EXCURSUS ON THE UKRAINIAN PEASANTRY
Postcard showing rural life in Ukraine, early twentieth century
Ukraine in the nineteenth and early twentieth century has it in common with Ireland that it was a fundamentally rural society, The industrial East - Kharkiv/Donbass - was essentially alien to the Ukrainian speaking population both in terms of its economic activity and ethnically. The industrial working class was largely Russian and therefore identified with what Ukrainian Nationalists regarded as an alien power. The analogy that can be drawn with Northern Ireland is obvious. Another parallel that can be drawn with Ireland lies in the absence of a native aristocracy, though, while the Irish aristocracy had gone down fighting (and to some extent worked from abroad to preserve the culture by supplying priests) the 'Ukrainian' or 'Ruthenian' aristocracy had adopted a foreign identity as Poles and Catholics (here a comparison might be made with Wales). But in both Ukraine and Ireland the landlord class was ethnically different - in the case of Ukraine, Polish, Russian and perhaps to some extent German, with absentee landlords often employing Jews as their agents and rent collectors. So that what could be read as class hatred was often confounded with inter-racial hatred. So Mikhnovsky's Ten Commandments, which one could cite as the founding manifesto of Ukrainian 'integral nationalism', regards Poles, Russians, Jews and Germans as enemies with whom no compromise is possible not specifically for religious or ethnic reasons (the manifesto doesn't have a distinct Orthodox content) but because they are 'oppressors' of the Ukrainian people.
One element that distinguishes the Ukrainian peasantry from the Irish peasantry, however, is that in Ireland the Catholic Church formed a bridge between the life of the people and the culture of the educated class. A two way bridge it might be said. The Greek Catholic Church played a similar role in Galicia for the 'Ruthenians' living under the Austrian Empire but I can't see that the Orthodox Church, concentrated singlemindedly on the administration of the sacraments, played that role in Russian Ukraine, where the Tsarist government was anxious to prevent any popular educational initiatives in the Ukrainian language, thus leaving the peasantry to its own devices. With results we are about to see …
THE RADA AND THE BOLSHEVIKS
Ukrainian soldiers in Kyiv in 1917
Returning to the events of 1917-18, the increasing tensions between the Bolsheviks and the would-be Ukrainian government in Kiev coincided with the opening of the peace negotiations between the Bolsheviks and the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk (in modern Belarus). The talks had begun on November 20th/December 3rd. At the time the Bolshevik government in Petrograd, following from the Provisional Government, still recognised the Ukrainian 'Rada' in Kiev as a legitimate administrative centre, while the Rada's 'Third Universal' still acknowledged a federal relation with Russia. In these circumstances the Rada sent representatives to Brest-Litovsk as part of the Russian delegation. The Ukrainians however, apparently, arrived late and the Russians began negotiations without them. The Germans saw an advantage in this and encouraged the Ukrainians to negotiate separately from the Russians. (5)
(5) Review by: Jerzy Borzęcki of Niemiecka interwencja militarna na Ukrainie w 1918 roku by Włodzimierz Mędrzecki, The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 79, No. 4 (Oct., 2001), p.762.
On December 12/25, the Bolsheviks, under the command of Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko (who had overseen the storming of the Winter Palace), seized power in Kharkov and Odessa, proclaiming themselves to be the legitimate government in Ukraine. Kharkov and Odessa were still outside the area that the Provisional Government had recognised as the legitimate responsibility of the Rada in Kiev so the Bolshevik declaration was not incompatible with a continued recognition of the Rada as a devolved administration. But it seems hardly a coincidence that on December 11/24, the Ukrainian representatives in Brest-Litovsk asked for full negotiating rights 'noting that Ukrainian interests cannot be represented by the Bolsheviks.' (6) This was granted on December 26th.
(6) Włodzimierz Mędrzecki: 'Germany and Ukraine between the Start of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Talks and Hetman Skoropads'kyi's Coup', Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Vol. 23, No. 1/2 (June 1999), p.48.
As we've seen, it was on December 4/17 that the relationship between the Kiev-based Bolsheviks and the Rada finally broke down and the Kievan Bolsheviks - led by Yuri Piatakov and Vladimir Zatonski - fled to Kharkov, where they played an important role in developing a more more militant Bolshevik approach in Ukrainian affairs. But it wasn't until a month later - 4/17 January that Kharkov moved against Kiev. The leading figure in promoting opposition to the Bolsheviks had been Simon Petliura. Hrushevsky and Vynnychenko had been very unhappy about Petliura's approach and deprived him of his command. He was dismissed and removed from the General secretariat on December 18/31, replaced by the more Socialist orientated Mykola Porsh. As a result Petliura formed his own private militia - The Haydamak Kosh of Sloboda Ukraine ('Sloboda Ukraine' being a term used to refer to the Kharkov region). (7) Petliura was then called on after January 4/17 to defend Poltava against the advancing Bolshevik forces but hastily recalled to Kiev when the remaining Bolshevik elements there attempted an uprising on 16/29 January. According to Pipes (Formation, p.125) the Bolsheviks were slaughtered after surrendering. According to the Russian Wikipedia account Petliura tried to prevent this from happening.
(7) Unless otherwise stated references to Petliura are usually based on the very informative Russian language Wikipedia account.
The forces in conflict were themselves chaotic elements thrown together almost by chance. Petliura's forces in Kiev were, according to Pipes, heavily undermined by Bolshevik propaganda. They had also been only recently 'augmented by units retreating into Kiev from the front.' (Formation, p.125). but the Bolshevik forces advancing from Kharkov - the 'Red Cossacks' led by A.M. Muraviev, a former White officer with Socialist revolutionary sympathies - were also quite incoherent. In Pipes' account (p.126):
'The invading army consisted largely of Russian industrial workers - who looked upon rough and ready methods of dealing with opposition, real and imaginary, as the best way of completing the "job" they had been assigned - and of criminal elements, enlisted in the so-called Red Guard, who took advantage of the war to pillage, loot and murder at will. Discipline was extremely lax. The Red soldiers were frequently drunk, and organised pogroms against the local population which their commanders had no means of curbing. Nor did Muraviev himself help the situation. An unbalanced, sadistic megalomaniac who, according to Antonov-Ovseenko, delighted in talking without end about "the flow of blood".'
They took Kiev on January 28th/February 8th (in February the Petrograd government adopted the New Calendar and from then on Old Calendar dates become irrelevant) and according to Serhy Yekelchuk's admittedly very Ukrainian Nationalist account:
'in January 1918 [OS - PB], the first blood was spilled in clashes with Bolshevik detachments advancing on the Ukrainian capital.The martyrdom of the young Ukrainian volunteers at Krutyin late January would later become the symbol of resistance to the Bolshevik onslaught, but at the time it was the prolonged bombardment of Kyiv by red troops and their mass terror in the occupied city that shocked contemporaries. The reds hunted down not just tsarist officers, but also members of the Central Rada and the Ukrainian army; indeed, anyone who spoke Ukrainian in public.The prominent Ukrainian Bolshevik Volodymyr Zatons´kyi nearly got shot on the street because his card, identifying him as a minister in the Soviet Ukrainian government, was in Ukrainian. Fortunately, he also served in Lenin’s all-Russian cabinet and was able to produce another ID in Russian, which bore Lenin’s personal signature.' (8)
(8) Serhy Yekelchyk: 'The Ukrainian Meanings of 1918 and 1919', Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1/2 (2019), p.76.
Since Zatonsky had left Kiev with Piatakov in December one assumes he must have come back with the Red Cossack army.
The Rada fled from Kiev to Zhitomir but, according to an account by a German military reporter, Collin Ross (Mędrzecki: Germany and Ukraine, p.51): ''The Rada, however, wasn't welcomed there and its members have since scattered around the country. Some localities remained under the control of the Ukrainian troops, but lacked contact with one another.' According to the Russian Wikipedia article on Petliura the problem in Zhitomir was the presence of Czech troops who still saw themselves as at war with the Central Powers. They had played a distinguished role in Kerensky's June/July offensive and were then given the right to mobilise Czech prisoners of war, forming the 'Czech Legion' which was soon to cause such difficulties for the Red Army in Siberia. The Czechs in Zhitomir presumably knew that on February 9th - the day after the Bolshevik seizure of Kiev - the Ukrainian delegates in Brest-Litovsk had signed a peace treaty with Germany.