Poltavshchyna, commenced again to
review their position. After the death of their leaders in a crossing
of the Dnieper and after the defeat of Denikin, they decided to adopt
the appellation of Communists and to rename themselves the Ukrainian
Communist Party without any additional description title. Thus, they
took the name of Ukapisty and as such they dragged on an independent
existence for some years, confidently expecting that they would
ultimately receive national and international recognition from the
Comintern, the Communist International.
This endless splitting and regrouping of the various parties proved
a headache to the Directory which was trying to organize the country
for defense against both of the Russian invaders. The individual
armed forces, acting independently, aided in wrecking the economy and
this inspired peasant leaders of various kinds to seek the control of
their own native regions. Some of these men proved themselves able,
if short-sighted, leaders. Some, as Nestor Makhno, were unadulterated
anarchists who saw no need of any central regime. Others were mere
adventurers thrown into prominence by the course of events and willing
to shift their principles for the sake of a momentary personal
advantage. Others were patriots with no broader vision than their home
districts.
As a result, throughout 1919 there were some 328 revolts against the
extending power of the Russian Communist forces which were fanning out
over Ukraine, slaughtering and robbing as they went but still unable to
secure a definite control of the villages.
As opposed to this welter of conflicting ideals, the policy of the
Russian dominated Ukrainian branch of the Russian Communist Party was
simplicity and clarity itself. This supported the paper independence
of the Ukrainian Soviet regime and openly avowed its intention of
subjugating the country and of exploiting it for the benefit of
Moscow. Their purposes were even openly avowed at the Moscow Soviet
of Workers’ Deputies on March 22, 1919, when Shlikhter, a Ukrainian
German and one of the commissars appointed by Moscow to collect grain,
declared: “You all remember how Ukraine began to become Soviet; with
every day of the advance of the Red Army, we and you felt more easy;
the rich grain-producing Ukraine is ours. We have four central military
divisions collecting and on them we rest all our hopes. We have a mass
of workmen sent in (from Moscow to Ukraine), who know how to search
all the Ukrainian villages. We always remember that the eyes of the
proletariat of Russia are turned toward Ukraine.”
These remarks represented the cynical attitude of Lenin and the
Communists. They ignored the statements as to a Ukrainian Soviet
Republic that were being made by Lenin and others to woo the various
leftist Ukrainian parties. They were safe speeches made to reassure the
Great Russians that the Bolsheviks still had a monolithic outlook, even
though they were prepared to go to almost any lengths to create a paper
regime which would insure and facilitate the plundering of the rich
grain-producing Ukraine. They told, more or less, the truth, that was
not recognized by the more idealistic theoreticians, that the Ukrainian
Communists were, in fact, the dupes and victims of the Moscow regime
which cared nothing for the Ukrainian people, or even the Ukrainian
proletariat.
By the end of 1919 the Ukrainian Soviet regime was so satisfied with
the success of its raiding and collecting parties that it felt able
to proclaim an amnesty and to disarm the population completely. To
accomplish the latter purpose, new Russian forces were sent into
the country, the villages were thoroughly searched and disarmed.
The peasants were tiring of the apparently endless exactions of the
independent commanders and they turned against many of the patriotic
partisan bands and declined to give them further support. This broke
the movement and even the alliance of Petlyura with the Poles and the
short occupation of Kiev by the combined armies in the spring of 1920
did not suffice to restore the old enthusiasm for the hard-pressed
Directory.
By the end of 1920, when the Russian and Ukrainian Soviet delegations
met the Poles in Riga in October, 1920, the fighting was nearly over.
The Poles signed a treaty of peace without consulting their Ukrainian
allies of the Ukrainian National Republic. There was nothing for
the forces of the Directory to do but to retire abroad and continue
their unsuccessful efforts to secure Western assistance. This was not
forthcoming. The French were interested in aggrandizing Poland as
a bulwark against Germany; the other allies were openly supporting
Denikin through a misinterpreted friendship with the Russian people and
there did not seem to be left even a spark of the principles enunicated
but a short time before in Wilson’s attitude toward self-determination
and the rights of people to govern themselves. The struggle was ended
and the Ukrainians were left at the mercy of their Russian overlords,
now back in a new guise.
CHAPTER THREE
The Period of Militant Communism